Sun & Snow

Yesterday afternoon, about 3:45, when I walked out of the health club (fully whupped, as usual), the sun was shining brightly--and it was snowing.

That seemed unfair.

But so what? I remember my mother telling me, over and over and over again (when I was an inattentive adolescent), that life isn't fair. It just is. At fifteen, I didn't find that particularly useful. And so I filed it away with all sorts of other parental sayings (paternal and maternal) that now, of course, I'd give the world to remember. It took me a long time to value what my parents were saying to me. For far too long I was ... a jerk.

I was also--via that cliche--a "late bloomer." I sort of dawdled my way through secondary school, caring about pretty much everything except classes. Sports, friends, girls, school plays--all of this was far more important to me than Latin and American history and indirect objects.

I wasn't a terrible student, mind you, just a lazy one. I did enough to "get by" throughout junior high and high school, and the habit lingered with me even into some college classes. Will you think less of me if I told you I got a D in Romantic poetry? (My junior year--I attended only sporadically, turned my term paper in a week late, etc.) I probably should have failed. But my professor's office was near my dad's at Hiram College, so maybe that earned me ... something?

But in college I also felt some things begin to return--my early boyhood fondness for reading, my enjoyment of writing, my desire to know things. By the time I graduated (1966), I was pretty much back on the highway, accelerating slowly, realizing I'd missed a lot--and that a lot of traffic had passed me ...

As most of you know, I became a teacher in the fall of 1966. Seventh graders. Aurora Middle School. Aurora, Ohio--only about eleven miles from Hiram, where I'd lived since 1956 when we moved there from Enid, Oklahoma. I thought it would be a temporary thing--something to do to feed and clothe and house me until I found something else to do.

I never really did. And I'm glad.

I ended up teaching in that middle school for nearly thirty years (loving it beyond description). But then one day I looked up, and it was over.

I probably could have stayed longer, but Ohio was going standardized-test-crazy, and I watched helplessly and hopelessly my final few years as tests changed everything. I've shared this little exchange before, I know, but here it is again--a reminder of what had happened:

DYER (waxing eloquent about Shakespeare or something)
STUDENT (raising hand--I call on him): Is this going to be on the proficiency test?
DYER: Definitely not.
STUDENT (puzzled): Then why are you talking about it?

And that was that. I retired in January 1997, the first moment I was eligible. I was 52 years old.  (In 2001 I returned to the classroom at nearby Western Reserve Academy and retired, again, in the spring of 2011 when my prostate cancer took a dark turn.)

Meanwhile--all those years from 1966 to 2011 (and beyond)--I was a voracious reader. I got graduate degrees. Published some books. Had a ball. The sun was always shining ... well, mostly.

But then, gradually, the snow arrived. Illness, deaths, losses of all sorts.

And so yesterday, exiting the health club, when I saw the sun, the snow, I felt something swelling in my eyes. And I hurried to the car where I could let it all out.