The Wanderer

I am not ignoring the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. I thought I might try. But no. I am crying over every remembrance. Growling over exploitation. Railing at injustices. Wishing for better in this world. I am almost media saturated. Almost ready to turn off the feeds and contemplate in silence. I am thinking right now, mostly about going back into the classroom after 9/11. 

That was my favorite classroom. In an old building, a half-flight down from ground-level, two walls were lined with multi-paned windows that we could crank open to let in a cross breeze. When we opened the windows, the trees and grass and silent pathways made us feel like we were outside. I couldn’t stand up on the dais to lead a lecture that day. I sat in a desk with a full class. Only one or two people were absent. One of the absent women knew someone missing in the World Trade Center rubble. I ached for her. She returned to class only sporadically for the rest of the semester. Brittle and emotional, she crumbled with the passing weeks. Eventually she withdrew and I don’t know any more of her story. 

But that came later.

On that first morning, a few days after the attacks, I had a hard time leaving the original Micro-Sonar (he was fifteen months old). In the classroom, everyone was muted. I let anyone talk who wished to talk. Without judgement. We listened. When silence had settled on us for some time, I looked around and asked what we should do next. One student—he favored very fancy pens, I recall—suggested that he needed a break. He needed to talk about something else, anything else for a little while. A wave of agreement went around the room.

I climbed back on the platform, with the green chalkboard, and stood behind the podium, opening my copy of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1. The words freed us that day, for a few minutes. I don’t remember what we were reading. That early in the semester of a Brit Lit survey, we might still have been studying Anglo-Saxon poems. 

…The wise warrior must consider how ghostly it will be when all the wealth of this world stands waste, just as now here and there through this middle-earth wind-blown walls stand covered with frost-fall, storm-beaten dwellings. Wine-halls totter, the lord lies bereft of joy, all the company has fallen, bold men beside the wall. War took away some, bore them forth on their way; a bird carried one away over the deep sea; a wolf shared one with Death; another a man sad of face hid in an earth-pit….

From the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Wanderer”