Michigan

Tonight I'm grading writing finals and am watching the stack of papers in the manila folder get smaller. My least favorite part of teaching is the grading, mainly because it's something I do alone, and no one else is there to share it. I've spent hours in coffee shops, at my kitchen table, in an office, sometimes reading papers about the benefits of thinking critically, or about someone's life experiences at work, or their childhood, or their divorce, or swimming in the ocean and almost drowning, or the birth of their first baby, or the time they had to shoot someone.

I think a lot. Sometimes I wish I didn't. Married friends say they don't think, or have shifted to autopilot, and sometimes assume I have no idea what's that like.

I did. In Michigan. Sometimes I was in a different city every night, four nights out of the week. My house was in one city, my office in another, and on average I drove two hours a day. For six months I drove four hours a day, plus had two teaching gigs. I stopped counting how many hours I worked. If I was awake, I was working, or at the gym to try to clear my mind. They were 80 hour weeks, easily. I slipped into autopilot then. I kept moving, wondering how long I could keep up this pace, begging for it to end, feeling more lonely and more emotionally bare than I'd ever felt before in my life. Only twice before had I been so sick of working; I felt like a machine, stripped down to whatever was needed for the job. I couldn't remember who I'd been before, only what was needed of me at the moment. What had happened to dreams? What had I thought life would be like? Not this. Hope was erased and in its place was dogged pushing until it was finished. Some days I wondered if that day would ever come. I prayed that I wouldn't lose my soul. I was glad to not have close friendships or a relationship in my life, I'd have nothing to give. I was dead inside from pouring too many places and having too many one-sided relationships where my value came from what I could give, not in the fact that I just was.

But on nights like tonight people and places start to resurface, images, and I get a little homesick for this time in my life. I wanted to share it. In Jackson there's a street with brownstone houses on the righthand side of the street once you turn off the main road (127) and are heading toward downtown toward the center. I wondered what it would be like to live there; it would feel like a castle. Nearby there's a restaurant on top of one of the hills called Steve's Ranch that has decent codfish, beer battered onion rings, and lowlit ambiance and a salad bar that looks like all the color has been sucked out of it by a vampire. The downtown has cobblestone streets, a few highrise skyscrapers, and buildings with theatrical masks set in concrete of men and women smiling (comedy) or frowning (tragedy). There are boys and young men who drive through empty alleyways and parking lots at night on bikes, coming and going from a drug deal. There's a police station a few blocks beyond that. The city center gets quiet at night, and hooded men and homeless wanderers hide out in bushes or under overpasses. I saw a couple students making out in a car one night as I was walking across the parking lot, then she got in her car and he drove away in his.

I worked with a man named Glenn who stood 5'5", rail thin, a Japanese American who had grown up in Hawaii and was surprised that I knew about the conflicts between the Filipino immigrants and the Japanese immigrants over the pineapple farms. He had a daughter a few years younger than me who had moved back to California because she never felt like she fit in in Michigan, and another daughter who was in high school. Glenn liked to talk theology or missions.

There was the girl whose boyfriend did drugs and stole their color TV. She couldn't leave him and was more worried about her gambling problem and how thin he was getting because of his heroin addiction. There were the women who'd been molested as kids and were still grieving it in their sixties. There was Eric, the formal African American fire chief who sometimes missed class because he was called to a fire, was tending to his rental properties, or thinking about moving to Florida. There was Lenny, riding in to class on a crotch rocket, struggling to finish his thesis and justify to his wife the purchase of his bike.

There were R, J, and T, always cracking jokes in class and making me laugh, then talking about their posttraumatic stress disorder from getting shot at in the line of duty and shooting a man. I ended up going on a ridealong with them and got caught up in a drug bust, SWAT team and all.

There were the ex-military students who had done their tours of duty and now were working on business degrees. Some came to class in uniform. A couple were deployed in the middle of the course and couldn't finish. They left behind families, didn't tell where they were going, only nodded stiffly, shook my hand hard, and said it had been a pleasure.

All these people. They cross our paths for brief moments and then are on their way to something else, or we are, and we're left with some good experiences but also sadness. At first this was very hard. I connected with a number of students and had a few crushes and would have loved to have been friends with a number of others. After hearing pieces of their life stories, sitting across from them, sometimes weeping with them or laughing, it felt like we had shared something. We'd see each other sometimes in the halls of the centers, or at the grocery store or graduation, but things had changed. We had had our time, and now it was different.

Over time, it became harder to connect. I knew the students would be gone in six weeks and besides, the faces started to blur together. So did the roads. Some nights I wouldn't know if I was driving north or south, home to Lansing or away to Flint, Jackson, Bay City, or Battle Creek. It was disorienting, like blacking out and coming to only to find that you've lost all bearings, have no idea where you are. Your soul has come unglued.