There’s a much older man in my English class. The younger students each do a little double take when they first see him sitting in there. He kind of sticks out like a sore thumb, really, amidst the teeming teeny bopper undergrads. A fish out of water, with his wooden pencils and spiral bound notebook to jot down notes instead of a sleek laptop.
He has crinkly wrinkles and a prickly, graying five o’clock shadow and his hair is close cut in that terrifyingly peppery gray shade that none of us will have to even think about dealing with for at least twenty years. He wears muddy hiker boots every day and frayed jeans and washed and worn lumberjack shirts. He does the internet assignments at the SLC labs because he I don’t think he has his own computer. I’ve seen him there a lot.
He always sits near the front during lecture. It’s obvious that he reads all of the assignments. He does the homework. He participates in class and shares his thoughts, and he always has something worth saying to say. He seems to try so hard, like he has something to prove, some past mistake for which he has to make amends. There’s this overwhelming need in his voice to be praised and smiled at.
No one talks to him in class. He’s not unapproachable. Just old and I guess that’s weird for us. For some reason, that scares us. But anything different scares us, so it is what it is.
Sometimes he can’t hear very well, so he raises his hand and asks Professor Iyengar to speak louder, please.
Sometimes he mentions his incongruity in a sort of, backhanded, self deprecating way… “Could you speak up? I’m an old man, I can’t hear very well…”
He obliquely calls attention to the fact that he doesn’t quite belong in this setting, with its classroom full of hoodie-donning, glowing, Macbook-toting, texting toddlers. He’s not a part of this generation with its self absorbed little babies who don’t even know what anything is at all…he’ll mention how he’s too old to know what it is to Facebook or Twitter, how he’s too old for the rest of the class to understand his allusion to AC/DC.
“I’m just an old man,” he’ll say almost sadly, in his crackly old man voice. A voice that’s probably been in use longer than anyone else in the class has ever existed, even the TAs.
And I don’t really know why, but it just hurts me so much when he says things like that. It makes my silly little heart ache for him because he’s so brave to come back. There’s nothing harder in this world than having the courage to start over. The only thing harder might be not belonging. He’s dealing with both.
I don’t know his name or his story, and I probably never will. But I admire him so much for being so brave. He comes to class every morning to a room full of fresh faced, children, who don’t even know what it means to be alive yet…and here he is, this wizened old man with so much water that’s passed under his bridge. He’s so brave. It must be so hard to come back, after all that time. I hope that if, somewhere down the road, I realize that who I am at that point isn’t who I want to be, that I have the courage to change my life instead of just settling for what’s easy. I hope I’m brave enough to turn my world upside down and start over for the sake of living instead of just existing with what’s easy. I don’t want to miss my chances. I don’t want to fall into that infinite abyss of “too late”…but if I do, if I ever find out that I left something behind that I really need, then I want to be brave. I want to be brave enough to go back and get it. I want to be braver than that terrifying chance of failure.
At the end of the day, really, I want what everyone else wants: I just want to be someone worth being. I just want to be happy. I just want my dreams to come true, even though I’m not sure what they are really, or if they change tomorrow, but I’ve learned that you have to be ok with changing your mind or else you’ll go crazy.
Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had. Sometimes what you want isn’t what you need, but at the end of the day you’ll find that everything is ok and what you get is really what you wanted all along. Things always end up how they were supposed to end up and everyone is as happy as can be and we all get what we want, even if we didn't know what we wanted to begin with.
I hope I never meet someone who changes my mind about that. You need hope. You just do. You need to reassure yourself that you will be ok. That it WILL be ok. Keep calm and carry on.
I wish everyone in the world believed that things will always be ok in the end. I feel like if everyone in the world believed that, then there would be a hell of a lot less sadness flying around this crazy old place.
Life always goes on no matter what barges in and stomps around. Things barge into your life, out of freaking nowhere, but they’ll make your world beautiful.
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.
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