Editors note: The relationship between a favorite teacher and a student is a quirky and mercurial one -- a love affair of the mind that usually evaporates or rots if it transgresses the boundary into physical love but one that nevertheless survives by the same pangs of feeling, the same unspoken rules of judgment, the same likelihood that the relationship will pass and dissolve with time, leaving only a collection of memories.

The stories here explore this very common but commonly unsung bond from the view of the students, the ones who sat in judgment, awe and silence and allowed themselves to be transformed by teachers who could never know just how their lessons would outlive their classrooms.

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Remembrance of things present
Mr. Sherman taught us to tell time long before we knew its meaning.

BY CAROL LLOYD
In a page from my senior yearbook there is an entry next to a bushy-bearded, bespectacled young man with a toothy grin and a book in his hand.

Carol,

2:28 p.m. 6/6/81

What I love about this moment is that we're still going -- I've read your card; it's moved and exhilarated me more than anything else this day and we can talk, and we will, and I love you too. Skip.

It sounds bad, I know.

Nowadays a letter like this written by a teacher to a student might provide grounds for misconduct investigations or perhaps even dismissal. "We're still going"? "I love you too"? But in my hometown in the hills of central California -- where the halcyon days of the '70s lived on far past the designated decade amid tall gold grasses and under hazy blue skies -- intense bonds between teachers and students were almost a part of the curriculum.

Skip Sherman, my English teacher of four years, was not engaging in anything untoward, just responding to my "card." I can't remember writing that missive, but I cringe to imagine what lavish, demanding invocations of feeling I must have constructed to get him to write back. I was an excitable young woman. I felt things strongly and expressed those feelings in free verse. My style -- profoundly influenced by Stevie Wonder's "Love's in Need of Love Today" -- consisted of extended metaphors that compared celestial bodies (universe, galaxy, comet, star, moon, cloud) to my inner life (soul, spirit, self, ego, psyche, heart) and reached a single inevitable conclusion: love -- cosmic, universal, agape -- was the answer.

When I loved a person in those days, I told them so. And told them so. Always in writing, usually in a journal entry in my own or their journal, a birthday card or, of course, a yearbook entry. Most people eventually obliged me and responded in kind. Now reading this entry, I surmise that I had been working on my teacher for some time and finally, as I was graduating and he was returning to graduate school, he capitulated to my language of excess.

It was all his fault. He created a cult, not of his personality, but of the tenderness and toughness of the written word.

What began with a 15-week assignment -- to keep a daily diary -- gradually grew into an epidemic of written communication. Writing became the primary social activity of student life at our school. We composed poems, letters and manifestos, chronicling religious yearnings and sexual escapades. Passionate, platonic friendships grew out of compulsive journaling -- once a male friend and I wrote to each other twice daily for a period of months. There was even a secret society with its own holiday (March 5, Crimson Day) based on journal rituals: making them, giving them and filling them.

Eighteen years later I sit scrawling in a notebook, at the back of a conference room at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Since we last met, Skip Sherman has become an English professor, specializing in the evolution of the diary. I'm feeling that familiar nausea of high school -- comparable in my adult experience only to hallucinogens -- when colors are just a little too bright, feelings just a little too acute. Like I did then, I still cling to whatever comfort and clarification a blank page can offer.

In the moments before his arrival, I try to remember why he was a great teacher. So contagious was his love for literature that he taught an overwrought surfer girl to read "Tristram Shandy," most of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Emily Dickinson without thinking it was "difficult." So devoted was he that once, when he discovered he'd lost a student's letter of recommendation for college, he actually rent his clothes like an anguished character in the Bible. So unveiled were his passions that the day John Lennon was shot we spent the hour listening to Beatles music while he delivered a lecture through tears.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. He's turned into his former self's father

 
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ILLUSTRATION BY KATHERINE STREETER