Winter Dreams A Novel

ONE I became the man that Brother Martin might have expected me to become. That's what I thought each time I gazed out at my classroom, watching my students file in to take their seats. It was the autumn of 1969, three weeks into my first semester of teaching American literature at the University of Massachusetts as a newly minted Ph.D. The town of Amherst had been home to me since I arrived from St. Luke's for my freshman year. Through four years of college and six years of graduate work I had led a solitary life here. A life of books and golf. And though I wanted, sometimes desperately, to engage the world, to make friends, to fall in love, and to experience the variety of life's chances, I had remained alone, caught in the solitary rituals of an existence that most observers would regard as empty. There were my students in front me each day, so far ahead of me really, though at age twenty-eight, I was already old in their eyes. Truth be told, however, I was a child in comparison to the living they had done, a stranger to love and unacquainted with death, I had spent my entire life in two small towns; I had never seen the ocean or flown in an airplane; I didn't possess a driver's license or a passport; and because I had lived so little, I, like them, was waiting for my real life to begin, believing stubbornly, in the way only a young person can, that life is more about fate than accommodation. I suspect this was why I had fallen in love with college teaching; I was as idealistic, and as uncertain of my destiny, as my students were. We were fellow travelers on a night journey of expectation and discovery. And while I could not tell them what lay ahead, around the corner, because I had never been there myself, I could bless them with the gift of literature, which is, of course, the knowledge that we are not alone. As I waited for the room to fall to silence and for the last student to settle in his chair, I felt a calm pass through me as it always did at the start of class. This had surprised me after spending the whole summer scared to death about facing undergraduate students for the first time. I don't know if America had ever experienced a more eventful summer--Senator Ted Kennedy off the bridge, sending men to the moon, the concert at Woodstock. But I was so encased in fear and self-doubt about teaching that those events seemed to be taking place on another planet. Then the moment my first class began and I realized that nothing mattered more than bringing to life for my students the great writers who had lived before us, all my fears vanished. I closed the door at the front of the room and nodded to a football player in the back row to close the door beside him. "Thank you, Mr. Schmidt," I said as he lumbered back to his seat. In the row of seats along the windows, the tiny red-haired girl from Pennsylvania took off her boots, then lit a cigarette, the first of eight that she would smoke in the next fifty minutes, lighting each new cigarette from the last. I watched the stoop-shouldered boy whose last name was Kapelke pour three packets of sugar into the coffee he had picked up at the spa on the way to class. The Sylvester girl, whose father had died that summer in a fire at the textile mill where he worked, sat with her head bowed as she had through every class. This was my world. The place where I felt safe and useful. And privileged. "Melville," I said softly, and the room grew even quieter. "We've got two weeks to figure out together what it is in Herman Melville's work that we need to take with us for the rest of our lives." I paused. "First of all, can you imagine ever naming your son Herman?" Laughter, even from Miss Sylvester with her bowed head. I was off and running. I was still thinking of her laughter late that afternoon as I rode my bicycle off campus, with Brother Martin's golf club resting acrosSnyder, Don J. is the author of 'Winter Dreams A Novel', published 2004 under ISBN 9780385508506 and ISBN 0385508506.