I emerged from my latest spell with only the minor inconvenience of having lowered my head upon my desk. Fortunately, the students arriving to second period were no more observant to my hardship than the earlier class. After I finally focused on my surroundings, I noticed them filing halfheartedly into the room. One girl was positioned unusually close to my desk. She busily jabbed her thumbs into the keypad of her Smart Phone. For a girl who routinely refused to scribble a single paragraph of coherent prose, the dexterity of her digit work amazed me. Even the speediest typists of my age rarely showed such proficiency at a keyboard.
This particular student, however, hardly merited any recognition otherwise. I concluded that Regan Cordell had honed her knack at riling the temperament of anyone who ever expected her to follow directions. Even on the seldom occasions where she pretended to obey the rules, I sensed an undercurrent of hostility in her mannerisms. I don’t know exactly when such a pretty, affluent girl like Regan developed her sense of entitlement, but I do believe it started well before I ever caught a glimpse of her.
Regan may have been as unpopular with her teachers as an unscheduled faculty meeting, (and secretly despised by the girls who envied her nubile figure), but the majority of boys gravitated to her cloying demeanor like roaches to darkness. They lined up in front of her as if she was dishing out free candy at a sweetshop, and perhaps in a metaphorical way, this analogy wasn’t far off the mark. If Ravendale High School ever enforced a dress code policy, I suspected Regan would’ve been the poster child on how not to come attired for high school. Her gossamer frocks were always hemmed high enough to provide the lascivious lads with exactly what they had been forbidden to survey. Barry Shorewater, a gawky, yet inquisitive kid who sat in front of her, once took a full six minutes to pick his pencil off the floor. Regan was the type of girl who’d wear a blouse cut deep enough into her cleavage to showcase her bellybutton, only to then berate those who had the audacity to ogle her breasts. Of course, this was just another thoroughly structured trick for attention on her part, and she despised me for divulging it.
In high school, meshed within the prototypical cliques, I gathered there were generally two types of females: those who followed and the trendsetters. Regan belonged to the latter grouping. Other girls attempted to mimic the style of Regan’s licorice black hair and purple eyeliner, which made her cornflower blue eyes almost appear lavender, like Elizabeth Taylor’s renowned peepers. But most girls lacked Regan’s patented mind-set of pomposity, which frequently accompanied a malevolent grin that was too often mistaken as mischievous play.
Although I had a litany of peevish objections regarding Regan over the past eight months, nothing irked me more severely than the manner in which she manipulated everyone around her, including those who considered her a friend. She was especially adept at conjuring sympathy from the copious clods that would’ve gladly stood blindfolded in freeway traffic to acquire her praise. Like most high schools, Ravendale had a surplus of oversexed boys vying for some leverage with someone more enticing than an Internet fantasy. For the past four years, Regan hawked her wares like a crafty quean, and she could’ve made any one of her sophomoric peers leap through more hoops than a parade full of circus poodles.
Perhaps it was the boys’ own fault for relying on a naïve hope that any depth of emotion flourished inside a girl whose heart seemed chiseled from a slab of granite. On the surface, of course, Regan glittered like a finely cut jewel, sparkling to an untutored eye, but nothing more than a mudstone to anyone with a speck of intuition. On any other day, I wouldn’t have purposely soured my stomach by training two seconds of my attention toward this girl, but I then remembered her recent alignment to another nuisance who I needed to confer with today.
The latest boy to lunge headlong into her venomous clutches was none other than Drew Mincer. Apparently, not even the notorious intimidator of Ravendale High was impervious to her pernicious ploys. I suspected that Regan controlled him with the same dexterous rhythm in which she thumbed her phone’s keypad. But in this scenario at least, I felt as though they wholly deserved one another. As I understood it, Regan was programming Drew as her robotic henchman to systematically terrorize anyone who happened to end up on the barbed edge of her moodiness. And since Drew possessed the emotional intellect of a fruit fly, he became as malleable as moist putty in her fingertips.
Before Regan became too complacent with her whereabouts, I elected to serve forth some much-needed sarcasm as a subtle reminder of who was still supposedly in charge. “Good morning, Regan,” I chimed with about as much sincerity as her pearly smile. She did her best to ignore me while continuing to text her cronies. “You know,” I continued, “I had a terrific dream last night that all the cellular towers suddenly shut down simultaneously, rendering those gadgets as obsolete as eight-track players.” (I enjoyed making nostalgic references to defunct technology, if only to spawn a reaction from my students). But Regan remained as unremarkably stilted as a wormwood fence.
