In Memorium

This isn't my thing.

Reflecting on someone's life after they've passed.  Not my thing.  I leave words for memorials and services to those more adept than I, who have more experience at it.  But that's the thing about getting older.  I'm gaining the experience.  Too much, it seems.

The very first compliment that Rob Quel ever gave me was the worst thing he could have said.  It was 10th grade.  I was in his Writing Lab class.  We were giving impromptu sales pitches.  He handed us an object - we got up to sell it.  Most of the items were random.  Some, I suspect, were calculated.  One kid got a bottle of Gatorade.  The soccer player.  Nice.  Me?  He handed me a pen.  And in a scene prescient of "The Wolf of Wall Street" he told me to sell it.  I have no memory of what I said.  I remember overhearing myself, though, and thinking, whoa, why you getting worked up over a pen?  But that was me at 15: cared too much about EVERYTHING.  I finished.  There was some polite applause and Mr. Quel, sitting in the back of the room, said, "Wow.  You should consider a career in evangelism."  I assumed he thought I didn't know what the word meant.  I was smug in the knowledge that I did know the word and hated it.  Of all the things to suggest: religion.  To me?  Really?

And thus was a relationship born.  How could I have known it would span this long.

He coached me as an extemper.  He was tough, even unfair sometimes.  When I was elected to speak at my high school graduation, by my peers, he looked over my speech half an hour before I was supposed to deliver it and suggested it was too vague.  I bristled.  How you want me to change it now? I asked, silently.

Then Rob Quel dropped out of my life for almost a decade.  I had drama of my own to deal with.  When I returned to E.C. Glass in the 04-05 school year, he was still in the elementary world.  Assistant Principal here; Principal there.  I started to hear sometime later that he might come back to Glass as an admin.  His wife worked here; his oldest kid was going to school here.  Made sense.  Then I was slapped with the first unthinkable thing in my professional life: my Principal, a man for whom I would stand in fire for, was yanked away.  Unceremoniously.  Gone.  Not gonna lie: I'm still bitter about that.  I'll probably always be bitter about that because we are, as a school, still living with the resonance of that decision.  Not as bad as invading Iraq.  But a personal war here nonetheless.  One I'm still fighting, most days.  So the year after I lost my Principal, Rob Quel reappeared.

One of the first things he said to me that year, after a day of school that week, was a Harry Wong reference.  He admonished me not to expend more energy than the students.  Make them do the "heav lifting."  I felt a tinge of that old excuse me? response.  I'll exert the energy I choose, thank you.  But he was partially right.  My students were sitting in one place too much, listening to me drone on too much.  They needed more to do.

Rob challenged me all the time to make the time in my class worthwhile for them.  Once, maybe three years ago, I was sitting in his office after school reviewing the evaluations from my students.  He was reading some out loud - the bad ones - and giving me a hard time.  "Too many students like you," he said.  "Clearly you're doing something wrong."  But then he found an honest concern.  "I think," he started, "that conservatives feel nervous about voicing their thoughts in your class."  We looked at the responses together.  Sure enough - there was something there.  That was a hard conversation to have.  I think it was hard for him to confront me on it too.  He knew my politics and while I thought I had tried hard to keep it out of my grading I didn't keep current events out of my classroom.  I could hem and haw about it all I wanted but the perception was real.  How was I going to handle it?

But my best memory of Rob was every time he threw my classroom door open, arresting my lesson and demanding my students rise up and not be subjected to "sad stories" any longer.  Our debates about Old Man and the Sea were legendary.  He always wanted the old man to beat the living crap out of those sharks.  He didn't need the story to have a happy ending, but it didn't need to have a depressing one.

Life, though, has a sense of irony.  Because depressing is sitting in my classroom at 3:30 on a Tuesday afternoon and realizing that he will never throw my door open again.  He will never challenge my literary prowess on social media again.  It'll be quiet uptown, I suppose.  And I'm not sure I'll ever hear a voice fill that void.

One of my favorite stories is by Norman MacLean, a memoir about his childhood in Montana with a minister father (religion again) and a rebellious younger brother.  I quote from that work more and more these days.  Two moments stand out to me.  The father, after a family tragedy, tells Norman, "We can love completely what we cannot completely understand."  Rob served in many capacities to me.  A mentor.  A teacher.  A foil.  An antagonist.  And I will never understand his passing.  I can work at finding some peace though, I guess.  But the ending of that particular story is probably more relevant.

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

Santiago, the fisherman, strains for all his worth but he never saves that marlin.  Rob would tell me to fight the sharks.  But it's hard because now these waters are haunted.