Last Day of Class

All of a sudden it’s 74 degrees.  The rise in temperature, along with the change in the clock, which has completely screwed up my body clock, has reduced me to a tepid pool of inertia.  My brain is a puddle, a dark back water for whatever the hell is going on in my unconscious these days.
 

Part of whatever that is has to do with the end of classes.  I am no good at closure.  Closure?  What the hell is that?  I mean at the end of my classes I feel sort of sad and depleted.  After all I have been meeting with these people in my classes for ten weeks; I have had email exchanges with many no matter how mundane or trivial, and some not so mundane and trivial, but about deaths in the family and suing doctors for malpractice or having to go to court themselves for various reasons, or becoming deathly ill and throwing up all night, or getting the pink eye, or having their computer suddenly die and go blue screen—with all their work disappearing into some digital void.  So I have come to know these people a little bit—and then the last day of class comes around, they go out the door to wherever it is they might be going, and I am not likely to hear from them again.

 Ever.  Except if they want something, like a letter of recommendation.

It’s like a post-partum depression or something without knowing what I have delivered or if I have managed to deliver anything at all.  So I keep trying to think of ways that might round the whole class out and bring it to a sense of completion.  Some people bring cookies to that last day of class or something.  But I am not that kind of person, a here’s a cookie person.  Anyway I couldn’t in good conscience hand out sugar.  If I drank myself, I would be more like, a “here’s a stiff drink person,” a “here’s looking at you, kid” sort of person as you go off into the crap that is going to befall you, because in your twenties, and let me tell you, the crap will just rain down.

I won’t see any of them again.  I am a writing teacher—; it’s not like I am a professor in their major or anything.  They have to work like hell to arrange another class with me and even then I am not going to get ten years down the line any emails or snail mail thanking me for like having totally changed their lives.  I mean what the hell—I make them write papers.  It’s not like I am teaching Zen Buddhism or something that might lift the veil of illusion from their eyes and show them the light.

I am left with loose ends and dead ends.

God bless’em each and every one.