In truth, I currently yearned for the days when students gabbed unabashedly face-to-face in the middle of my lessons, rather than resorting to texting conspicuously through the camouflage of a book bag. The blatantly cheeky defectors, such as Regan, didn’t even attempt to disguise her noncompliance. She deflected my statement with a quirky grin and a single swipe of her fingertips through a scarf of black hair.
“Put your phone away and sit down,” I finally told her in exasperation.
“Wait a sec,” she said, treating me as nothing more bothersome than a gnat. “I’m almost done.” Her thumbs still danced on the phone’s keypad with the nimbleness of Gene Kelly in tap shoes.
Did I really expect anything else but a challenge from Regan? I could’ve resorted to an angry outburst, but that discipline strategy, as most students knew, was the mark of a novice. Even the most obtuse students in high school had an innate sense for identifying the teachers with the least amount of authority. Oddly, usually the teachers who yelled the loudest and most regularly had the poorest rapport with his pupils. I must’ve stopped showing my irritation outwardly with my classes nearly ten years ago; the flipside of things was convincing the kids that I hadn’t become as apathetic as them. In this instance, since I required a tiny favor from Regan, I decided to only slightly accentuate my sardonic request.
“When you’re finished socializing,” I said, “May I please talk to you?”
“About what?” she snapped, while lowering the phone and stuffing it into a pocket in her handbag. “If this is about my homework again, I already told you that my printer ran out of ink and my mom hasn’t bought a new thingy for it yet.”
“It’s not about your homework,” I said, realizing that I had about as much of a chance receiving that assignment as I did at seeing the Second Coming. Regan flexed her hand and placed it on her hip, popping her thigh slightly in front the other like a model posing for a camera.
“Oh,” she remarked flippantly. “What do you want then?”
Because I typically disassociated myself with my student’s personal affairs, my next question must’ve sounded a bit awkward. “Not that it’s any of my business, but do you still hang around with Drew Mincer?”
Regan rolled her eyes at my inquiry and then shrugged her shoulders as if the boy’s name was inconsequential to her. Her amethyst eyes flashed wickedly before she returned, “What do you care?”
“It’s just a question, Regan. You don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to.”
“I see him around here and there.”
“Good. Any chance you’ll run into him today before fifth period?”
“Why? Has he done something wrong?”
A more appropriate question, as I’m sure Regan already surmised, would’ve been to ask if he’d ever done anything right from the moment he arrived at Ravendale. Since we both knew that Drew was conceivably incapable of performing any deed that warranted acclaim, my brevity on this point proved comprehensive.
“He hasn’t done anything y
et. But if you happen to see him, can you tell him that I want to speak to him privately before our study hall in the auditorium?”
“I’m not his freakin’ nanny, Mr. Cobbs.”
“Should I take that as a yes or a no?”
I paused to monitor Regan’s glacial expression, which I imagined was how Captain Edward John Smith must’ve felt seconds before the RMS Titanic collided with its demolisher. The girl flipped her hair off the front side of her shoulders like a velvety whip and promptly pivoted away from my desk, leaving me to inhale the cool vapors of her flowery perfume. Logically, I should’ve let her flee uncontested, as I had done on other occasions, but my broadmindedness for insolent brats had thinned almost to the consistency of my hair.
After Regan clutched her phone and casually lifted it from her purse again, I sensed a pitch of fury rising in my tone. “I told you to put that phone away once already,” I shouted across the room at her. “You know the rules of this classroom.”
It was marginally comical to utter such perfunctory statements aloud. I almost had to stifle a chuckle that arrived like an unwelcome acquaintance in my voice. Follow the rules? Who was I kidding? Regan certainly didn’t reveal any urgency to heed to my trite order. In such moments, I wondered at exactly what point I had surrendered my authority in the classroom, or if I ever truly possessed it. Admittedly, my own aloof nature betrayed me at times. Maybe I let the reins slack for too long, and now not even the most adroit horseman could’ve tamed the pending stampede. Unfortunately for Regan, I was in a rare mood today, and suddenly keen on a prospect of lassoing an unruly mare galloping amuck in my classroom.
In order to cast a more formidable posture, I stood up from my desk, causing my weakened legs to wobble a bit. Then, while watching Regan continue to text from her seat, I lashed out at her with a sternness that I had seldom resorted to before this moment. “Look, Regan, I don’t care what you do outside this classroom, but when you come in here from now on I don’t want to see your phone. Do you got it?”
