I Loved To Teach

Yesterday, on Monday, I watched a most intriguing movie.  I had started watching it on Sunday when, as sometimes happens when I’m watching sports, I found I had to stop watching because, for some strange reason, I begin to care too much who wins, and I detect a haunting taste (but it’s not exactly a taste either) that is a warning I discovered when I was in my forties and my body would suddenly “give out.”  My heartbeat would become irregular and then there would be no heartbeat while that mysterious organ would get its rhythm back.  There was no pain involved—only fear.  Several times I went to the hospital—once in an ambulance.  The fireman/boy who pushed me out on a gurney was a former student, a mild, quiet lad whom I knew had once gone on an ambulance call and found that the dead child he had gone to assist was his own daughter.  And when I looked up into his face, I was surprised to see tears in his eyes, and I knew that once again he had found himself intent on assisting someone he loved.

I felt very guilty that, by the time we reached the hospital my heart tested completely normal.  My doctor told me after the third occurrence of this panic attack that what I needed to do the next time was to darken the room, lie down, relax, and wait for it to pass.  I was sure he had no idea what I was going through, but when it occurred next, I did as he had said, and as I lay there, expecting to die and not wanting to die in that beautiful, recently-decorated bedroom in that finally finished brand new home, everything returned to normal, and I knew he had been right and I had been wrong.  “Darn you, Dr. So-and-So,” I thought, “you were right!  I had been in no real danger.”  David’s tears had been in vain, his recalled pain had been unnecessary.  I shall always love him for those tears.

I had asked that doctor if I should give up directing plays, as the stress was always directly related to the pressure of doing a difficult play.  The first attack had come after midnight when the kids should have been at home but the huge bridge for Oliver, which should not have been made of large sheets of masonite, had fallen apart as if made of match sticks, and there was no other time to do the repairs before the performance, so I lay on the gym floor, expecting to breathe my last.  That doctor was a wise man to know he held so much of my future life under his control at that moment.  “Do you enjoy directing plays, Johnny?”

“Absolutely, but we have four children.”

“Then you need to learn to deal with stress.”

And in that moment, lying in the dark, I was able to discern something akin to a taste in my mouth, and when it returned the next time, I was in a classroom at Southwestern High School in Shelby County, Indiana, and I gave the class a task, left the room, went to the nearby teachers’ lounge, switched off the lights and relaxed on the couch until I felt ‘safe.’

I had learned to recognize a chemical reaction to stress that was wrought with fear.  I called off play practice for that evening and went home, I guess to rejoice.  I don’t believe I ever really explained this phenomenon to Margaret, but somehow she understands when I suddenly say, in the throes of a basketball game (Is that a pun?)  I can’t ?watch this.” and divorce myself from the activity that it is still important to me, so she watches and periodically updates me on what is happening.  I think there is hidden in here something magical about the enduring material a good marriage is made of.

I’m sorry—that was quite a digression, wasn’t it?  But that was what happened suddenly as I watched Nicole Kidman and Nicholas Cage in The Interpreter.  Factor in that the producer was Sidney Pollack, a South Bend boy, also trained by James Lewis Cassidy, though ever-so-much more talented and more loved, who has since died and “shuffled off this mortal coil” but appears as a character in this film—something he chose to do that was always a thrill for me, having first watched him, while I was awestruck as an aspiring  high school kid, as he portrayed a psychiatrist in that brilliant musical which was to become my first attempt at directing a high school musical.  (It required eighteen scene changes, and nothing was ever to seem impossible to me after that)—Lady in the Dark.

Our AT&T cable system allows one to just press record and it records the show you are watching from the beginning, even if it is in the last minute, and retains it until the space is needed for more recording.  So, when I realized that I could not deal with the stress the film was creating for me, I pressed record, turned off the TV, and walked away.  So it was that I was watching the rest of that admirable piece of work on Monday afternoon, prepared for stress by putting aesthetic distance in its proper place.

Nicole, as the Interpreter, explains her fascination with words, which she may or may not really have, but I do; and in a notebook, when she comes across a word that fascinates, she adds it to her list.  So I was awakened this morning thinking of fascinating words and trying to remember some/any of hers.  In this process, I came up with a town in northern Indiana that I knew was stored in my brain but was escaping my cognizance—Osceola, an Indian word with more vowels than consonants.  Incidentally, this computer program is driving me nuts by filling the spaces in front of the letters I type with the wrong words—words that I have used somewhere in the past.  (Virginia Woolf might admire my ‘stream of consciousness’ today , if she were alive and were to read this.  Maybe you can to that for her.)  So, in trying to find “Osceola’ in the cloudy mess of my morning mind, I was recalling that my brother Dan’s first college roommate was from this ‘unnamed’ town.  What was his name?  He went to our church in South Bend—Marty Something?”  Martin?  Well, I didn’t come up with that, but I came up with the name of the town where a handsome young man I hardly knew had grown up.  I wonder if Dan has given any thought to Marty in these many years.

In parting, let me explain that I know there are probably few people who experience life in the manner that I do, which is introspective and retrospective at the same time, and, knowing it might bore many to death, wanted to attempt to explain that process.  Thank you ever so much for taking time to read this.