I Take This, and This
In my dreams, of course, my final year of teaching resembles a retiring ballplayer’s farewell tour. Alas, in reality there will be no key to the city, no basket of hometown culinary specialties, no desktop-sized replica of some local landmark. There won’t be a presentation at the home plate of my lectern before the semester begins, let alone a highlight reel of my greatest classroom quips and insights.
Moreover, I’ll be the one giving (or throwing) stuff away. Here for the taking are boxes—and stacks beside them—of Shakespeare, Thoreau, Frost, Dickinson, Douglass. Here are my mugs full of pens and markers, drawers full of knickknacks I’ve used to jumpstart writing workshops: bottle caps, rusty pennies, a cracked hourglass. Here are posters from Dublin and Rome and sets of shelves for my colleagues to claim, here are two sturdy office chairs, a wide desk and a printer. Here’s the office itself, sans books, sans furniture, sans light, sans everything.
II Miss Foley, Elle est Moi
In one of her essays, the late poet Kay Ryan recalls her college English instructor, Miss Foley, who every few minutes would “look down and rearrange two or three little stacks of books and papers on her desk… always unconsciously tidying up, already preparing to leave.” It was an epiphany for Ryan back then: “Miss Foley had a private life of the mind that she protected, and to which she was eager to return. She wasn’t entirely there for us.”
After decades as a professor, I have to admit to a similar fugitive sensibility. For much of that time, and more consciously than not, I too have been preparing to leave. I’ve always been more Miss Foley than Mr. Chips.
Maybe that’s why the departure seems natural, why I neither fear an abyss of purposeless days ahead nor itch to begin checking off items on some bucket list. As a class session has ended or a semester wrapped up, I’ve hurried to return to the pen and the lamp, to the books still open on the desk or armchair, to the draft of that poem or essay I was scribbling—my teaching day but a necessary, if on the whole pleasant, interruption in my real life, that private one of the mind that all of us Miss Foleys hold dear.
James Scruton is an associate Academic Dean and a professor of English who is speeding toward retirement at the conclusion of this school year. He has published poetry, essays, and reviews for forty years.
