I have this desk that I am tinkering with. I think it’s oak, but it is old and dry, very brittle. It was Brad’s desk, but it kept falling apart on him and I took it home after we moved him a few months back. It was Cole’s at one point. Cole is a friend and instructor from TSU. When I teach British Literature I am teaching everything Cole taught me; his oxford education through the filter of my own midwestern one.

I took his British Lit class with a very bright girlfriend of mine: Melinda. Cole used to call us “the holy palmers” because neither of us could tolerate those uncomfortable silences when a mass of people tries to decide whether a difficult question was rhetorical or not. I got a B on an exam in that class that I am still pissed about, not at Cole but Melinda. She picked a fight with me at Country Kitchen the night before the exam such that I was fixing the relationship instead of reading one of the books we were to be tested over.

Eventually that relationship got as brittle as this desk, the legs gave out. She graduated a year before I could and wanted us to get married. When I said I wasn’t ready and had to finish school, she went to Japan to teach on the JET program for a year. We saw other people, angry letters, you know that score. She’s a married librarian now, living in Seattle, M.A. from Clemson, ten years since we’ve talked. I’d hazard that she knows where I am too. We still share some people.

Anyway, several years later in life my office was down the hall from Cole’s. It’s odd the way things turn like that and fold back in on themselves. Now that I think about it, I became an English major in part because of an early office mate of Cole’s, Nancy. Nancy Lovelace was my mythology teacher. She was one of very few instructors who were able to challenge me. I told her, after our first test, that the exam was mentally like popping the clutch in second gear on a cold engine. After that analogy she reappraised me, and praised me when I started to work at a higher level.

Nancy raised basset hounds and would freely admit that she thought that dogs were better than people. She was one of the Kennedy set, the idealists who joined that first wave of Peace Corps volunteers. I do well and I do poorly with idealists. They inspire me, but they can also clearly see the failures of my heart, my compromises. Most teachers want you to do your homework. Idealists want you to become something. Bob is still calling this phase of my life “the chrysalis period”. That’s a good question kids, will the pupa of this pupil ever pop?

To continue the insect imagery, the Cole’s desk is now on its back with legs pointed to the sky as I wait for all the wood glue with bracing to dry. It was designed to come apart for easy moves. When I get done with it, it will take a fire to move joist from joint; or at least a very swift kick. Lots of things could use swift kicks, couldn’t they? Myself included.