Regan looked at me with befuddlement, almost as if I spoke in the garbled language that only Charles Shultz’s cartoons could’ve deciphered. By her expression alone, I know she felt the tethers becoming a bit tauter. She withdrew in her seat momentarily, still tinkering with her phone as if to test my integrity as a disciplinarian. A few other students had entered the class just in time to witness my reprimand. One boy, Paul Holmes, actually circled his lips in awe. After all, those in company hadn’t ever observed such an outburst from me before now; they’d have more luck waiting to catch a glimpse of Halley’s Comet under normal circumstances.
Since Regan was confrontational by nature, her choice to be defiant didn’t instill any wonderment in me. “Calm down,” she muttered. “It’s not like you ever got mad at any of us before for texting in class.”
“You’re absolutely right, Regan. I was lax in that area, but that doesn’t mean I can’t improve. It’s something I should’ve corrected a long time ago, but that’s one of the perks about being a teacher. I usually get a chance to fix the mistakes I’ve made in the past.”
I noticed several of my students staring at me as if I had another head growing out of the side of my neck. They almost anticipated a punch line, but I didn’t have one to deliver on this occasion. When you’re known as humorous and lighthearted, such as I was, it’s a difficult task to modify that perception. At least Regan took me seriously enough to slip her phone back into her handbag. But her enchanting eyes simmered with the froth of two cauldrons set ablaze. I should’ve known that I hadn’t yet squelched her caustic mockery.
“Sounds like someone didn’t get any action in awhile,” Regan smirked, just audibly enough so that others around her distinguished her slur. Naturally, her retaliation generated a modicum of nervous giggles from her feckless friends. Yet I couldn’t rebuke the kids for their coerced alliance with Regan, for they knew that anyone who opposed her rudeness would’ve intensified her ire. The students also understood that Regan never confronted her adversaries directly; this became Drew Mincer’s primary errand. Rather than say anything else immediately, she glared at me with pure vexation brewing in her countenance, perhaps wishing to cast a grave illness upon me as if she channeled Hecate’s most malicious incantations.
“It’s not like you can take my phone away from me anyway,” she persisted. “So why don’t you just back off, huh?”
On what precarious route does a teacher venture now? The easiest path, of course, was to simply proceed with the lesson, thereby eliminating further friction. But this tactic had obvious flaws. The other students almost expected me to issue a reprimand, while they simultaneously cogitated the parameters of their own boundaries. Even if I didn’t want to let it appear as though Regan riled me, it was necessary to verbalize some idle threat.
“I’m sure you don’t want me to get your parents involved in this,” I admonished. As I uttered these worn-out words unimaginatively pilfered from the handbook on pedagogical blunders, I remembered that Regan’s parents were as useless as feathers on a fish when it came to curtailing their daughter’s rebellious behavior. They were also divorced, and consequentially preoccupied with overcompensating for their shortcomings as parents.
“My mother lives in Phoenix with her boyfriend,” she specified. “Do you think she cares if I talk on my phone in school?”
“Well, maybe your father does.”
Regan smirked impishly at my blandness, which suddenly made my strategy as antiquated as The Cat Lady’s philosophy on classroom management. Back in the days when a father’s scowl worked more efficiently than a panel of educational pundits, this scenario might’ve only happened once. But, as Regan unmercifully reminded me, fathers were no longer the leaders of families; somewhere along the blurred lines of progress, the children displaced the parents as the architects between right and wrong. Therefore, the blueprint to public education’s future rested in jejune minds.
“My father listens to whatever I tell him,” said Regan. “Why should he believe you? You’re just a lousy teacher. He’ll laugh in your face, and by the end of the conversation, you’ll be the one apologizing to me.”
Perhaps there was a time when such an avowal was treated as nothing more significant than a disillusioned rant from a spoiled child, yet I suspected the truth was far more demoralizing to those linked to my profession. It pained me to concede that Regan’s words weren’t merely muddied in illogical thought. Teachers and administrators no longer controlled the environment in which they worked. Moreover, most of the important decisions approved by schools boards and politicians were established and ratified by people whose only familiarity with overseeing education was the fact that they once attended school at one time or another. The repercussions of these ill-conceived mandates sat before me in the form of at least a hundred different faces everyday.
