Essayist Redeemed

Let's play off that old Christ story, it never gets old.

So I wrote this essay on my schooling and contrasted it to the experience of Joyce Carol Oates' time in a one room school house in Niagra County, New York. I studied Ms. Oates essay to such an extent that I could sit at a bar, blasted on a gallon of beer or a fifth of Woodford Reserve, and still tell all about it in complete detail. I would also see Ms. Oates everywhere in the bar. Come to think of it, I did see her everywhere. On every corner and every coffee shop was a thin girl with big glasses and wiry black hair; prophets of things to come.

I write. I stall. I agonize. Then I threaten to delete it all. I am angry. Angry and possessed of madness, enough to drive me squealing off the mental precipice. It's two in the morning when I print the final version. The professor, with a doctorate, mind you, with flawless grammar, might I add, has my first draft. I call it a rambling shambles and I cannot live with it. "I'm going to get roasted in that class," I tell Wifey-Do.

I'm dead in my work, and having relived my twelve years in the public school system over the past few days was a purgatory which I would rather not descend into again.

Friday comes around, if only this would pass from my hands. But I have resolved to walk freely into this fate, whatever it brings. This is learning, and for me it often comes with pain.

In the classroom I'm always anxious, as if confined in a vault. The professor approaches, and I fear my paper is of such poor condition as to warrant an immediate talking to.

"Your essay is outstanding. I would like to read it to the class."
She is not bearing a dead work, wounded in it's errors with red ink; she brings good news. I thank her and for the next half hour I'm holding myself, propping up a calm composure. I'm a strange flavor of the 'emo' man. I cry at weddings, war movies, and if I say anything, I will include readings of my personal essay. It's just that I was so convinced I didn't have the brains and understanding to pull it off in any way. I've had to come from so far behind.

At the end of class I rose from my seat with a plan and a solid understanding of the next assignment. This week my quest for literacy will take me into the mind of a small monk, a master of the mindful state: the weasel. But that day I took time to clear my mind and mounted one of my bicycles to ascended the hills of Portland.