MY MOTHER IS ALIVE and her mind is clear but her body is failing. She will be ninety-five years old in a few weeks. For three years she has been bedridden and now she is almost unable to move. It is very painful for me to visit her. I love to look into her eyes and talk to her, which is as it always has been. But to watch the terrible invasions she must undergo to be cared for breaks my heart.
I tell you this because it reminds me of the year I was lucky enough to be in the only classes Eudora Welty ever taught. That year her beloved mother had been put into a nursing home near Jackson, Mississippi. Eudora’s friends in the English department at Millsaps College had talked her into teaching a creative writing workshop to help cheer her up as she nursed her mother. Also, probably, to help defray the costs of the nursing home. This was a low point in Eudora’s career. She had not published a book in many years and was struggling with the long novel Losing Battles, which was about the lingering last years of a matriarch in the country. Of course, it was a metaphor for what Eudora and her family were going through. Eudora, with her brilliant imagination, had turned her small, almost dying family into a large, laughing clan with lots of powerful young men. In her own family one brother had already died and the other one was ill. Eudora did have two wonderful, strong nieces and I think I see them in the beautiful young women in the novel.
I think often of that year I spent with Eudora. Her kindness and maturity were the main things I loved about her. She was like my mother and almost the same age. It seemed hard to imagine that the kind, gentle woman who climbed the steps of the Millsaps library two afternoons a week to talk to us was a famous writer. When she talked about literature, about stories she loved, then I believed it, but not when I saw her coming up the steps with her hunched back and wearing her little stocking cap and looking so sad. She drove to the nursing home every afternoon and spent the evening with her mother.
Tomorrow I am getting in the car to go and spend two days with my mother. The drive I have to make is much longer than the one Miss Welty made but the expression on my face is the same one she wore as she climbed the steps to our classroom. I hope we cheered her up as much as my students cheer me up. They take me out of myself. They present me with problems to solve and I try to solve them.
Yesterday I had a note in my mailbox asking me to recommend a young woman to the graduate school of education. She was the worst student in my class last year and contributed nothing to the workshop. Half the time she had not read the stories we were going to talk about. Yet I liked her for being honest. “I haven’t read this” was all she would ever say when I called on her. Also, she was always there, on time, and always listening to everything I said. And she turned in her work on time.
I agonized over what to say in the letter I wrote to the education school. Finally I wrote that she was dependable and honest and very shy about talking in class. I think that was basically true. I told the person to whom I was writing that she didn’t talk in class but I thought it was because she was overwhelmed by the powerful students who were extremely opinionated and critical. After I wrote the letter I decided I believed it. Teaching is turning out to be a lot deeper than I thought at first. Layers upon layers. No wonder no one ever gets any writing done after they begin to teach. At first I didn’t understand that but the longer I teach the more I understand why it happens.