The Late Bloomer

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Mr. E, you’d like that I’m trying to do this. Instead of videoing everything and narrating over it. I couldn’t have done that anyway. There was no time to be a reflective documentarian. Now that I’ve got some time, maybe I can process all this and tell you what happened.

In fact, doing it this way is how I process it.

I know you’d prefer this to, well… you were such a supporter of my writing, a mentor. And so telling this with the intention of writing it down instead of filming it… I know you hated the world of screens we’d come to live in. I tend to agree with you now, though at first I thought you were being a crabby old teacher who didn’t get it and stubbornly didn’t want to. Referred to yourself as a Luddite. I had to look it up.

But it’s me who gets it now. I was getting it then, the way you saw things, which wasn’t negative at all. I got that you were trying to show me that through storytelling I could show readers that the world is a beautiful place, that life is a beautiful thing, even when we’re scared and we don’t understand what life is and who we are and why we live and what happens after we die. “Don’t let anybody tell you they know, because they don’t,” you’d said. When I repeated this at the dinner table to my stepdad, Martin, he said, “Sounds like your typical liberal school teacher who can’t hack it in the real world so he teaches, warping minds with his embitterment.” Pretty poetic for an asshole like Martin, I have to say. I remember offering him a brittle smile when he said that, nodding my head, and muttering to myself, “Embitterment, hmmm.”

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