In the Fall of 1993, I received
word that a man named Nicholas Aversa had passed away. He had been
my English teacher, 25 years ago. During those years, I remembered
him fondly, but never really thought much about him. But in the days following learning of his death, I found
I kept thinking about those classrooms, especially his classroom long after
the final bell of the school day. And so it happened that I
wrote a letter to a dead man, and it was read at his memorial service in
New York.
October 21, 1993
Dear Nick,
Since it was 1969, it didn't really seem strange that the new English
teacher was a monk. The school had obviously recognized our need
for someone schooled in the ways of silence, humility, and the absurd.
(Why have I spent my life believing you invented that word, "absurd?")
We liked the idea of English class with a monk. It suggested mysticism,
old abbeys, meditation, penance, hair-shirts, Rasputin, flagellation, self-immolation,
poverty, and anti-social behavior in general. Needless to say,
we were disappointed that first day of classes. Just look at you!
That shape! That voice which seemed always ready to break into profuse
and abject apology! The laugh which only made more vivid those dark
and nervous eyes.
You brought out the Thurber drawings in the first minute or two of that
class: Grandma, terrified of leaking electric currents, wasn't it?
Yes, it was absurd. And yes, you were absurd. And yes, even
in that first hour, we were already hooked.
For some of us--corduroyed, long-haired book junkies--it was inevitable.
You spoke to us as if we were serious people. You listened, as if
our confessions and groping explanations meant something. You brought
us books to meet, and introduced us to them as if the meeting mattered.
But what about those other kids, the ones most teachers pray will disappear
into year-long truancy? How did you pull someone like Kevin into
your spell?
I'm a teacher now, Nick. Did you know that? I guess you couldn't
have known. A veteran, now--nearly two months! The high school
where I teach is full of kids like Kevin, and I need to know how you did
it, how you got through to them. Is it by by being real, by not pretending,
by gathering the courage to not hide your own doubts, your own fear?
Is that how you got to us all?
I'm trying to remember what you actually taught, what we actually might
have been doing in those classes; but all I keep coming back to are your
eyes. Dark and nervous, is that how I just described them?
That doesn't quite do it, does it? (Would you have me re-write that?)
They were dark; we'll keep that: dark greasepaint for a grand and tragic
role. If they were nervous, though, it was not with a venial fear
of embarrassment, but with a fear of being misunderstood, of wounding without
meaning, or missing, through inattention, a chance to comfort and connect.
Could that be it? Was it all an arcane, ocular curriculum learned
deep in a monastery somewhere?
I've got a lot of questions, now, Nick. This teaching business
is trickier than I'd thought: I could use some of the guild secrets.
What are we to teach, who know so little ourselves? I'd been
thinking of coming to talk to you about a lot of things; or, maybe, just
to talk. I wasn't finished with you, yet, and here you've gone
and packed up all the transparencies and switched off the overhead projector...
Hey, damn you! I was still taking notes!
Peace, old Teacher.
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