Senior Year

 Senior year, 1988.

 

Last night  Caroline  and I were talking in bed.

 

She mentioned the Waste Land by TS Elliot.

 

“One of my favorite poems,” I replied.

 

She read the first few familiar lines

 

“I. The Burial of the Dead

  April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.”

The quintessential poem of the seasons, of a time between Winter and Spring, between death and life, here and there, this life and the underworld, regeneration and regret.

 

Earlier in the day, we talked about what our daughter’s senior year might look like.

 

She has an internship the last semester of her senior year in high school next year. 

 

“Its good.  You don’t  learn anything senior year anyway,” she said.

 

“Really,” I replied,  reflecting on my senior year at Greenhill when I read not only Eliot but some my favorite novels.   I  was done with classes with Dr Buchanan, whose lament that “constant flux” was going to be a feature of  our lives, has become painfully prophetic.

 

Still,  senior year we translated Virgil in  Latin class, read the  Waste Land and  Dante in  Poetry,  tracing  Virgil’s tour through our modern consciousness.   That line of thought took  us  through Walker Percy’s Love  in  the Ruin’s, a novel that referred  to  all those works.  I remember reading it in awe during the spring semester of my senior year in 1988.  That same semester we read The Unbearable Lightness of  Being,  Beloved,  and Aunt Julia the Scriptwriter,  two of three of my favorite novels of  all time.  Of course, like many seniors in high school, thoughts about poetry and  the anxieties of influence intermingled with conflicts about romance, the ordeals of intimacy Freud described.

 

An interchange from my new novel Illuminations on  Market Street, traces  a  few  of these conflicts and influences:

“I know. Well at least you don’t have a class with her,” I confided.

“Really, what class?”

“Literature in Transition, five days a week.”

 And it wasn’t just a class with Sarah—Becky, Phil and Mandy (a girl I had fooled around with Junior year in Todd’s Mom’s houseboat) were also in the class. I couldn’t believe it the first day I had entered the room to see everyone sitting against the back wall of the classroom looking like a panel from the Last Judgement. I stared down the whole class in complete shock. Looking at all three of the women and another former friend, the class was like some absurd comical aberration, something I deserved, the universe offering me a check.  I even told Mrs. Chips, a confidant from sophomore year when I got a 44 in her class. There had been a lot of explaining to do that year. She had taught Becky, Phil and me Gatsby years ago. “How much of this has to do with hormones?” Mrs. Chips inquired, quite matter-of-factly. “Oh, none, nothing Mrs. Chips,” I lied. As much as I hated to admit it, she was right.  “But Mrs. Chips, I thought we talked about this before I signed up for this class,” I lamented, flabbergasted after that first class. “I specifically asked you if either Sarah or Becky were going to be in this class.” “I know you did Cab, but I couldn’t tell you they were in the class. This is material I knew you could enjoy and benefit from. I can’t allow petty personal conflicts get in the way of that,” Mrs. Chips replied with mock seriousness. “But Mrs. Chips, I have had relations with girls in this class—not very positive relations.” “This’ll be good for you Cab. It’ll be a learning experience,” she concluded, smiling and getting back to her business.  So, for the last three months of a high school experience full of girls I had fixated on who had given me the cold shoulder, I had to face three of the girls I had recklessly let down. I was assigned The Divine Comedy in my class rights before the Literature in Transition class. Purgatorio was my favorite part. Alliances quickly fell into place as Mrs. Chips lectured about literary influence and movies, magic realism and Faulkner. Becky and Phil took the same two seats every day for their note passing. Despite all the LSD, partner swapping and panics, they still maintained a bond. They both seemed to enjoy the questions we’d all face in the class. Mandy always sat by herself. Phil and I were fine yet estranged. Susan and Sarah took to the same seats in the back row where they both crossed their legs and defiantly ignored my presence in the back corner as did Becky and Phil.  “I love teaching this course,” announced Mrs. Chips. “These are modern works in every sense. I would never assign these books to underclassmen. I wouldn’t even assign these readings to first term seniors. You are only ready for this stuff in the spring of your senior year as you are about to leave having experienced so many of the things which high school seems to entail in this precocious day.”  Phil and Becky listened in their distinctly Deep Ellum boots, psychedelic jewelry, paisley patterned shirts, ripped jeans, and reflective sunglasses. Mandy sat with her hand on her chin in acid washed jeans a black shirt buttoned up all the way to the top. Sarah and Susan maintained a flow of shopping mall department store Sanger Harris and Neiman Marcus up to the minute—girl about town, somewhat confident, imitation standards. The class proceeded with our undivided attention, weirdness oozing all over the room, the clothes, the books, the looks, and the lectures. On the first day, Mrs. Chips had begun: “I want to start with Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy. Let’s just read out loud a few pages to get a feel for the material. None of you have had an opportunity to read yet so let’s all start off on the same foot. Becky, would you read starting with page one?” And read Becky did. She straightened her back and started:

