You awake with a start, bolt upright, an I-overslept-my-job-interview panic in your pulse, but of course it’s hours too early and there’s barely any light making it through the new rectangle of blinds at an angle unfamiliar relative to your bed. It is pouring outside, you wonder briefly whether the whole external world is taking a shower the sound is so loud of the drops, falling asplatter yes, but also the resulting rivulets, quickly becoming torrents, streaming in all lines of least resistance from the intersection of water and ground. It’s a familiar sound, sure, but the particular echoes and reverberations of this sort of rain are uniquely reminiscent of the way it precipitated in one place, decades back. It’s not the floody deluge of New Orleans or the tepid frigidity of Boston, not the crackling flash-flood-warning of Albuquerque nor the foggy soak of San Francisco. It’s distinctly northwestern in flavor, the steady patter of the Oregon coast, and for maybe the fifth time this week you’re transported back to the profoundly formative part of your childhood, the competing shades of greenest green on rolling hillsides and curvaceous roads. The relief here is palpably misshapen, funhouse mirrors distorting hills into cliffs and turns into hairpins, but the general outline of the landscape and tone of any given block is essentially the same. As it was two nights prior at the county fair, the livestock barn notably smaller and emptier than in your youth, but then again you were the shortest ten-year-old around, cages that now meet just below eye level towering over your bewildered frame as you trudged through drenched animal muck and straw and gravel to the cages where your rabbits and duck and chickens shivered waiting for feed and attention. Still, though, you can count, you can know that eight overstuffed cages of rabbits was one 4-H club in your day, not a whole fair’s worth, and you wonder how what must be a more populated and distinctly more isolated rural county can produce so much less animal husbandry unless it’s just the kids these days and that even green-thumbed farm kids would rather spend more time growing artificial livestock in Minecraft than tending their own gardens in the backyard. But you hear the earnest few wrestling their uncooperative bleating lambs describe the two and a half hours daily they spend in the pasture and, well, it’ll do, pig, it’ll do, it’s enough like the old days to satisfy you, the faintly starting to gray would-be professor feeling the subtle grooves of the top row of corrugated metal bench beneath your slacks-adorned rump. There is a reason you always wore jeans in Oregon.
Of course you are preparing to teach English 101 and while you never took English 101 at an age-appropriate time, there is that other time that you’re prone to forgetting, to filing in a different part of the brain, the time the vaguely inappropriate John Rupp bestrode the front of the class and held forth on how most writers fail and most topics are dull, how it takes real work to make something interesting to an audience. Yes, yes, there was USEM 1a or whatever they called it, Brandeis’ bizarre boycott of the traditional university numbering system, one- or two-digit numbers for underclasses and those three-digits beginning in 1 for upper classes, such that your advanced history class would carry a number like 181 and sound for all the world like just a vaguely advanced freshman course, graduate-level beginning at 201, as though the whole institution were some sort of remedial clearinghouse for those who couldn’t cut it. When, of course, the truly remedial clearinghouse had been Clatsop Community College, windswept welding outfit with the artifice of education pasted on, wedged into a hillside to rival the steepness of Morgantown, slick slate bridges and vertiginous asphalt paths wicking water away into the neighboring ferns. It was there that John Rupp resided, along with your French and Western Civ teachers (more palatable, less dangerous, but correspondingly perhaps less interesting), apologizing for innuendo in your eleven-year-old presence, wondering whether he could get away with it still because for all your understanding of basic concepts and figures, for even the awkward moments in the notoriously proverbial bad-video “health” class the prior year in an inhospitable middle school, you still have no real idea what’s going on. Despite the untailored nature of an education attempting to more accurately aim for your aptitude, you did truly learn a lot from John Rupp and his cohort of disinterested future welders and cranky office staff. Soup can labels can be interesting, for example, a mantra you still repeat to yourself about the silliness of dreading writing and the mind’s comfortable quest for ongoing empty procrastination. It was there, late in the semester, when you sat in an overlit computer lab, one of your first lifetime migraines setting in, to grapple with the paper titled What is Success?, realizing for the first time ever that success was perceptual and not tangible, that the concept was a dangling carrot of a fool’s errand rather than a craggy mountain of hard-won ascent and eventual achievement. It was an electric shock of a discovery, hinted at in recent failures like the parental decision to withdraw you from the middle school for admittedly completely legitimate fear for your life and limb, but only now understood in full color, and it demanded to be shouted from the rooftops, to jump from the screen and page in this desolate angry lab while your father fretted over how late we would be home to dinner. The assignment, ultimately, was half the length assigned and resulted in your first-ever C at any grade level, but Rupp was clearly impressed between the lines at the maturity of the conclusion in his youngest student by nearly a decade while no doubt simultaneously chuckling over the relative failure of a paper bemoaning the overrated incongruity of American notions of so-called success.
