el peregringo

A few minutes before 9 o’clock that Tuesday I was in a cab headed cross town on 14th Street. I was running late for a meeting in a mid-town hotel that was to start at 9. The stretch of 14th Street between 5th and 7th Avenues has quite a few electronics stores and like many such stores, there were banks of televisions facing the street.

When I’m late, I can feel my blood pressure rise, and I begin to sweat. I don’t like being late. I’ve had to learn to use breathing techniques to try to control my anxiety, and that day in addition to that, I was watching the store fronts and trying to take my mind off the fact that I was going to miss the start of my meeting.

It was curious. Virtually all of the screens were showing the same movie–some action/adventure flick that was obviously a remake of Towering Inferno. Except that more than one store seemed to showing the same movie…

We reached the intersection of 7th Avenue and 14th Street and all traffic came to a dead stop. I glanced down 7th and the movie turned out to be live action. North tower was spewing tons of smoke. I yelled at the driver to turn on the radio, and I, like hundreds of others around stepped out of their cars and cabs and stood staring down at the towers. Just after 9 am, South Tower was hit from the southern side and the north side of it exploded as we watched. The radio was still suggesting that it had been a small private plane that had hit north tower–all of us at the intersection of 7th at 14th knew differently.

For three days I stayed in a mid-town hotel overlooking Times Square, waiting for a way to get out of the city and back to Ana and Vermont. At 8am the next morning, Times Square, normally a sea of yellow cabs and 10s of thousands of people walking was virtually empty. Twenty four hours after the attacks, pieces of office paper still rained down from the skies; the sidewalks were gritty with ash. It was the calm after the apocalypse, and nothing would ever be the same again.

Todd (not his real name) was a pain in the ass in my class for two years. He was one of those kids who knew everything already, had all the answers, and couldn’t be bothered to try to see things any other way. Of course his experience was somewhat local, but that didn’t slow the universal pronouncements. He had a tendency to bully others who disagreed with him–in class or out, but he was right after all, so it didn’t really matter. He was gonna get out of town just as soon as he graduated, join an elite military force, and set the world straight. Except for one thing, I might have dreaded teaching any class he was in.

Todd was me in many respects. Every day I’d see him and in him see so much of what I once was: a reasonably bright kid from a small conservative town who knew that that which he knew as “normal” was by definition “right.” Anything that was different from that “norm” was “queer” (though now, my students say “gay”).

On several occasions I tried talking to Todd. I know that I hated “advice” when I was a young guy–I knew better after all–so Todd responded pretty much as I would have. He essentially rejected everything, but I still had to try. Instead of pushing advice, I basically made a few predictions for his future. That was pretty straightforward–just like reading my subtly modified autobiography to him. He didn’t seem to pay attention, but then neither did I when I was in a similar position.

Life, as it has a way of doing, stepped in both of our cases, and made it pretty clear that that certainty we held dear, was nothing but an illusion, and maybe even nothing more than a defense mechanism. In my case, I got on a plane to Central America to work as an archeologist. I learned directly what it was like to be the odd one living with a new “norm.” In Todd’s case, he blew out his knee and suddenly an elite military force was no longer an option.

Todd came to see me today now that I am back teaching. He’s been through some rough times with substance abuse, depression and thoughts of suicide. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Turns out he watched a man die–someone he tried to save but couldn’t. He came to tell me that when he took a couple of weeks off from work after the incident, he got in his car and drove with no destination in mind. He had a few bucks in the bank and found himself in the southwest. As he told me the story, he was lying on the hood of his car, watching the sun rise in New Mexico, and some of the things I had told him ran through his mind. Things that had happened to him since high school, mistakes he now realized he had made, and damn it, it all seemed to line up pretty closely with some of my predictions. He watched the sun rise, got back in his car, and drove home to Vermont and came to see me.

These moments in time with students and former students are the fuel which gets me out of bed at 5 am every day to prepare and review lessons. I earn 1/3 of what I used to make in the tech world, but today, Todd just made me the richest man in Vermont.