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December 28, 2006
Another lesson from my teacher: "We should go over and say hello," Melissa says.
I am hesitant. We are sitting in a restaurant and moments earlier we had seen him enter a restaurant across Main Street in Melrose. He was hunched over a walker and, physically, a shell of the man I remember as my U.S. History teacher in my junior year of high school. I know it may be the last time I see him and I am not good with good byes.
He has been ill for quite some time. Two years ago and just before he died my father and a friend had gone to visit Freeman Frank. "He didn't look good, but he was alert," my father had said.
My father died less than two weeks after that visit.
He taught U.S. History. Kids didn't mess around in his class. If you messed around you were bound to miss something interesting. He taught in a narrative style that brought U.S. History alive. He didn't teach a series of dates and names but our shared experience and the emotions of the people who lived through the times we were learning about.
He had a passion for books, reading long passages from Steinbeck to illustrate the unit on the Great Depression. Seeing him draw emotions from the printed page is more than a small part of why I wanted to become a writer. Knowing that words could make people passionate is a big perk of this profession, but I had never really seen -- had never really felt -- that passion until I heard Mr. Frank read from Grapes of Wrath.
I have been thinking about Mr. Frank lately. Next month I start my own teaching career with two classes of advanced English composition at Newbury College. If I am a tenth of the teacher that Mr. Frank is, I will consider myself successful.
We finish our lunch, pay our bill and Melissa leads me across the street. She knows him and we find him seated in the back of the restaurant with a group of eight or nine other men. He is engaged in a conversation and Melissa politely interrupts him to reintroduce herself. She starts to reintroduce me but he knows who I am.
"You look just like your father," he says. I hear that often.
Did I say he was a shell of the man I remember? I was wrong. He is alert and his eyes dance with the genuine happiness I remember, a genuine happiness that emits from people who genuinely like engaging with other people. He remembers that I was the youngest in my family "by a long shot" and tells Melissa about the day I was born. My oldest sister was on his debate team and she came in on that Saturday in March of 1973 to announce she had a new baby brother.
"And the next thing I know that baby brother is sitting in my classroom in front of me," Mr. Frank says.
He talks about my father's visit and how much it had meant to him. He tells me that my father was a good man but knows that I do not need to be told that. Before that day two years ago he had only known my dad in passing, as a man dropping kids off to school functions and offering polite hellos. I suspect in September 2004 they talked for hours because like my dad, Mr. Frank is a gifted conversationalist. The kind of person who talks and listens, the kind of person people remember talking to.
"The thing that impressed me most about your father is that he knew everything about everything," Mr. Frank says and I smile. Anyone who ever met my dad and spent more than a few minutes talking with him could say the same thing.
Waiters are delivering food to the table full of men and need to get by us. We say a polite but hurried good bye and shuffle backwards away from the table. It's just as well: I couldn't have lasted much longer than that. A routine day off had turned into something bigger, something I hadn't expected. I am overcome with emotion. I am happy and sad, elated and devastated all at once.
I am so proud of my dad that on that day, even with his own life thrown into uncertainty by an awful disease, he went to see a friend and was his typical self -- optimistic and more interested in someone else's well being than his own. I am elated that a teacher I had 16 years ago, a teacher who was one of the ones who made a huge difference in my life, is still a story teller and still sharp.
On the sidewalk in front of the restaurant I well up. This was not something I expected or wanted. But this is not an experience or day I would trade for anything in the world.Labels: education, life
Posted at 11:46 PM
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