Once More to "Once More to the Lake"

Here's the latest A.P. blog prompt:

Blog Entry #4

The inspiration for this entry is E.B. White's "Once More to the Lake." Write about returning to a place you used to go after a long time away from it. Why was this place important to you to begin with? How did you feel when you returned? Nostalgic? Maybe a little sad? Some combination of the two?

Details will be important for this entry. Paint a picture of the scene for your audience. Min. 500 words.

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Note: I took kind of an unconventional approach here, and it occurs to me I may have failed to address my own prompt. Whoops.

If you haven't read E.B. White's essay, you should. Go ahead - I'll wait. It's one of those pieces that will mean different things to you depending on your age when you read it. I first read it in Mr. Glatt's A.P. Literature class, during fall of my senior year of high school. I remember enjoying it then, but I can't really say it stuck with me. In fact, I had forgotten most of its content until I saw it listed in the table of contents of the anthology I'm using for class - Philip Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay - and decided, basically on a whim, to assign it.

I enjoyed reading it again. It's sweet and simple, and it deals with some pretty complex and deep issues with deceptive simplicity. The basic situation: After many years away, E.B. White returns with his son to a lake in Maine where he spent some of his formative childhood summers. The piece is about the lake itself, but more importantly, it's a rumination about the passage of time. The speaker wants the lake to be sort of a Garden of Eden, a place immune to the effects of time. But he can't help but notice subtle signs that time has paced and things have changed. He finds himself unexpectedly confused when he watches his son do the things he used to do. "I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father," he says.

Midway through reading about White's weird out-of-body deja vu, I started to experience my own. I think it was the bit about transposition that did it: I had a flashback to Mr. Glatt reading the line aloud and talking about the importance of that word, "transposition," although I admit I can't remember exactly what he said about it. And I started to sustain my own illusion that I was Mr. Glatt and my students, by simple transposition, were me.

Mr. Glatt was about my parents' age. In both intellectual prowess and physical appearance, he was the closest thing I had had to a college professor at that point in my life. He was bald ("follically challenged," as he put it during a lesson on euphemism) with a patchy black beard and glasses. He wore a crocheted tie every day, as well as a constant expression of bemusement. He spoke and gesticulated in a vaguely rabbinical manner. Given that I took his class seventeen years ago, I remember a surprising amount of specific things he said. As I reread White's essay I remembered an aside he made during our discussion, which bothered me a little bit at the time. The essay, he told us, reminded him of recently graduated high school students who return to their

high schools some time after graduation. They often hope to be greeted by their old teachers and former classmates as heroes returning from battle, and they usually end up disappointed. He told us, quite candidly, that he wished his students well, but often found it awkward to converse with them when they came to visit after some time away.

He wasn't kidding. About six month after graduation, I came home from college and paid a visit to my old high school (on the pretense of picking up my sister, but really to attempt to enjoy a nostalgic moment for myself). Mr. Glatt was one of the first people I sought out. I was excited to tell him that I had already decided to be an English major, and that I was reading King Lear in my intro class. I appeared in his doorway between classes and there he was, crocheted tie and all, about to teach a new class of seniors. I don't actually remember much about this conversation, but I do remember feeling that whatever I had been looking for, I didn't quite get it. Sure, he was cordial, if not exactly warm, but he was visibly preoccupied with the lesson he was about to teach. We only ended up talking for a minute or two.

He co-wrote the definitive guide to writing style,
as well as a bunch of essays about existential angst.

And still, he's best known for Charlotte and Wilbur.

Ultimately, this somewhat awkward interaction did nothing to damage my memory of Mr. Glatt or his class. I still think of him often when leading discussions with my own students. Now, at the age of thirty-five, I would gladly pay money to audit his A.P. Literature class (provided he is still teaching). Now that (by simple transposition) I have become the teacher, I think I understand why my post-graduation conversations with Mr. Glatt were so uniformly disappointing. (There were a few more in the years to come - all of them equally brief and unsatisfying.) The truth is that I sometimes find it difficult to catch up with former students returning to school on their breaks. The day before our class discussion of "Once More to the Lake," in fact, I ran into a former student on the stairwell while returning to my office to retrieve something in the middle of a class. "Hey!" I greeted him, "I want to catch up but I'm in the middle of class!" His face fell a little, and I felt bad. I did want to talk to him, and maybe the proper thing would have been to drop everything and catch up with the poor guy. But I also wanted to get back to my class of patiently waiting freshmen - the ones I'm currently being paid to teach.

