Yesterday was spent staring at a computer screen.
Grading, grading, grading.
Grading until my neck ached.
Grading until my eyes began to quiver right along with the quivering cursor.
Grading until I started to sweat through my shirt, as if the very air had grown heavy around me.
But wait. The very air had grown heavy around me. It was wet and thick with pent up rain, that, petulant, refused to fall. I wrestled off my pullover and sat in a damp t-shirt, glowering at the screen. I wanted to run out the door, throw myself on a bicycle, and leave the town in the dust. But I’d pulled a muscle in my back at the gym, and, besides, any moment now, it would rain.
I kept grading.
Did anyone read this nonsense?
Was any student, anywhere, interested in anything beyond the final grade, each letter-greater-than-F a deliverance from one meaningless class to the next, until at last they were free to imprison themselves in a cubicle and waste their time for money? I doubted it. But still I typed, on and on: “Interesting thesis! For revision, I’d like you to consider…”
Grade, grade, grade, waiting, waiting, waiting for rain.
I couldn’t stand it. I could not stand one more single second of it.
“I’ve got to get out of this house!” I said to Don, a little too forcefully, as if it had been him and not the grading holding me captive.
He looked up from a set of rusty socket wrenches he’d rescued from a ditch and was now, as part of some inscrutable socket-resurrection ritual, sliding into the oven to bake.
“That’s fine,” he said mildly. “Try to buy some printer paper. And maybe coffee filters.”
Three minutes later, I was on my way to Dollar General.
The rain, which had given up its I-won’t-fall-you-can’t-make me tantrum, was coming down now, steady but not hard. I wish I’d watched it mist up over the fields, but I was intent on the windshield and the thrum of the wiper blades, and then, finally, on the fluorescent indoors of the Dollar General. I picked up some legal pads; a package of pens I didn’t need; one of those garden tillers that look like a claw on the end of a stick.
I hadn’t bothered with a cart or a basket. I strode through the aisles carrying it like a spear.
Printer paper was nowhere to be found, and when I’d exhausted my patience scanning rows of Folgers, Maxwell House, and Suspiciously Generic Premium Blend, I asked a woman stocking bottled water about coffee filters.
She marched me back to the coffee aisle. “We’ve got ’em,” she said. “They’re just hard to find. They’re right…Well…gosh…they *are* hard to find today. I’ll ask Kayla. KAYLA!” she shouted, “KAYLA! What happened to the coffee filters?”
There were no coffee filters.
Kayla, who had emerged from nowhere, shrugged and drifted towards The Back.
The girl who checked me out was maybe twenty-two, pretty, with red-brown hair that fell in curls to her shoulders. I offered up my tiller with two hands and laid it on the counter.
“I looked all last spring for these,” I said. “Couldn’t find them anywhere.”
She regarded the yellow shaft for a moment. “Those things jump off the shelf and attack me,” she said. “They’ve got a mind of their own.”
When she’d rung me up, I gathered my pens and notebooks in my right hand and tried to take the tiller in my left. It swung crazily toward a rack of candy. I pulled it back just before the mini peppermint patties went flying.
“See?” she said, knowingly. “Mind of their own.”
I drove down the road to a little country grocery store where I found printer paper under a table of brioche in cellophane packets. I picked up coffee filters. In line, I tried to make small talk and found myself in a conversation with a man who’d once threatened to put a teenager’s face in the deep fryer at McDonald’s.
“And right then, I said, ‘I quit!'” he said. “I wasn’t gonna catch a case over some dumbass kid!”
He was cataloging the local the restaurants where the kitchen staff didn’t speak English when the cashier handed me my receipt. I headed for the door. “Have a good one, sweetheart!” he called. I waved a hand in response.
You too, buddy. Try not to boil any children.
Outside, the rain was coming in cliches: Sheets, torrents, cats and dogs. I drove slowly, peering over the steering wheel at the blurred road.
Don announced he was going to see Star Wars Episode II at a local theater. Did I want to see Star Wars Episode II?
I did not. I could not, frankly, imagine anything worse.
Don took this in stride. “I’ll text Keith!” he said. A few minutes later, his Keith-date secured, he headed to the bathroom. I heard the tinny opening bars of the Star Wars theme playing under the sound of water, shower and rain.
He emerged with a towel around his waist, phone held aloft, blaring The Imperial March. He marched, Storm Trooper style, upstairs. Then he was back, dressed, and out the door, and I was alone.
I tried to write and found it pointless. I played a game on my phone and felt the day bleeding away from me. Outside, the rain had stopped. It was dusk and the yard had turned to shadows. “Come on, dogs, I said. Let’s go for a walk.”
We went to the lake. The clouds were banked dark and low over the water, which curved along the shore line and out to the horizon.
On the long pier, fishermen stood like sentries, evenly spaced black silhouettes against the darkening sky. I watched them cast and reel.
The air had grown cool, all that heat and weight drained out of it.
All that heat and weight drained slowly out of me.
We came upon a toad, sitting placidly on the sidewalk and, once I had convinced Pete not to eat it, we watched it hop away.
I thought about my students, waiting or not for my “helpful revision critiques.” I will dutifully type them out today and tomorrow. I will type until my neck aches and my eye quivers.
But last night, standing there before our inland sea, I hoped they wouldn’t read a word of it. I hoped they’d throw caution to the wind, turn in the rough draft as a final, fling themselves on a bicycle and ride out, regardless of rain.
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