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.