Our dispute may have lingered in the form of leering gesticulations had it not been for another belated addition to my classroom. I doubt Harold Wagner ever developed a knack for entering a social environment unobserved. His inability to blend quietly among his peers was partially attributable to a preadolescent clumsiness that clung to his back like a three hundred pound gorilla. Harold didn’t hold a claim on being the most unsightly student in the senior class, but his disheveled appearance often placed him in the crosshairs of those who skipped the training seminar on sensitivity.
Today, Harold stomped into the room towing a neon green knapsack two sizes wider than his shoulder blades. His curly umber-colored hair looked like a wad of tangled shoelaces atop his head. In this case, I welcomed the distraction, as the students’ attention instantly shifted from me to him. Because of his heedlessness, I almost expected Harold to do something to unintentionally humiliate himself. As he scrambled between the rows to find his desk, his left sneaker hooked on a steel leg of Amber Lange’s desk. This sole misstep caused the boy to tumble headlong to the floor, nearly plunging into Paul Linderman’s lap, who once again had proper ca
use to round his lips like a guppy.
To worsen matters, Harold had neglected to adequately secure the Velcro tab on his knapsack, which resulted in a spillage of its contents. Loose notebook paper, writing utensils, and an assortment of stationary supplies spread out across the floor as if regurgitated from the innards of a Staples store. Even before the motion of Harold’s tumble came to a standstill, the students ignited with uproarious laughter. This cacophony must’ve infiltrated the adjoining classroom’s walls, and I fully anticipated a discreet reproof from the neighboring room’s teacher, Mrs. Fisher, that the decibel level within my class had reached an intolerable level once again. My immediate concern, however, was to tend to Harold’s woe. As it turned out, the boy had fallen down so many times before that he learned to do it without injuring anything more than his already pulverized ego.
“Harold,” I called, while watching him scuttling like a crab between the desks to collect his scattered belongings. “Are you okay?”
Fortunately, Harold hadn’t lost or damaged his eyeglasses this time. He managed to gather most of his materials hastily and shove them back into his open bag with a few swipes of his hand. Regan remained perched like a cement gargoyle in the back of the classroom, simpering at the boy as if she took a perverse delight in his embarrassment. I wanted to feel sorry for Harold and other students like him. Sadly, this kid seemed destined for ridicule since his first day of high school.
At least Harold had the gumption to recognize the folly in his ungainliness. Instead of sheepishly slinking behind his desk like a scolded puppy, he bounced to his feet as if the rubber on his sneakers was molded from Super Balls. Then, in true showmanship fashion, he offered a curtain bow to the class as if he had premeditated the whole event. I’m sure Regan detested his theatrics because it drew attention further away from her corner of the room.
Harold had almost become desensitized to the insults hurled at him throughout his high school years. His feigned apathy, as I presently perceived it, was actually a coping mechanism. I couldn’t help but to suspect that this boy shielded his wounds beneath a thin cowl of jollity. Over the course of several weeks, I noticed subtle variations in Harold’s conduct. To an outsider, or maybe even his own mother, these changes may have seemed insignificant or went largely unnoticed. Yet I detected somewhat of a craving in his expression, as if he harbored a taboo idea that he wasn’t quite ready to disclose.
Harold usually counterbalanced his social incompetence by imparting random stories of a bizarre nature. In the past, his anecdotes were amusing diversions focusing upon esoteric facts culled from the Internet. At times, even the hard-to-believe-but-true yarns intrigued me. Most of what Harold conveyed sounded far less plausible than any urban legend, but basic research generally confirmed the oddities. I imagined the boy sitting up late at night in front of his home computer, dutifully scanning websites for titillating tales. Lately, however, Harold’s tidbits of trivia became progressively morose, and borderline weird. He was starting to make the melancholic Hamlet look like a philanthropic character by comparison.
Two weeks ago, after corresponding via email with Harold’s mother in regard to her son’s plummeting grades, I learned the probable cause of his sullenness. I was informed that Harold’s father died suddenly the previous summer, evidently from an undetected embolism. Since Harold wasn’t the type of kid to air his anguish in public, it was likely that he had repressed his torment for many months. It now appeared as if he could’ve uncorked like a champagne bottle at any moment.
Knowing this information didn’t necessarily assist me in developing a strategy to counteract Harold’s concealed grief. I wish I had a formula to magically dissolve the boy’s sorrow, but then again, I might’ve consumed the larger portion of it myself. Perhaps if Harold had confided in me earlier, I would’ve intervened and dished out some obligatory advice. Most teachers had a difficult time teetering on the invisible boundary between a student’s education and home life. I’ve witnessed numerous colleagues leaning too far in either direction, resulting in being ostracized by both the students and administrators.
