Changing the river's course

In talking to friends and family members, I've found that a common experience we have is in there being a small number of people who have radically altered our lives in a positive direction.  Sometimes a single gesture, smile, or well-placed word can shift our pathway profoundly, and the sad truth of it is that we seldom ever get around to telling those people how much they have changed us.

This comes up because a few days ago I found out that my high school French teacher, Shirley Taylor, died last summer.  I remember Mrs. Taylor well -- I had her class for four years running -- and she stands out in my memory as everything a teacher should be.  Firm but not harsh; high standards, and with a determination that every student can meet them; and a subtle and wry sense of humor.  But the one thing she did that I remember best is something she probably didn't even recall herself afterwards.

I was a fairly good French student but lackadaisical in most other classes, content to get by on a minimum of work, rarely pushing myself to do any better than I had to in order to stay out of trouble when I brought my report card home.  But Mrs. Taylor saw in me an ability to learn languages, and pushed me more than once to spend a year in France after I graduated.  I'd excel, she said, and I'd come back completely fluent.  It surprised me that she singled me out; like I said, I was no great shakes as a student.  The funny part of it all in retrospect is that I didn't take her advice about spending a year in France.  I didn't travel until much later -- to Mrs. Taylor's intense disappointment -- but when I first went to a non-English speaking country, years afterwards, I still remembered Mrs. Taylor's confidence in me.

"You're a natural," I recalled her saying.  "Someone like you needs to see the world."

I haven't stopped traveling since.

My French teacher, Mrs. Shirley Taylor (1936-2015)

The strangest thing about those moments is that we ourselves sometimes don't recognize them as the earthquakes they are while they're happening.  My entire life jumped to a different set of tracks when my high school counselor, Mr. Grace, grabbed my arm as I was walking down the hall in my senior year, and told me I needed to take a scholarship test that was being offered at the University of Louisiana.  I wasn't planning on going to college -- what I really wanted to do was to join the Park Service and move to Arizona -- but he said, and I quote, "You're taking that test if I have to go to your house on Saturday and drag your lazy ass out of bed."

So I did.  And I was one of the scholarship winners.  Automatic admission and full tuition to the University of Louisiana.  He turned my life a different way by that one action -- who knows where, or who, I would be now if it hadn't been for that one thing?

I remember with great fondness three other teachers who shaped my world -- Ms. Jane Miller, my high school biology teacher, whose passion for her subject and deep enthusiasm were absolutely contagious, and whose style I still model in my own classroom after nearly thirty years of being a teacher myself.  Dr. Harvey Pousson, my college calculus teacher, whose gentle, soft-spoken wit and brilliant way of explaining abstruse concepts made calculus one of my favorite subjects (and how many people do you hear that from?).  Ms. Beverly Authement, my high school creative writing teacher -- who I can say, without hesitation, turned me into the writer of fiction I am today, and without whose cheerful encouragement I would never have had the confidence to tell stories to the world.  (And who is, by the way, still a teacher today!)

I've been able to thank a few of these and other folks who have sculpted my life's path, and who have forever enriched my world.  Even though they may think they're forgotten -- that what they did was insignificant -- they remain the people whose influence has lasted.  And it makes me more determined not only to give gratitude to the ones whose lives so inspired my own, but to have more awareness myself about what I say and do.  Will anyone look back, forty years from now, and remember me as one of the pivotal connections in their lives?  And, most importantly, will that memory be a positive one?

I may never know the answer to that -- and that's okay.  Maybe the force that diverts the river doesn't recognize the effect it has, then or perhaps ever.  But it does highlight something I've known for a while: that we all need to be a great deal more cognizant of how we interact with the people around us, because we may be having a much larger effect than we will ever realize.

