Perspective

I've had a rough week or two. I'm teaching a class and for a few days last week I felt like I was getting nothing but hate mail from students. Most of this has calmed down, but it still pops up from time to time. Because I don't teach every term, I forget just how frustrating and annoying this is.

And then something happened that put everything back into perspective.

Last weekend on Facebook an old friend, someone I usually refer to as My Gay Husband (but from here on out will be known as KW), wrote that his best friend was in the hospital. I started wracking my brain trying to figure out who this was. Who was in the hospital? And then the next day he posted who it was: Bruce. I'm using his real name. Why? Because he means that much to me. And my friends. He was, for the lack of a better phrase, a second father to me.

Bruce is an English professor at my alma mater. I never took him for a class because I knew him too well outside of class. What if I did poorly in his class? (It never occurred to me I might get preferential treatment if I knew him; I assumed I'd be judged harsher because expectations would be higher.) I knew him so well because of KW. Bruce had a reputation for taking students under his wing and for taking in boarders. There are reasons why he did this, and Bruce himself is an incredibly complicated man who can be best described in person. He took KW in as a boarder. But what he didn't know was that with KW came the rest of us.

I've mentioned my friends and I were all pretty tight in college. We were. We still are. There are many reasons why. And every year of college there was a different place we gathered: Paul & Drew's, The Apartment (where I lived with several others), but when KW moved into Bruce's, that's where we all went from that point on. If I told you what we called it, it would completely identify who he is, so I won't.

Bruce's place was this big purple house in a small town. My freshman year I knew the people who lived across the street. We'd to sit on their front steps and wonder if anyone lived in that [Bruce's] house because it was dark and kind of creepy and the lights never seemed to be on. Someone told me this eccentric English professor lived there. Two years later, that house had become my second home.

When KW moved in, the rest of us just started showing up. Bruce began to feed us. And we raided his liquor cabinet. He began to host dinner parties for us. He exposed me, and probably a lot of us, to food we'd never heard of. I'd never even had pesto before then--I was that sheltered from non-Midwestern meat-and-potatoes food. Or non-cheap-ass beer. I tried wine and Saki and foreign beer and food I couldn't pronounce. He had an entire room devoted to music. We'd raid his record collection and play stuff from albums made by people with names we couldn't pronounce. He'd let us do our laundry at his place. He hosted holiday parties for people who couldn't go home. He took care of all of us.

And at the same time, we dragged him out of his dark house. He became more social. He got out more. He blossomed. Once, when he and I were driving to the wedding of some friends, he pondered what his colleagues thought about the fact that his closest friends are all in their early 20s. (Bruce is the same age as my mom.) I told him they probably thought it was strange, but who cared?

Bruce's house was the center of our lives. I don't think it was ever locked because we wandered in and out of it at will. When something went wrong, we went to Bruce's. When something went well, we went to Bruce's. The night we found out Cori died, we all went to Bruce's. I think someone probably arranged it, but I don't remember who. I just remember leaving my place and walking over there in a trance. We filled the place. We sat wherever we could. We held hands, we cried, we laughed... we just were. And at some point, Bruce ordered a monster-sized stack of pizzas for us. Almost two years later, another friend died while house sitting for Bruce (at some point, I think all of us house sat for Bruce). His house was already the center of our universe--this just cemented it.

After graduation, his house was still the center. As we all left and moved and changed jobs and whatever, Bruce's house was always the place we went. It was the place to go to just be. To just think. To contemplate. A decade after I graduated I needed to go somewhere to sort out my life. I was living two states away from Bruce, but where did I go? Yup... Bruce's.

There were other groups of kids after us. That's the way college towns are. But I like to think that no one could ever top us, because we were first.

So, when KW said he was critically ill, I fell apart. As I said to BFF, "I'm not ready for this." I'm not. We all know it is inevitable, but I'm not ready for it. And to say I fell apart is an understatement. When I began to think about what Bruce had done for me, for us, and what we did for him... Well, it was overwhelming. Bruce is doing better. He's still ill, but he is definitely recovering

I'm heading back to my old stomping ground for a conference later this year (I'm presenting). I was already looking forward to it, but now I am looking forward to it even more because this was a reminder just how much I care about that shitty little town and how much the people there changed my life.

And then, in good news, by (step)brother is in the States after a year in Afghanistan. I remember when he came back from Iraq in 2004. My dad called me to tell me that my brother was in Texas, and I burst into tears. I didn't burst into tears this time, but I let out a long breath that made me think I had been holding it for an entire year.

So after all this, I look at the crap I'm getting from other people at work or in class, and I can see that they are just that: Just a job and just a class. There are far more important things in this world than those two things.