Mrs. Brewster’s Second Grade Class Picture

That’s me, standing in the third row

with a wiseacre grin, skinny and blond,

taller than the others. Of the rest, George

and Jane, Jacqueline and Tom, a class

of sixteen and I recall nearly all the names:

the boys in white shirts or plaid; the girls

in skirts and bobby socks. Mrs. Brewster

stands to the right, dark hair, a benign smile.

She, who I’d thought old, looks about forty:

Bailey School, East Lansing, Michigan.

By now roughly sixty years have passed,

while the lives that, in 1948, were scarcely

at the start of life have almost completed

their separate arcs, if they haven’t done so

already. Strange to think that some are dead.

A few of these children had great success,

a few had moderate triumphs, others

were dismal failures. Some were granted

happiness each day they spent on earth;

some felt regret with every step. I know

nothing of how their lives turned out.

Look at Margaret sitting cross-legged

in the front row in a light-colored dress.

The black and white photograph can’t

do justice to her fine red hair. A smile

still uncorrupted by appetite or cunning,

no telling how long it retained its luster.

But all must have pursued life with various

degrees of passion, arrived at decisions

they felt the only ones possible to make.

How many would now think otherwise,

that the indispensable trip to Phoenix

might as easily have been to New York,

that the choice of a career in law might

just as well have been a job in a bank?

What is needed after all? Which choices

are the ones really necessary? Could I

have been as happy as a doctor or even

a cop? No burning passion lies hidden

in these faces, all that came later, if it

came at all. But how bright and eager

they appear, how ready to get started.

One morning Mrs. Brewster gave us a treat,

showing her slides of Yellowstone Park.

In the dim light of drawn shades we stared

at a buffalo calf crossing a brook, a bald eagle

perched on a dead branch, Fire Hole River,

Mystic Falls, Old Faithful of course. How strange

these places looked compared to where we lived.

Were these the wonders we’d been promised?

At the water’s edge a grizzly devours the carcass

of an elk; a black wolf creeps out of the pines.