“NOW IN THESE DREAD LATTER DAYS OF THE OLD VIOLENT beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines...”

“Cab, you’re in Dr. Currier’s advanced poetry class aren’t you?” Mrs. Chips asked when Becky finished. “Yes Ma’am.” “Have you started Dante yet?” “Yes.” “Do you have your copy of Inferno with you?” I nodded. “Could you pull it out and read the first few lines of Canto One?” “Yes ma’am.” I read:

“Midway through life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. what wood that was! I never saw so drear, so rank, so arduous a wilderness! Its very memory gives a shape to fear.”

“Did everyone hear that?” “Uh huh...” Mandy lied. “Becky, read that first paragraph again. Could you please?” Which she did.  Forests again. We were all starting sit up in our chairs.  “Cab, now read from the beginning of that first Canto again.” Which I did. “Percy came to himself in a grove of young pines, Dante in a dark wood,” I found myself mumbling, thinking out loud.  “What is Percy saying about us with this allusion?” Phil inquired. I hadn’t heard him talk like that for two and a half years, from back when Phil, Becky and I had our first class with Mrs. Chips studying The First Testament and Gatsby freshman year.

 “Actually, I think there’s an answer to that. I want to continue with the readings out loud. Phil, could you read from Thomas’ Creed on page six?”  Phil began: “I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth...” Listening, I knew Thomas was my guy. That could have been my creed, but I did not say so. We read the rest of the first page from Love and the Ruins: “Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the USA and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery …” Sitting there in Dallas, Texas, where JFK spent his last breaths, it was hard to disagree. God had removed his blessing from this place built on the backs of slavery and the slaughter of the Karankawa, Caddo, Apache, Comanche, Wichita and Tonkawa peoples. While slavery was abolished in Mexico in 1829, the Republic of Texas made the practice legal in 1836, joining the confederacy in 1861, dragging its feet to abolish the practice in 1865. Even then, lynchings were common throughout the state. This history was out there for us all to see. But we didn’t talk about it much. It was all just part of growing up in a part of the country that does not apologize for the cruelties of its past. We were busy trying to forget all this. The underworld Virgil led Dante through seemed to point toward a suburban wasteland, where amnesia removed us from this history.  For years we converged in vacant parking lots, listening to music, hanging out, getting high, trying to make sense of this space between the treacheries of the past and the uncertainty of the future. “It’s only teenage wasteland…” The Who sang about it. And we tried to live in it. “Let’s get together before we get much older.”

 

Every novel we read—Kundera, Vargas Llosa, Puig, Percy—taught us to think a little bit more about the lines between these words and life, tracing meanings between unrequited love, hope, history and the questions about faith, longing and Eros that had been rumbling through our heads. Each story allowed us to make a little more sense of the sensations we had found discomforting. Kundera made body smells a driving force in his story. Ideas about morality shifted with these ideas, but so did TS Eliot’s descriptions of the “Wasteland” in which we all seemed to operate.”

 

Yes, we learn a lot senior year.  Hopefully it is just the beginning. 

 

 This is an excerpt from his novel Illuminations on Market Street (Ibidem Publishers, 2019).