I’m trying to get the last lecture, a difficult lecture, a
supremely difficult lecture together. Ed is firing off questions about a case, an out of the blue unrelated case that
he is intensely curious about. I tell him – you’re a distraction!
It is often like that. Ed is a distraction. I like, nay,
love working at home. But I have to work around the idea that Ed throws out
queries and usually they are hard to ignore.
By the time I post this I’ll be officially after the
spring semester and onto the summer months. My teaching will have ended, my need to wake
up early, super super early will be behind me.
Dinner – I will have wiped clear traces of it. Washed plates
and chopsticks, discarded boxes that once held the Chinese take out.
This spring, the story that I tell my students at the close
of the semester is different from previous ones. I tell them about my
grandmother and her insatiable desire to bring a smile to the faces of her two
granddaughters. I don't look for stories to pass on. They come to me and when they do, I tell them.
At the end of the school year, I get in my law school
mailbox a sprinkling of notes from kind hearted students. You may hear endless
complaints about this generation of young people who know how to take and not
once give back – let me tell you, so many of the ones I’ve come across know how to
give back and then some. Today, I found in my mailbox one of the most
beautifully written notes ever and I paused a great while to think – how is it
that he found the time to do this, to want to share something positive with a
random teacher in his law school years?
Law school is a funny place. You come with great
expectations, you lose a good three years of your life and a hefty sum of money
to get through it all and then you’re done and so often you don’t think back to
what just happened. You’re done, for Pete’s sake, you’re done! Move on!
Finally! Your spouse, girlfriend, cat, mother, father, all those who love you
are so happy you’re out of there!
And I am too. I'm happy for you. But for one brief second, I remember the time
you, the student said something incredibly endearing, risky, funny, clumsy,
from the heart special and I think -- wow, I'm so sorry to see you leave and move on.
So I’m working hard tonight – I have to turn in exam
questions by daybreak – but I’m also thinking about my grandma and her sticking
a gift, her gift, actually nothing more than a bunch of frozen chicken breasts into my bag when last I visited her, just before she
died. That’s all she had to give by then. Despite
dementia, despite all that was wrong with her, she rambled over to her freezer
and reached for those chicken breasts.
There are some things that you just never forget.