Once my students settled, I moved to the classroom’s center aisle and managed to deliver just two spoken syllables before another interruption halted my lesson. The offending source originated from an intercom speaker mounted above the classroom’s door. The senior class advisor, Mr. Sinclair, considered it imperative to disrupt instructional time with yet another unscheduled assembly. This one was planned for next period to expound the regulations for the forthcoming prom.
An exaggerated cheer rebounded throughout the room, inciting Jasmine Kramer and Josie Martinez to celebrate yet another truncated school day. These girls, like so many others, believed all 12th grade academics ceased sometime in mid-January, leaving the remaining five months of school for more convenient matters, such as Twittering current fashion trends and updating their online networking. Since I had no authority over what rated as pertinent news in this building, I simply rolled my eyes and sighed in frustration. This next intermission meant that my third period American literature students would miss their fourth class this month due to an assembly program.
The duty of providing pivotal instruction for my current charges still loomed in front of me like a forty-three minute root canal absent the Novocain. My head had cleared momentarily, however, and I felt lucid enough to present at least one compelling thought for my students to ponder. I resorted to an old tactic rather than scrawling an endless batch of meaningless words on the whiteboard. I picked a red dry-erase marker off the whiteboard’s shelf and printed one word in large capital letters on the centermost board. By itself, the word GRAVEYARD registered as ambiguous to its observers.
The students stared at one another in bewilderment, but at least a quarter of the eighteen faces in front of me showed a perceptible reaction. Any expression was superior to a multitude of deadpan glares that typically accompanied the onset of a thoughtful exercise. I already presumed that they were waiting for some additional instruction; after all, what work were they supposed to generate while eyeballing a seemingly random word? The handbook of preferred instructional tactics suggested that I waited at least a minute for them to absorb a concept, but I purposely stalled in silence for at least twice that amount of time.
Before the quietness consumed us all, a tentative set of fingertips rose from the hand of Erin Ortiz. The baffled girl asked, “Aren’t we still reading ‘The Iliad’?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“So what do you want us to do with that word on the board?”
“Just think about it, Erin,” I responded succinctly.
“About graveyards?” inquired Andre Wilson, crinkling his nose as if a scent of putrid corpses suddenly permeated the room. A solitary smirk from me didn’t clarify my intentions.
“How does that word make you feel?” My question was almost rhetorical, but I always believed that good teachers operated with the same discipline as competent attorneys. We generally asked questions to which the answers were already known. Since the notion of death or anything closely linked to it was a topic most teenagers rarely contemplated, they remained mute on the matter.
“This is kind of creepy,” one student whispered.
“Tell me about it,” murmured another. “But so is Mr. Cobbs.”
It amused me to eavesdrop on the students’ banter concerning my disposition. Occasionally, I entertained this outlandish notion to make connections between literature’s imbedded themes to our existence in this world. Rest assured, it was a fanciful expectation, but one worth revisiting from time to time. I had no misconceptions about my daily challenge. If I expected any of my students to remember or appreciate Homer’s epic poetry, I had to make the material more relevant to their circumstances as young adults. Consistently engineering the gap between fiction and reality was a feat that rivaled the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
“Many of you in here,” I started, “haven’t planned a future for yourselve
s much beyond what awaits in college.” Normally, when immersed in a thought worth elaborating upon, I’d pace in front of the desks, gesturing with my hands to match my voice’s inflection. But my random bouts of unconsciousness left me feeling vulnerable today. I remained leaning slightly against the whiteboard, still holding the red marker uncapped in my left hand.
“I’m not known for my prophetic skills,” I said, pivoting slightly toward the board to underscore the word I wrote a few minutes earlier. “But I can safely predict that no matter where life’s journey takes us, the majority will end up in this place. It’s a final destination for most people.”
“Like those movies,” quipped Terri Gallagher.
“Whatever you want to compare it to,” I resumed. “The main point is that we’re all going to die someday, and a graveyard represents a spot where those who knew us in life can visit and rekindle fond memories.”
My students’ faces turned as gray and dull as granite tombstones while they deliberated my words. At the very least, I had their partial attention. This in itself became a minor achievement when instructing seniors during the final months of high school.
“Why are we even talkin’ about this stupid stuff?” Regan called out. She didn’t bother raising her hand. Rather than respond to her, I waited for someone else to fill up the calculated void. After a few seconds, Colleen Sanders stopped tapping her pencil on her desktop long enough to deliver some uninspired words.
