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I'm standing in front of a college composition class for my friend, Suzanne. The faces looking back at me are empty. These people do not want to be here. English is not their favorite subject. Words do not flow like blood after the spleen eats the platelets. Words clot.
I'm tap-dancing (not literally), trying to weave a spell. I tell them words can save them and writing will give their minds wings.
I try to be funny. I read a boy's description of a girl's hair. It's like honey, he says. It smells like honey. "He's standing too close," I tell the students. They laugh obediently.
I read from John Muir's journal, written one spring morning in 1868, when he first saw the great central valley of California: "Like a lake of sunshine, a vast golden flower-bed, so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light, but composed of it."
Their eyes do not light.
I ask how many times they've had an experience, a meal, a moment, and said to themselves: I will never forget this. And then forgot - not just the details, but the incident itself - because that's what we do. From our entire childhoods, most of us recall only six or eight incidents. The rest has vanished. One way to remember, I say, is to write. Reading about a trip is like taking it a second time.
They stare back at me. We are studying observation and description. I have them write about clouds and describe their own hands. Concrete detail, I say. Look at the whole and, like a painter, choose what to include and what to omit.
Class is over. Everyone flees except for one young man in the front row. Frizzy hair, bright eyes. I am grateful to him. He has laughed at my jokes.
"Would you like to hear how I described you?"
I can't think how to say no.
He reads: "She is clothed, not in light, but in lavender, and I can see from the budlike shapes among the folds of her dress that she does not wear a bra."
My mouth opens and closes. A daughter told me the same thing last summer: Mother, people don't know where to look. I'll have to buy one of the strangling, constricting things.
I take a breath. "Well," I say, face red, ears burning, "aren't you observant?"
He grins with pleasure and hands me my own copy.
I sit at the desk after he's gone, blood retreating from my face and ears until I'm bled out. I gather my things and creep out, books clutched in front of my chest. |
