If I could have found the words, I would have stopped teaching on my own. Telling my students that I really didn’t know what I was talking about and that they would have to figure it out on their own, just like me, 74 years old, fifty years into a teaching career, still standing in front of them like a ricket-racked escapee from a home for wannabe poets, spouting nonsense that they benignly mistake for wisdom -- like the world is our soul inside out, a psychedelic mirror only an ardent Narcissus could love – none of that worked. The students knew I didn’t believe there was such a thing as a soul but they still thought I was onto something. That much was true, I was after something that would put me on the Road again, some meandering mumbo jumbo by which I could convince myself I really did know something grand and true and set me off wandering again in this dismal November rain. If I could find it, I could quit, since there would then be no point in going on with this charade. Teaching is all about searching for meaning. If you ever found the key to it all, you could bid your students good luck and goodbye, your last words as you walked out the door, “See you in Tulsa.” Didn’t they know that the writing I assigned them was a thinly contrived excuse for me to find the words? You see, while I was hired to teach these innocents, to have them read the golden oldies so that they could discover what had oft been thought, but ne’er so well expressed, I instead had them write and wrote along with them. But here’s the kicker – If I did somehow find the words, the writing assignments, the whole house of cards would collapse and I would be a free man. The students would be on their own and no doubt some of them would become teachers someday, throwing sand in the eyes of their students and making them dream.
But then it happened – not the words yet, but one day Daisy What’s-Her-Name realized she really wasn’t learning anything and complained to the administration – her parents, she said, were paying good money for her to attend this school and here was this sad excuse for a teacher telling his students not to let school get in the way of their education. His teaching was nothing but the worst sort of humbuggery, the sort where the humbugger tells you to your face that what he’s selling is bogus, though she used other words like fake, senile, lost. She may have mentioned dementia. It was like they had suspected this all along. The next day I was gone, the memory circuits of the institution simply deleted me and rebooted. It was as if I had never existed, let alone ever taught at the school. I was on my own, but now the words came to me unbidden – it was surprising because the words sounded like a question and I had all this time been looking for something else (I confess some small part of me, some primitive generous impulse, was calling out to students who no longer even knew my name – it’s a question, ask the right question and you can get on with your life). Abjectly kneeling before a beaming Aristotle, I asked, Why me? Why not a zombie? and was good to go.