A Man of Letters
The first time I had a classroom of my own was in 1990. It had no walls. Let me tell you how that happened.
I had been living in Los Angeles for a year or so, driving the serpentine freeways through the desert, breathing in the sagebrush and thunderbird air, and on weekends hiking in the dry, glassy Sierras. I was a couple of years out of college and didn't know what the heck to do with my life. I was making ends meet by working odd jobs, seeing what the world looked like from California, and I was considering teaching English to Armenian immigrants. But then in June, the way you can when you're 23, I drove back East to work at the Bread Loaf School of English, a summer graduate program high in the mountains of Vermont. And something odd happened.
I wasn't a student then. I had been hired to run the bookstore and answer phones at the front desk. But I spent every spare moment outside because I was in awe of that temperate state. The rain amazed me, as did the trees mantling the dark mountains, as did the proliferation—riot, really—of grass, flowers, meadows, sedges, creeks, bogs, ferns, streams. For fun, I floated at night in a mountain pond and listened to the bullfrogs, "their blunt heads farting" (to borrow from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney). The irony was that I had returned to a place I knew well and was noticing it, in many ways,...
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