“This has something to do with that poem we’re reading, right?”
“That’s a start,” I said encouragingly, “but maybe it’s better to say that the poem has something to do with us.”
One of my brighter students in this class, Wanda Carlson, then flung forth a Frisbee of light for the others to cling to like a raft amidst a tempest. “I get the whole graveyard thing,” she said as if she had just invented the next fad. “Since we’re all going to die like those people in the poem, you want us to imagine ourselves in their position.”
“You’re on the right track, Wanda, but it may be more about how we feel before we reach this inevitable place.” My left hand swept back to the whiteboard, where I double underscored the word for emphasis, as if it needed any. “Let me put it to you another way,” I continued. “How many in here want to be remembered after you die?”
Once again, the students looked spellbound by the mere prospect of having to consider something as solemn as this topic at eight thirty in the morning. Most of them hadn’t even yet peeled the crumbly remnants of sleep from their eyes. A couple of the kids lifted their hands hesitantly in response to my last question.
“Come on,” I goaded the rest. “Is it important for you to be remembered after your own death?”
“That’s another stupid question,” said Regan snippily. “What’s the difference who remembers us after we’re dead? We’ll never know.”
“Maybe not, Regan. But surely most people want or need to be recognized for something after we die, especially by those who loved us. But how about being remembered for things we’ve done in life by people who never even met us? Who would hope for that?”
No one forwarded a gesture or word this time. Perhaps the question in itself was too ambiguous. Borrowing from the wisdom of one very famous rustic-minded transcendentalist, I had to simplify. “Maybe it’s easier for you to understand what I mean if I tell you a little story.” Whenever I resorted to such a proposal, the students groaned collectively. Over the years, I learned that my penchant for storytelling wasn’t designated solely for paper. I habitually selected relevant sketches from my past and present to enliven our discussions.
“I still don’t get what we’re supposed to do,” Erin whined.
“Just listen,” I advised. “Sometimes when I want to unwind or think about my life, I’ll take a stroll through Willow Acre Cemetery near my house.” This confession generated a few nervous chuckles from my captive audience. To them, of course, a graveyard was synonymous with the ghosts, zombies, and other supernatural entities that young minds formulated from a bombardment of horror films. Admittedly, most teenagers didn’t imagine their teachers on a jaunt through a churchyard at any hour of the day, especially as a means to attain relaxation. Luckily, I wasn’t the only uncanny pioneer in class today.
“Hey, I know where that graveyard is,” said Harold. “It’s the one with the flat tombstones that all look the same, right?”
“The very one,” I confirmed.
“Oh,” Erin added. “It’s in the field behind that old brick church. I could never figure out why all the headstones lay on the ground in there. Seems kind of strange to me.”
“It’s not so odd if you know the history of the Moravian Church,” I interjected.
“The what?”
“The Moravians, Erin. The members of that congregation are buried in that graveyard after they die. Everyone is assigned a headstone the exact same size, spaced on a plot of soil no bigger or smaller than the one adjacent to it.”
“Why?”
“I suppose it eliminates a repute of wealth or importance. In such churchyards, everyone’s social status is essentially anonymous,” I offered.
“I still don’t get it,” Erin complained.
“No one stands out,” Wanda illustrated. “They’re all the same. Got it now?”
“Got it.”
“Anyway, a hike through a Moravian graveyard on a sunny afternoon is a valuable experience,” I resumed. Naturally, no one in class had ever dared to fathom such a venture as being anything other than obligatory. “Since the Germanic settlers arrived here back in the late 1700’s, they’ve used Willows Acres as their final resting point. It certainly gives you a perspective on life and death.”
“So you really go there alone?” Harold asked, more unreservedly than any of the other voices. He was obviously fetching for some details that his classmates were simply too apprehensive to query.
“I visit mostly in the warmer weather,” I explained. “One of the most fascinating things about old churchyards is that it’s like taking a walk backwards through time. Some of those grave markers date back over two hundred years.”
“That’s a long time to be dead,” Terri giggled.
“I don’t understand something,” said Jasmine, “what’s so interesting about a bunch of old gravestones?”
“Well, I guess it’s a reminder that people lived here so many years before any of us were born, or even before your parents and grandparents were around. A marker, as insignificant as it may seem to any of us, is the closest physical link to a deceased person.”
