The following is my first foray into an experimental writing style I’m trying out in which I listen to my environment for - rather than imagine, remember, or anticipate - the story being told.
A window open onto the spring morning, Professor’s lilac polo accentuates the charm of silver-grey hair. At 70, his mind is still the escape hatch to sanity that slipped me by a decade ago, although now it seeps out with a hoarseness that anticipates a final exit.
Someone sneezes and he – unhesitatingly – commands God, bless. The display of good Catholic upbringing mourns yesterday’s passing pope.
We all stare at him and pretend to hear the meaning of a panopticon while we dwell inside of it. Professor’s materialist reading of the superego has stuck to the star-student who once looked like me and is learning to look for herself. She performs the reluctance of responding correctly.
His iPhone rings in the alarm bells of incoming tariffs that had spurred a run on Apples’ stores.
The answer is America’s prison population. At last count, 1.8 million Googled numbers rarely run but sometimes smuggle phones. How often do they feel rehabilitated, we wonder but don’t expect an answer. How much of a sacrifice will we accept to feel secure, asks the too-early clock on the wall that helps us police our time.
I looked away and returned to Professor’s impression of a grandfather. “Buy Gold.” Usually a desperate clinging to the past but today prescient wisdom for a liquid future. Surrounded by the sound of metabolizing information, the students import reason into context and make sense of the Golden Gulag they’re unwittingly redesigning.
Professor offends and befriends the two inhabitants of Bunkey, Louisiana and it is this self-corrective and reflective capacity that has allowed an otherwise discrete and humble hermit to glisten on the beach of a hunched and hardened shell.
Still-wearing sneakers tap to signal we’re in a rhythm now, and I wonder how many of us have heard it? The lonely mouse with the blue tooth lurks beside the already-worn copy of Surveiller et Punir. Scrolling along archives of memory, so rich and storied as only to be replicable incompletely, impartially, in – out - line.
I am reminded of my first day subbing for this class when I took his 2016 seat before the fossilized white board. The students – at my prompting – informed me that Professor had since moved his modest hearth to the other side. Backlit by the celestial glow of a projector, I know that, of all the men I’d ever known to some degree of depth, he had lived the most of a long life. The Nabulsi hostel owner - resistance fighter and freed political prisoner – had perhaps lived eternity but in the congestion of one long Day of Judgement.
The arc of the Professor was one of sustainability, and, to me, he was a sobering ode to my American. A conscience hard up in a crowded cave watching rom-coms and copaganda, waiting to welcome any hand that reaches out from the horde – should one ever come.
So long – as I am here –understanding for and by myself. Why do I know he sat in the same seat behind another Jack P. – an Irishman? A Pole? I’m not sure, but it must’ve been someone from Scorcese’s mean streets who I’d always assigned as my surrogate father.
Professor’s performance gestures a remembered Italy, and he recalls Liberation Day – more anchoring in the material that slips by the weakening fingers of my youth. Some of the students, still ripe with righteous anger, miss the practicality and resignation of his engagement.
In cynical light, he is the professorial propagandist. In shadowy heart, he is freedom uncommitted, yet consistent. His world, I feel or believe, is real because it gives mine all the more texture. To imagine the Providence apartment, he eagerly shares with me in the hall of light. His cat has disappeared except for clandestine night meals. And I listen to how it is that individuals are born at the DMV, but I weigh whether or not couples are born in the DMs – private norms created for a nosy public. But back in the projectionist’s cave, my digression is a marooned thought that lives in community. It comes from the life that encircles this one. That makes His disciplined window a gift and not a punishing look into what might come to me.
It is the aphorisms about his daily habits and musings I will miss the most. The Professor, constructed in my afterthoughts, is a time capsule that cannot be buried by the tomb of a tongue. He is a part from a legacy that gestures to before thoughts and more thoughts to come.
It is not the most appropriate moment for tears to well in my eyes as he begs for laughs at the mention of Nick ‘Satan,’ but if he has encouraged me with any idea, it is always appropriate, admirable, and – maybe– revolutionary to seek refuge in the activity of affection.