In 1928, Thornton Wilder’s second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. As a Wilder fanatic, I’ve read it several times, and it perplexes me, which I think he wanted, since he very often left readers pondering, as befits a long career of writing about religious and spiritual matters. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is set in eighteenth-century Peru and tells the story of a friar who happens to be waiting to cross a rope bridge over a canyon when it collapses with five people on it, sending them all plunging to their deaths. The monk is deeply affected by this, and decides to try to collect as much information as he can about the five victims, in hopes of proving definitively that God does (or does not!) have a plan for each life.
At the end of the tale, it’s revealed—ahem, nearly one-hundred-year-old spoiler—that the friar’s work was found to be heretical by church authorities and both it and he were burned. The novel closes with what has become one of Wilder’s most famous quotes: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” In this way, Wilder leaves the ending ambiguous, and powerful. The friar’s initial proposition—“Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan”—isn’t resolved. That’s the ambiguity, and that’s what’s stayed with me.
Look, I have no more idea than anyone else which it is. Both options give me the willies: How dare I blithely declare that an innocent child’s death is part of a plan? Or that the tornado that leveled a town is God’s will? But the trajectory of my own life doesn’t feel accidental either: Why did Geri call me for an interview without my ever sending her my résumé? Why did the guy who was given a full scholarship to the MFA program at Pitt decide to go elsewhere, so that I, the writing program’s second choice, ended up at the school that’s been my home ever since? Like a basic cable commercial for a local psychic, I have to ask: Was this coincidence, or something more? I don’t know. But I do tend to ever so slightly put my thumb on the scale for a plan of some kind, at least when it comes to my life. And here is the big reason why: I once taught high school seniors, and then I taught college freshmen.
I know that this sounds ridiculous, but truly, I mean this. It is some amazing karma, some ideal circle-of-life perfection, the kind novelists won’t write because it seems far too convenient to possibly be true. It’s The Lion King, only without the lions, puppets, and plot.
You have to understand that when I taught seniors at THSB, we adults tried so hard to get them ready for college, but it was a hopeless task. Those students were not into it. They wanted to enjoy their senior year, which had long been promised in American television and film as a glorious time of footloosery. By midwinter, most of them felt their hard work was over—they had gotten into college. Now their lives were set. Besides, didn’t they always get As and Bs at THSB? They had no idea what was ahead, and chose to ignore our warnings that college would not be anything like high school, where we teachers were expected to keep them entertained and grade them on a “Hey, you showed up!” scale.
Erica, Danielle, and I worried about this endlessly, knowing that even if we could magically adjust their attitudes (Note: We could not), our students were not ready for college in myriad other ways: financially (even if they managed to land a scholarship, it did not cover personal expenses), geographically (some had barely ever left Brooklyn but were supposed to attend school hundreds of miles away), in terms of the support they got at home (because they were the first to go to college in most of their families, their parents often didn’t understand how difficult it was going to be), emotionally, and so on. We couldn’t help with much of that, so we tried hard to get them ready academically, at least. But our help was met with eye rolls and scorn.
When many of our students didn’t make it through their first semesters at college or passed by the skin of their teeth, we weren’t surprised, but we were upset. Yes, our suspicions had been validated, but there was no joy in it, as some of our students lost scholarships, dropped out, returned home, and vowed that college wasn’t for them. Others stayed at school, but faced the struggles of their lives thus far to bring up low GPAs while working full-time and juggling family commitments, all in hopes of getting a degree that would set them on a path toward a more stable life. Yet there was little we could do: THSB wasn’t really in the college prep business. If anything, we were in the college admissions business. After our kids got into college they were on their own, and the demands of the job we had in preparing their former, younger schoolmates meant that there was little time to counsel or support our graduates, even if they asked. It was incredibly frustrating.
After four years at THSB, I was beyond ready to move on. In nearly every way, the school was a nightmare: run by a series of increasingly incompetent or corrupt principals, overseen by support administration that was either completely unengaged or in way over their heads, employing a faculty of deeply stressed-out people, and plagued by the same violence and despair that haunted its neighborhood, at least some of the time. The building was dirty and poorly kept, with bedbugs spotted in the hallways. The other schools in the building had little control over their students, who terrorized us. The library was actually falling apart. Laptops kept getting stolen from the laptop cart. I won a prestigious award to develop curriculum with my colleague Kelli, but we had to beg the principal to let us go to the required professional development for it because he had so much trouble getting us subs. We still didn’t have bells to change classes. There was no money for new books, so I was still teaching, God help us, A Separate Peace, a book so white it makes Pride and Prejudice seem like a night at the Apollo. Several of the students smelled so strongly of weed that other kids in the class got sick from the stench. Disciplinary systems changed every year, and the NYCDOE always seemed to have some new initiative to implement, which invariably boiled down to making teachers assume yet another task (like taking on an extra period for small-group counseling). Personally, I was constantly exhausted, tired (once again) of the (slightly shorter but still) long commute, and disgusted with the administration’s tacit policy of using any means necessary, up to and including cheating, to get as many of our students as possible to graduate or leave. Worst of all, one of the principals had formed a preposterous but deep-seated grudge against me, which made my life at THSB absolutely miserable.
