Cambridge XXII

July 9, 2010

Complicated, vivid dream before waking. I was pretty much who I am, except living in an elaborate circus tent in Akron. School officials came to me and asked if I would mentor a kid who was promising and troubled. I said I would. They sent two boys. When they arrived it was winter and snow was blowing, but very quickly it was spring. The boys had an aptitude for theater–so advanced that I wondered that the school had mis-diagnosed it so egregiously as behavioral problems. When I’d worked with the boys for a while, we went back to Hyre Junior High to have a look at the theater program there. It was, at best, ad hoc when I was a student, but it had turned into a gigantic undertaking with several full time and very self-delighted faculty. I perceived at once that the boys had not been underachievers, but had run afoul of their teachers by being too advanced and therefore insulting to their vanity. At the very end, one of the boys was sharing a new candy with me, that you extruded from the barrel of a toy gun. At first taste I was delighted, for it was the candy lipstick we knew so well in those vanished days.

I think this dream was, impurely and at some remove, about Steve, who claimed I had reawakened a dream for him, the dream of being a writer. He has a mystical novel he thinks he can finish by September. He gave me a poem he’d written, and in large it isn’t bad at all. I am so grateful for this relationship. It is a steel nail holding together an experience which otherwise is airy indeed.

The waitress in the Café Rouge is, in the daytime, a painter of horses. She had been to Carbondale, where there is an artist she admires.

Exams have been taken, and the students prepare for the next leg of their journey, corporate removal to London. We go out tonight and celebrate as a group– something, whatever each of them has to celebrate. My lap top is rendered almost unusable by incessant ACTIVE UPDATE reminders from AOL. They had been there before, but after these many days they become an extended and unquenchable dread. I suppose I could accept the update, but my suspicion is that warning of the next one would appear within the instant. I hate them with the inner fiber of my being.

Valedictories? I didn’t teach as well as I ought, but probably about as well as they could stand. I didn’t go to Evensong as often as I thought I would, but JK had carved that territory out and I did not trespass. I got much more from Cambridge than I had before, and incorporated the experience fully into my imaginative life, which I did not do ten years ago. Forty years ago made I peace with at last. Steve was a gift. London was a gift. The poets play was a gift. Some of the students were gifts, but their impulse from the first was to build a clear divide between us and them, which was probably well. I am more exhausted than likely even I understand. I will probably be inert in Dublin.

Steve sends a poem in response to last night’s show. Transparency is not its signal characteristic, so it gives me a chance to delve and interpret. But he was glad to be there. He yearns for something other than the company he keeps. I know suddenly why I am so–I thought unaccountably-- sad. Leaving him. Anyone adept at the intricacies of love would look at me and shake his head.

Someone is playing the piano in the little pavilion in the garden.