If you turned in a paper with writing on it, you were guaranteed a hook from Jake Epping of the LHS English Department, and if the writing was organized into actual paragraphs, you got at least a B-minus. The grading process hardly figures into it, or at least it didn’t for me I passed everybody, because I never had an adult student who did less than try his or her ass off. The teachers among you who have picked up an extra three or four thousand a year by taking on a class of adults studying for their General Equivalency Diploma will know what a dispiriting job reading such themes can be. Who can know when life hangs in the balance, or why? The subject I’d assigned was “The Day That Changed My Life.” Most of the responses were heartfelt but awful: sentimental tales of a kindly aunt who’d taken in a pregnant teenager, an Army buddy who had demonstrated the true meaning of bravery, a chance meeting with a celebrity (Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, I think it was, but maybe it was Karl Malden). Down the hall I could hear the thud of basketballs, the blare of the timeout horn, and the shouts of the crowd as the sports-beasts fought: Lisbon Greyhounds versus Jay Tigers. I was sitting alone in the teachers’ room at Lisbon High School, working my way through 2 King_112263_i-852_PTR.indd 2 8/30/11 9:52 AM 11/ 2 2/63 a stack of themes that my Adult English class had written. Other than when I got the news about Mom, I can only remember one other time when I cried as an adult, and that was when I read the story of the janitor’s father. But blocked? Unable to feel my feelings? No, I have never been those things. So maybe the not-crying-easily thing is genetic. He was the strong silent type, and for the most part, my mother was the same. I never saw my dad cry at all, now that I think about it at his most emotional, he might fetch a heavy sigh or grunt out a few reluctant chuckles-no breast-beating or belly-laughs for William Epping. I could have told her about them later, but I didn’t see the point, partly because she would have thought I was pity-fishing (that’s not an AA term, but maybe it should be), and partly because I don’t think the ability to bust out bawling pretty much on cue should be a requirement for successful marriage. I went into our little laundry room and took a dirty sheet out of the basket and cried into that. “Sometimes it’s very sudden, and doctors tend to see that as a blessing.” Christy wasn’t there-she had to stay late at school that day and meet with a mother who had questions about her son’s last report card-but I cried, all right. “I’m sorry, but there was no chance,” he said. And I cried when Mom’s doctor called me and told me what had happened that day on the beach. Partly because it was my first experience of death mostly because it had been my responsibility to make sure he was safely penned up in our backyard. I didn’t cry when we buried him, although my dad told me nobody would think less of me if I did, but I cried when she told me. She told me my collie, Rags, had been struck and killed by a truck that hadn’t even bothered to stop. One day when I was nine, my mother met me at the door when I came home from school. I just lay down on the bed that now belonged to me alone, and put my arm over my eyes, and mourned. The house where no baby had come, or now ever would. I didn’t cry when I went back inside the little house with the great big mortgage, either. “Boy meets girl on the AA campus”-that’s another saying they have in those meetings. “Even when you told me I had to go to rehab or you were leaving.” This conversation happened about six weeks before she packed her things, drove them across town, and moved in with Mel Thompson. “I have never seen you shed tears,” she said, speaking in the flat tones people use when they are expressing the absolute final dealbreaker in a relationship. I was “unable to feel my feelings,” in AA-speak. But then, when I didn’t cry at my own parents’ funerals-they died just two years apart, Dad of stomach cancer and Mom of a thunderclap heart attack while walking on a Florida beach-she began to understand the nonexistent gradient thing. Christy said she supposed she could forgive me not crying at her father’s funeral I had only known him for six years and couldn’t understand what a wonderful, giving man he had been (a Mustang convertible as a high school graduation present, for instance). My ex-wife said that my “nonexistent emotional gradient” was the main reason she was leaving me (as if the guy she met in her AA meetings was beside the point).
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