My response generated a reflective pause throughout the classroom. I decided to capitalize on their concentration, even if it was feigned. “You see, a phenomenon takes place in every graveyard, but it’s really noticeable in the Moravian churchyards because all the headstones are horizontal rather upright. Although those who are buried in the ground have stopped living, the surrounding earth continues to thrive. Over years, the gravestones begin to settle into the soil, while the grass grows over the markers, in many instances preserving the stones from the harsh elements.”
“But don’t people come to see their relatives and maybe clear off the grass?” asked Andre.”
“Of course, Andre, while they’re still alive. But who tends to the graves after their loved ones and relatives die?”
“Don’t they have a landscaper to cut the grass?” Wanda inquired logically.
“Sure, a caretaker does that, but he only trims around the visible markers. If you go to Willows Acres you’ll notice large empty expanses of freshly clipped lawn, but if you look more closely at the beveled field, the land isn’t as barren as it first appears. Beneath the manicured grass hundreds of forgotten gravestones have been entirely camouflaged. Since there’s no one still alive to remember the people in those burial plots, they remain hidden and essentially lost to the world.”
“That’s so sad in a way, Mr. Cobbs,” muttered Josie as she flipped nonchalantly throu
gh the pages of a Cosmopolitan magazine.
“I suppose it can be,” I returned pensively. “But it can also serve as an introspective moment…”
“A what?” Erin interrupted.
“A thoughtful moment, dummy,” snapped an unidentified voice.
“Look,” I proceeded quickly, “everyone is in a hurry to get somewhere and do something. We rarely pause to reflect about the direction of our own lives let alone the course of those who’ve traveled these roads before us. So why not, in your spare time, take a walk over to Willows Acres and find the area I just told you about. Then, trace your fingers along the grass and you’ll likely feel flat stones about two inches beneath the soil. Once you find a marker, peel back the sod just a tad and take a look at the gravestone underneath. Read the stone’s inscription, including the date of birth and death. Then ask yourself: who was this person? What did he or she do in life? For a moment that person suddenly springs to life within your mind, because as we’ve already heard from Terri today, two hundreds years is a long time to be dead, but it’s an eternity to be forgotten.”
“So now we know how Mr. Cobbs spends his summer recess,” Regan huffed audaciously. “Funny, I’m not so surprised.” I learned to ignore Regan’s snide comments only because she’d rather instigate an argument than make a salient contribution to the class.
At least Harold provided me with the encouragement to continue. He perched on the edge of his seat like a praying mantis, waiting to absorb as much insight into this topic as I chose to impart. His eyes remained locked onto mine when he said, “I think it’s a very cool idea, Mr. Cobbs.”
“Creepy is more like it,” Regan tittered. “Hey, Mr. Cobbs, does your wife know that you go out skulking in cemeteries to spy on dead people?”
Regan’s zinger hung on me like a leaden shadow for a moment, and a good portion of the class chuckled disobediently at my expense. I could’ve easily shifted away from the subject at this point, but Harold had more to expostulate. “So what you’re really saying is that we all have a potential of being forgotten after we’re dead,” he remarked.
“It certainly keeps you humble, doesn’t it, Harold?” I asked. “But on the reverse side of things, it’s also a reminder that we all have a chance to make an impression in this world that lasts beyond our limited lifetimes.”
“But what about those people who don’t care to be remembered after they die?” Harold countered. “Is that wrong?”
I realized, of course, that some resentment surfaced in Harold’s words, for he combated oppositional people on a daily basis. He may have already surrendered some of his zest for life, and would’ve preferred to slip into a channel of obscurity to escape the harassment he encountered throughout his adolescence.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to remain anonymous,” I replied. “But most of us secretly want to believe that our lives matter for something beyond family acquaintances and friendships. After all, if no one cared to be recognized after death, then our landscapes would be cluttered with unmarked headstones.”
“But such places do exist,” Harold contended.
“You should know, Weird Harold,” shouted Colleen through the veil of her fingers. Once again, laughter swelled like a frothing wave, gathering brief momentum before crumbling to my feet with a gentle undertow at the front of the classroom. Harold remained visibly unscathed by the ridicule as he veered toward his next little known narrative.
“There’s an island off the coast of Brooklyn, New York,” he said. “It’s currently a cemetery for thousands of unclaimed bodies buried in pauper graves.”
“You must be referring to Hart Island?” I questioned knowingly.
“Yeah, but I think it has another name, the graveyard that is.”
“Potter’s Field,” I said.