I'd like to get a little better at talking to former students when they come to visit. They have been trickling in for the past couple weeks, and God knows many of my colleagues seem to share none of my hang-ups. So I'm aware that they problem may be with me. And yet, I think returning to old haunts comes with its own peculiar and contradictory emotions that exist independently of me. Part of returning - whether to an old school or E.B. White's lake - is coming to the sad realization that things are going on just fine without you. Your place is elsewhere now.

On Doing Stuff Alone

Last night, I went down to D.C. to see a rock show. Pinback, an obscure indie band I discovered in college and have been following closely ever since, was playing at the Rock and Roll Hotel, a tiny venue on H Street, and I couldn't resist. It was my fifth time seeing them in concert.

I have turned a few of my friends on to Pinback over the years, but I decided to go to the show only a few hours before it started and by that time, it felt too late to ask anyone to accompany me. And really that was fine by me. The fact is, I like going places alone sometimes. I complete much of my grading at a table for one at Starbucks, but I also don't mind going solo to meals, movies, baseball games and the occasional concert. What does bother me is the constant feeling of having to explain myself or apologize when I go off on an adventure by myself.

"I went to a show last night," I'll tell people.
"Oh cool," they'll say, "Who did you go with?"
More than once, I've fabricated a friend to avoid admitting the truth."My buddy Marvin," I'll say, "We met in a study abroad program."

It is a well known rule that if a character in a movie is dining alone, the movie wants you to know that they are Lonely. The truth is, I've eaten many pleasant meals by myself. And I don't consider myself a lonely person.

Something like this actually happened last night. The lights came on after the final encore and when I looked to my right, I realized that for the entire duration of the show, I had been standing next to two college acquaintances (now married to each other, it turns out). We caught up with each other for a while, on the sidewalk outside the club and it wasn't long before they asked me if I had come to the show by myself. Sheepishly, I admitted that I had. "Wow, that's a commitment," they responded, charitably. "Or just pathetic," I retorted.

Do I honestly think that my habit of going solo is pathetic? I don't think I think that. I mean, let's look objectively at the facts. I love people and spend much of my life surrounded with them. I have a wife and two kids and lots of friends - from high school, from college, from work. In fact I'm spending next weekend with a bunch of college buddies: we're renting a house near Annapolis. I don't work some sedentary job in a cubicle; my teaching requires me to speak publicly multiple times each day, to dozens of people. I enjoy going to movies, ballgames and concerts with friends and I do so probably three or four times as often as I venture out alone. It's fair to say that I am an introvert, and that my wife occasionally has to encourage me to reach out to friends rather than hanging out around the house, but I am by no means some hermit who can't stand social interaction.

So why should I feel weird about choosing to venture out alone sometimes? Concerts (and movies, for that matter) are basically anti-social events anyway, if you exclude the drinks or meal that often take place before or after. You stand or sit in a darkened room for an hour and a half to two hours. Admittedly, a concert would be weird if you were the only one in the audience - much weirder than a movie - but still, I've found that I don't need a companion by my side in order to thoroughly enjoy the experience.

Even now, I feel like my tone sounds a little defensive - as though I'm trying to convince the world, and maybe myself, that I'm not some weirdo loner. The stigma against doing things alone is just that strong. I admit, I have perpetuated it myself. How often have I been out to dinner with friends, glanced over at a man or a woman reading a book at a table for one, and thought (sometimes even out loud), "What a loser"?

Pinback isn't really the point of this article. But I really do love the band.

I sang along with every Pinback song the other night, even the B sides that only the guys in the band know. (Because the lead singer, Rob Crow, is kind of mumbly, I don't know the actual lyrics to many of the songs, but I've made up my own. And I have to say, I think the two of us sound pretty good harmonizing together.) By the end of the night, I was starting to feel a little lonely and was ready to return home to family. By 6:30 Sunday morning I'll admit I wasn't completely ready to wake up, but I after a cup of coffee, I was happy to spend time with my wife and babies. We went to the Baltimore Farmer's Market, where we had lunch together and picked out some beets and acorn squash for dinner. I was reminded once again that I love spending time with my family - and I love it even more after I've spent a little time by myself.