TGI English class

I am happy to write a tidbit about a nice and fine occurrence, as most of my stuff is dark, tar-like painful good medicine that the New York Times will never print, though I’ve tried. Two nights ago, on a lark I emailed my 10^th grade English teacher, Don Killgallon. Weeks or months before that, googling for haunting memories, I had seen his name attached to some very specialized books, so I knew he was still around and proliferous. The next morning, there was his reply! 10^th grade was fifty-two years ago. And yet presto – his gracious hello!

Because of my constitution and basic dismality, one beer will give me (only) a 15- to 20-minute lovely buzz; two beers, the same then I’ll feel sick. This nostalgic yet here-and-now rendezvous was five 12-packs of golden high!

My teacher and his wife have created an enduring name for themselves with a series of books for high school and younger students: a fun and non-stodgy way to learn good writing by focusing on the single sentence. If I weren’t feeling so warm over all this, I’d be jealous! Really – good feelings can replace the grumbly ones (but not at the really deepest level, otherwise I wouldn’t have a job!). My benefit is palpable. Our corre­spon­dence has connected my past to my current self in a private way that is redeeming, like the soldier’s moment at the end of Salinger’s story, “For Esmé – With Love and Squalor.”

It was a long time before X could set the note aside, let alone lift Esmé’s father’s wristwatch out of the box. When he did finally lift it out, he saw that its crystal had been broken in transit. He wondered if the watch was otherwise undamaged, but he hadn’t the courage to wind it and find out. He just sat with it in his hand for another long period. Then, suddenly, almost ecstatically, he felt sleepy.

You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac- with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.

How did Salinger know this feeling, pregnant with time, where a part-ruined American soldier is healed in all ways that count by a precocious girl in a tearoom?* (You must read the story.)

Dysthymia (see my earlier post with that title) tends to make one a-historical and homeless, wandering insular throughout life. Owing to Mr. K, I feel the distant vibes of a home.

And it doesn’t hurt that we have appreciated each other’s work. In Mr. K’s class, I could ignore all my developmental regressive injuries – my bad neurosis – and crow my good one, a desire to write saucy and brilliant stuff. This man, God knows why, did not disenchant or dethrone me. My stilted and not brilliant assignments were appreciated by him, even lauded over the class occasionally. Look: Therapy can have the perverse effect of doing good by destroying ties to a toxic parent. We become undermined and then almost necessarily stronger. But won’t we then need some replacement for that loss of roots? The therapist, if he’s got a clue, wants to be that replacement. But really, how much of that can he accomplish, can be accepted by the “purged” client? And can his partner fill that role? I am doubting it.

Maybe what the client needs is a voice from the past, that stands alongside of where the parent should have been. Maybe that redeems the past, which may have been terrible, revisits the grief and defeats it with the good. Positively, that’s what my encounter with my teacher has done for me. I don’t think therapy can do that.

Thank you, Don.

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* Something like this:

“Conway went to the balcony and gazed at the dazzling plume of Karakal; the moon was riding high in a waveless ocean. It came to him that a dream had dissolved, like all too lovely things, at the first touch of reality; that the whole world’s future, weighed in the balance against youth and love, would be light as air. And he knew, too, that his mind dwelt in a world of its own, Shangri-La in microcosm, and that this world also was in peril.” My emphasis. James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, at Project Gutenberg Australia, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500141h.html.