“That’s the one,” Harold verified. “From what I’ve read, a lot of vagrants from the city get buried there, but I think a movie star and a couple of writers did too.”
I should’ve surmised that Harold couldn’t resist an opportunity to exhibit a smidgen of his arcane knowledge. In this instance, I had no idea of what he was referencing, and I’m sure his friends were as equally perplexed. Sometimes it was mildly intriguing to listen to Harold rattle off trivia as if he was reciting it verbatim from his cell-phone.
“That child actor who did the voice for Disney’s “Peter Pan” is buried there. He also played Jim Hawkins in another Disney movie. “Treasure Island”, I think.”
“I never knew that, Harold.” I uttered. “That’s pretty interesting.”
“Yeah. Some kids found him dead in a tenement home in New York City back in the late 60’s. He was probably thirty-something by then. No one claimed his body, so they planted him in Potter’s Field.”
“Do you remember the actor’s name?” Wanda asked Harold.
“No, I guess I forgot,” he responded dejectedly.
“So what might this say for the rest of us?” I proposed.
“I dunno,” said Erin.
“Me either,” said Josie, “but I think I want to be cremated.”
“Well, in this case, fame wasn’t enough to preserve the memory of a very talented childhood actor. So stardom doesn’t automatically guarantee any pomp and circumstance after death, does it?” I asked.
The purpose of my introduction to today’s lesson, of course, wasn’t solely intended for students to implement a degree of humility in their pursuits. Ironically, the student who required the least amount of tutoring on this lecture seemed the most enlightened. For better or worse, Harold Wagner already recognized the fallibilities of being human. The rest of his classmates would’ve been wise to internalize what had just occurred.
Nothing in a scripted lesson plan, however, could’ve ever been carried out flawlessly. As I was about to make a transition into today’s reading of Homer’s epic, another distraction unsettled the students. This one reverberated in a series of pulsating sirens. It was the alarm for a fire drill, and in our high school these occurred as randomly as any true blaze might’ve behaved. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have given a second thought to an unscheduled drill on Thursday morning. But the custodian’s forewarning suddenly saturated my intuition. I almost hoped something in the school was really burning so I could’ve discarded his earlier claim as gibberish. Now I was compelled to reconsider the hastiness of my cynicism.
A fire drill in the warmer months of the school year had an astounding effect on the students’ otherwise sluggish pace. Upon hearing the alarm, I marveled at the fleetness in which they bounded for the door. They were more unstable than quicksilver under such conditions; even Harold managed to navigate the classroom without tripping over something conspicuous to the rest of us. Not surprisingly, Regan was the last to exit, as her phone messages took precedence over any safety regulation. Before leaving the room, she casually flipped me her middle finger. Her taunting gesture was done in such a way that she could’ve handily dismissed the action. But with my vertigo still unmanageable, I decided to forgo any further discourse with her at the moment.
The school’s policy dictated that all teachers must accompany their students outside the building during any evacuation. Only the principal and select safety officers (formally known as security guards) were permitted to remain inside. For nineteen years I obeyed the rules even when I found them to be officious or disorganized, but I lingered behind in my classroom on this occasion. Maybe it was a resurfacing headache that instigated my rebellion. Whatever the reason, I waited a few minutes before leaving the room, assuring that most of the marauding teenagers were already herded from the hallways. I deemed it no accident that I found myself maneuvering toward the main office. Before advancing approximately thirty steps, however, I sensed my knees wavering as if my joints had disconnected. I managed to prevent myself from collapsing in the center of the corridor by shifting my weight against a boy’s lavatory door.
Rather than risk being discovered unconscious by someone as intrusive as Pr
incipal Lemus, I sought refuge in the bathroom. As my dizziness worsened, the floor’s blue and white tiles seemed to undulate beneath my feet as if a squall disseminated within the room. Fortunately, no one else was in the lavatory at this time. I staggered hastily to a stall and locked myself inside it. A fluorescent fixture adjacent to this stall was extinguished, leaving part of my body in shadow. The toilet was clean enough to sit down and rest upon. At least the custodian did something useful when not following me around. I cocked my head back against the wall, now fully incapable of staving off the approaching episode.
I had already conceded to the fact that I couldn’t halt my illness’s progression anymore than I could’ve prevented my eyes from blinking involuntarily. Whatever was happening in my mind, I anticipated no reprieve as the day continued. If anything, my spells were becoming more uncontrollable with each passing second.
Chapter 20
8:38 A.M.