It is hard to internalize how likely it must be that Rupp is dead now, though his rumpled portly demeanor blended the lines between mid-forties and mid-sixties and people are allegedly living longer these days. The gap between how much of an authority a community college professor seemed to an 11-year-old child and how he must have seen himself at the time is, of course, only visible in gaping hindsight. His sarcasm, derisive jokes, and love of Bierce must’ve been more self-effacing than outwardly focused, as most such tics and crutches have come to be understood. No wonder the Ph.D. helping out your English 101 teacher training yesterday discouraged sarcasm as a form of humor. It shuts people down, she said. Rupp must’ve been sure that we were all shut down anyway, that we were his punishment for falling short of his own ideas of success.
There is now the wish to conclude with some pithy quotation from the success essay, or perhaps the entire page and a half piece in its incredulous discovery, but of course the file is long gone, if it was ever saved in the first place. No doubt a box somewhere holds the paper version, wryly marked and graded, but the accessible file archive dates from the fall of 1993, the move away from Oregon and to New Mexico, the surge of fiction and analysis that followed. There is the old saw, widely attributed to Angelou, about forgetting what people say and do but not forgetting how they made you feel. But on the eve of your beginning to mold young minds in a collegiate subject you yourself barely delved into (officially), it is perhaps best a reminder of the cacophony of wills, a favored summarative theme. As giving 6,423 Uber and Lyft rides in two years in New Orleans reminded you, there are just a lot of people out there in the world. And they are all living vibrant technicolor internal lives, replete with hopes, dreams, fears, and failures. It is a point as obvious as the idea that success is more perceptual than actual, but no less imbalancing when truly understood.
John Rupp, were he alive, is no more mindful of how he influenced you than you are of how you influenced the 1,711th Uber rider, the one who neither warranted a story in your book nor made you feel any particular way. No less because his influence was not particularly inspiring or transformative, though it was a key milestone of many on the ascent to the relationship with writing you now so thoroughly contemplate. And yet, here on the precipice of significant access to forty-four minds thrice weekly too early for any of you on the campus a monorail ride away, you are all too aware of your potential impact, for good, for ill, for intentional and un. Twenty-five percent of first years won’t return, they tell you. Four in ten graduate within five years. It reminds you of the stats on marriage, a road we won’t traverse this morning. No one enrolls in college expecting to be home in six months. But it happens all the time. “You may be the only professor who knows their name,” they tell us. No pressure.
The point, of course, is not to dwell on this particular set of interactions to come, to focus so hard on the stakes as to become paralyzed by the potential power. After all, you will be the opening class for perhaps all forty-four students, their literal first salvo in college, early morning on the first day.
(You still remember being in the first class Ms. Roth taught at the Academy, after the assembly, and it was your first class too, and what an institution she became and still is at the school you can’t quite believe she isn’t Headmistress of yet.) The point is wider and more dizzying: every interaction, every moment, every dynamic offers the opportunity to influence, to create a memory, to set a course, to roll a stone in a direction. “You are in the awkward but wonderful position of being both teachers and students,” they tell us. This is hardly our unique condition. This is a universal. All of us, every day, are teachers and students.
To take that role seriously, without succumbing to overwhelm, that is the challenge. A planet of seven billion is almost as staggering as a campus of 29,000. But we are here to teach and learn in equal measure, all of us, but go ahead and feel you especially if it helps. The rain, the trees, the switchback paths, they are here to remind you of how long it’s been between English 101s, unfolding the map in your head, giving you a sense of history and perspective. How else are you going to relax when you feel this gravitational sense of responsibility? It took you so long to find writing fun, to make it a voluntary activity, to embrace play in language. Maybe you can speed that process for some people, turn 101 on its head (which, of course, leaves you just with 101, the deliciousness of palindromes). Living is serious business, but writing doesn’t have to be, always. You can help them write outside the lines.
Take it from water: you can move mountains. You can’t wait to go walk in the rain.
