REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PRESENT | PAGE 1, 2
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I hear his voice first: giddy, husky, babbling. Half of the sounds that come out of his mouth are not words at all but yelps of laughter, uh-huhs, oohs and gasps. As he approaches the panel, and I finally see him, time shocks me. He's no longer the young man in the picture; the gray beard and the patrician body have conspired to turn him into a father of his former self.

Oh, but when he begins to speak, it's like dreaming of food: sustenance, roots, comfort. Watching the jealous eyes of his fellow panelists, I think, my God, he's smarter than I remember. But intelligence is not the whole of his gift: He knows how to allow intellect and feeling to reside in a single nest. This was the genius of making us keep journals, I realize. We learned to pay close attention to the emotional tumult of our daily lives and to stay conscious of the fact that time is passing and distancing us from those sensations. Our brains had to make sense of it all right now. Even his entry in my yearbook struggled with this. He noted the day and time for posterity, then wrote about "this moment" as if it could go on forever.

In his talk he quotes novelist Richard Stern, the subject of this rather obscure panel, from a eulogy he'd once heard the writer give. The dead do not disappear, said Stern, but they become a "permanent part of thought." That's what you are, I think. Yes, great teachers share this with the dead.

He does not know I'm here, and I keep it that way as long as possible. I don't know how he'll react when he sees me. I'd tried to keep in touch, but after so many years of phone messages left on strange machines and letters to doubtful addresses, I had given up. Ours was the unequal relationship of teacher and student. I worked tirelessly but parasitically, feeding off him as if he were an intellectual nursemaid. He worked tirelessly for us all and then moved on. The loss was like a death that goes unmourned and then heals quietly without fanfare.

When I approach him after the talk, he stares at me disbelievingly.

"I'm Carol Lloyd," I explain, my palms turned out in an absurd presentation.

"Oh God, oh God, yes, of course, of course, yes!" he cries out and hugs me, his colleagues looking on vaguely aghast. This is the MLA after all, where professionalism always trumps sentiment. He seems genuinely happy to see me -- explaining that I represented a time when teaching was "joyous." I ask about his book, which I heard got some award.

"Actually it started with an assignment I gave to your ninth grade class," he begins, explaining how his thinking and reading about diaries turned into scholarship. As soon as we say goodbye, I find the book in the University of Chicago Press stall: "Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries and English Diurnal Form 1660-1785" by Stuart Sherman. Even his name has changed with the passage of time. And when I find a quiet moment, I open a new page in my notebook and try to make sense of what I love about this moment.
SALON | Feb. 12, 1999

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