My close friendship with Erica, Danielle, and a few other teachers at the school, my love for many of our students, and my desire to assure some kind of good future for at least some of them kept me there for longer than I should have stayed. I knew it was time to go two years before I left. Beyond all of the horrors of the school itself, I had no time to write. My writing career was always perpetually perched at the tipping point where, if I just could find the time, I might break through and start making some of my living by it. But I never had the time. There were always lesson plans to write, papers to grade, calls home to make, and incident reports to type up and file, not to mention other jobs to apply for, at other schools.
As I’ve established, I am not suited for martyrdom, and this was as close as I got. Yet I’ve come to think of that time as strangely blessed. If God was calling me to be a writer, He had come up with a very clever plan: every effort I made to stay teaching in the NYCDOE and thus avoid upending my otherwise happy life was churlishly thwarted, while almost every effort I put into writing usually reaped a reward and a way forward. All I needed, I thought, was a year or two to just write. If only I could just catch the break of a little time. So I started putting together applications to several MFA programs. On its merits, it seemed a remarkably stupid plan to leave the reliability of teaching to be a writer, but I decided to try, since writing almost always went well for me, and teaching, increasingly, did not. Besides, honestly, why not? There was no upside to staying at THSB, nowhere else in the NYCDOE seemed to want me, and Stella was gone. Two years to write sounded great to me, so long as I got a scholarship to do it.
Crazily enough, it worked. I got into Pitt. And when I declined their offer because I didn’t want to pay for an MFA, they offered me a full ride. So, with fear and trembling, I turned in my notice at THSB. Danielle and Erica and the students who loved me were sad, and I was too. I knew it was unlikely I would ever return to teaching high school again. In fact, I suspected I would never return to full-time teaching again at all, and that seemed okay-ish. As last acts, the administration was cruel to me without cause one more time, using the kindness of the fair warning I gave them that I was leaving against me, and then a couple of the graduating seniors pulled a prank so vile—dumping live worms covered in oil on computer keyboards around the school, including mine—that I, a person who every year has an emotional mid-January parting from my very dead Christmas tree, didn’t find it hard to walk out on that last day at all. It was another karmic shove toward Pitt, one strong enough to get me through packing up the apartment I’d lived in for eleven years and saying goodbye to Andrew, to whom I would stay close but no longer see every week.
Before I arrived on campus, I only vaguely grasped that I would be teaching as part of my scholarship package, one class of Seminar in Composition—Pitt’s required freshman English class—a term. Pitt keeps those classes small, fewer than twenty students, so they need a lot of people to teach Sem in Comp. That was fine. I knew I could handle it, and I was much more concerned about becoming a student again at thirty-eight and studying writing formally for the first time. For my first few weeks, I almost found teaching relaxing because it was so familiar, although I had to adjust to teaching college students. I learned to be less high-energy and to allow more time for the students—who mostly wanted to be there and certainly were not going to give me the finger as they walked out of the classroom—to just sit and think.
As those weeks turned to months, and I began to know my students, I started to realize that I had been given the perfect karmic reward for all of that worry and grieving back at THSB: I got to help freshmen get used to going to college. Whereas a year before at THSB I had been saying “You guys really do need to start typing your papers before you turn them in, your college professors won’t read handwritten work, probably,” now I was the college professor at Pitt saying “I won’t read a handwritten term paper.”
“Y’all, please don’t plagiarize; let’s learn how to cite correctly” became “I won’t read this until you’ve cited these quotes correctly, unless you want to fail.”
“You guys really have to learn to meet your deadlines” became “This is dropped by one letter grade because you’ve turned it in two days late without explanation.”
“Please stop chatting during my short lecture” became… well, I didn’t need to say anything because one of the young women in my class let the chatting go on for maybe twenty seconds before she shut it down, saying, “I can’t even afford to be here, so can you shut up so I can at least learn?” But I have occasionally had to ask a student to stop by my office hours so I can tell them face-to-face that they need to shush, and it’s always terrible for them, no matter how low-key I am, because college professors carry much, much more authority than high school teachers.
Is that fair? Not really. But it was a beautiful thing to experience. It was healing too, and suddenly, halfway through my second semester, I realized that I was enjoying teaching. I—get this!—looked forward to going to my classes. I missed the students when I was away from them. And when I was with them, oh boy, did I have a lot to teach them, and a lot to learn from them.
And I finally had enough time to write, and build that career. It felt good. It feels good. One might even say it feels like part of a plan.