A few thoughts about loss

I lost a good friend two days ago to one of those lightning-fast, unpredictable deaths that leave us all reeling, wondering how someone so vital, so apparently healthy, could suddenly be gone.  Diana, a 47-year-old history teacher at my school, was driving home on the last day of school, and apparently felt ill and pulled her car over to the side of the road.  She was later found there, unconscious.  She had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage from which she died eight days later.

I am not a person who forms friendships easily, something about myself I don't like and don't completely understand, but Diana was someone who reached out to me pretty much from the moment she was hired, about twelve years ago.  I've taught two AP classes (biology and environmental science) for more years than I will willingly admit, and when Diana was assigned to teach AP World History, she actively solicited advice from her colleagues who had more experience than she did in these college-level curricula.  This began a friendship that expanded into a shared interest in human ecology (and the writing of Jared Diamond), medieval European history, music, and fiction.  About a month ago, she read one of my novels, and liked it so much she was pushing me to write a sequel (which I have actually begun to work on); and my fiction inspired her to try her hand at writing.  The last week of school she sent me the first ten pages of a historical novel, which was compelling and well-written, and said she was going to work on it more this summer.

The best-laid plans of mice and men, Robert Burns famously said, gang aft agley.  Or as Thomas à Kempis put it, "Man proposes, God disposes" -- an aphorism I agree with in principle, if not in literal detail.  We plan our lives far in advance -- taking an Alaskan cruise in summer of 2014, going to China after we retire, and so on.  If anyone asked, we'd say that of course we know that it might not happen; any number of circumstances, up to and including death, could intervene.  But we have to keep planning, somehow, even in that knowledge.  Funny creatures, humans.

When I posted on Facebook that Diana had fallen grievously ill, and then that she had died, this elicited an outpouring of sympathy that was truly amazing.  I was the recipient of well-wishes and words of comfort from hundreds of people.  All of this has left me pondering how I can wrap my mind around the concept of death and loss.  Is there a way to fit this into the context of the understandable?

Of course, being an atheist and a rationalist, I don't have recourse to the supernaturalist claim that even tragic events like this one somehow fit into God's plan for the world.  That comfort is beyond my reach, and (to my mind) never sounded like much more than an equivocation to me in any case.  You'll hear the devout say that sure, some good, kind, honest people die young, and some unkind, greedy, cruel people live long, prosperous lives, but still it is all part of the divine purpose.  To me, this says no more, really, than "we don't know why but would like to think there's a reason, because it sure seems like a crappy outcome to us."  On the other hand, the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum -- that unexpected deaths just happen, and mean no more than a bug hitting a windshield -- seems so bleak as to leave me wondering, "Why bother at all?"

After a couple of days of mulling the whole thing over, I think I've finally realized that what matters is how we change the world.  I'm not talking about big changes, necessarily; people like Wangari Maathai, a hero of mine who died last year, are sadly few (and if you don't know who this amazing woman is, go here and prepare to be awed by what one dedicated human being can accomplish).  What I'm talking about is the personal legacy of friendships that you leave.  Who have you taught, learned from, connected with, treated with kindness?  Who have you cared for or received care from?  Whose life have you, through your attention, made a little more beautiful, a little less painful?

I don't, honestly, have the need to have it all make sense.  My belief is that in the common definition of the word, it doesn't make sense.  Death comes for us all eventually, an idea I don't find frightening so much as incomprehensible.  Maybe we're not built to think long about the big existential questions; what matters most is the here and now, how we can live our lives and care for the ones around us.  The lesson I took from Diana's death is to make every day count, because you never know how many you have left.  Hug your children, your significant other, your family members, your pets -- hell, hug total strangers if you want to, because this world has too damn much pain and uncertainty and not nearly enough love and comfort.  Take care of yourselves and the people in your life.  Be kind to each other, even little kindnesses like letting someone go ahead of you in the checkout line at the grocery store.  And in the end, if your life can end with people getting together -- as I did the evening after I learned of Diana's death -- and holding up a glass of their favorite libations, and saying a few words of thanks for how you made their world a better place, you will have done what you could.