THE SCRANTON HISTORIAN

by Salvatore Pane

When I first came to Scranton, I had many misconceptions about the life I would lead. This was back in ‘87, when I still had the fresh faced poverty of all college graduates who trade the world of ideas for the dusty floorboards of America the beautiful. When asked, I told people I hoped to become a historian—I’d majored in history, minored in literature—but in the meantime had discovered that education degrees weren’t necessary to teach in private schools in my home state of Pennsylvania. I sent out twenty-nine applications and was finally accepted by a rundown Catholic high school in a town pockmarked by impotent coal mines, their insides tattooed with graffiti. A principal with crooked teeth assigned me sections of American history up to and including 1865.

Before the school year began, Principal Fischbach invited the faculty to his home. I arrived thirty minutes late and made friends with the liquor table, sipping my whiskey and water, blinking at the drab partygoers scattered throughout the living room. They looked like my parents. If only my girlfriend could see me now, I thought. The lackluster student who’d sabotaged himself again and again—getting high before midterms, blowing off interviews to gamble in AC—had been entrusted with the fertile minds of youth. She thought I should go to graduate school, but I wanted to become worldlier first. I wondered how I looked to those Catholic Scrantonians, those bearers of Spanish root words and worm dissections and Catcher in the Rye.

And then the man I would know as Walter F. Cookington arrived. He was baby faced and possessed the long eyelashes of a striking woman. He showed us his Chiclet smile and I immediately sensed that this man would become my adversary.

“Walter!” Fischbach hurried across the room and grabbed his elbow. “Walter. I’m so glad you could make it.” He gestured to the others. “This is the one I was telling you about. The boy with real promise. He had a poem published in The Paris Review!”

Walter shrugged. “It was nothing, really.”

“Of course it is.” Fischbach’s cheeks were red from alcohol. “Youngest poet to be published there in a decade our Walter is. And he’s coming to little old Scranton to whip our kids into shape. Isn’t that right, Walter?”

“Mm,” Walter murmured. “I guess that’s right.”

Then Cookington made a toast. I can’t recall exactly what he said, but I remember thinking it very Paris Review. Still, I toasted with the rest, and when it was over, I returned to the bottles of cheap liquor and sulked, hoping that someone would recognize me as dark and mysterious and deserving of attention.

On my way to the first day of school, I tried to envision my pedagogy. There would be a dozen students in each of my classes, and I was determined to convince each and every one of them that the class was as big a lark for me as it was for them. I’d be the cool teacher, the Fonzarelli, or at the very least more suave than a man named Walter F. Cookington.

After the opening bell, seniors shuffled into my room in noisy packs and filled the back of the classroom. The front row remained empty until a bubbly girl picked the desk across from my podium. In her pressed plaid skirt and uniform polo, a beret in her dark hair, she looked like all those wonderful girls I remembered from my youth, all those ripening beauties that had barely known of my existence. She was pale beyond all comprehension, her face spotted with freckles.

Her name was Amy Ann Snyder and I stuttered through the first ten minutes of class because of how the light caught her hair.

Eventually, I became accustomed to Amy Ann’s presence. I understood the boundaries dictated to us by Bishop O’ Darcy, but occasionally I’d slip and find myself stupefied as Amy Ann rummaged through her purse, a strand of hair obscuring her left eye. I’d forget about the moral obstacles—about my girlfriend back in Philly—and remember Amy Ann was only four years my junior. But those were idle fantasies I only entertained when Amy Ann, proud and receptive in the front row, would raise her hand and speak to me in a voice the texture of whisked cream.

“John Smith was a man before his time, wasn’t he?” Amy asked.

I stroked my chin and tried to look studious. I’d just explained how Smith had grown up in the lower classes, how he memorized The Art of War before enlisting in the Queen’s Army, how he was forced into slavery in Constantinople. Within a month, he’d killed his master, stolen his garments, and escaped to freedom. All this before ever setting foot in Vespucci’s New World.

“Take it further, Ms. Snyder.”

“He was one of the great men. If it wasn’t for him, Jamestown would have been really screwed, right?”

As an undergrad historian, I’d always been drawn to the so-called great men, the John Smiths, the Alexander the Greats, those luminaries whose destines were intertwined with the sprawling narrative of history. In my most secretive of moments I counted myself amongst them, an American boy with the greatest of potentials. I had yet to discover any outstanding talent but figured it was only a matter of time before my abilities revealed themselves like the blossoming of a flower.

She smiled and crossed her hands over her desk. The other students stared into their books or out the window at the beater cars simmering in the lot. While they drifted through the halls with their heads hung low, Amy Ann waved at everyone she passed, myself and Cookington included. A week later, when auditions for Oklahoma were announced, it was no surprise that she landed the lead role of lovable Laurey Williams. And once people started discussing Homecoming, Amy Ann’s name was whispered everywhere as the potential and inevitable queen. Everyone at Bishop O’ Darcy had fallen under the squeaky clean spell of Amy Ann Snyder, and I was not immune.

In those first days, I lived in an apartment in the Plot, the neighborhood in Scranton with the lowest elevation, prone to flooding from the Lackawanna and Susquehanna. It was a one room cluttered with a hide-a-way, a couch that smelled like wet cardboard, and unpacked boxes that held the contents of my uninteresting and easily summed up life. There was a gas stove as well, but I couldn’t cook and took pride in heating cans of soup or microwaving popcorn without burning the kernels and stinking up the apartment. I couldn’t afford television so I listened to what the family below me watched. It was kind of like a radio drama, and the cast of Cheers was in a terrible state of flux.

I rarely went out. I tried a few bars but discovered that people there were inherently different from the friends I had known. These people didn’t intend on leaving Scranton. They’d made their friends in grade school and had held onto them. Most of my Scrantonian contemporaries were married or had kids. They spoke nostalgically of classmates killed in drunk driving accidents, drownings and overdoses; they accepted mediocrity as their lots in life. There was something comforting in this, about their acceptance to the indifference of history, but even then I sensed the danger in getting too close, in being pulled into their magnetic orbits. I confined myself to my apartment, to the canned laughter of sitcoms wafting up through the floorboards like warmth.

That left my girlfriend to talk to. Sarah Milfort had been a year behind me at Temple and lived with two friends with poor complexions and sour smiles. We’d met at a bar on South Street, where I’d spent the entire evening explaining my poorly thought out views on that year’s midterm elections. Sarah nodded continuously and said things like, That’s so smart, You’re so smart, and Your watch is beyond awesome. I assumed this was love, and for the next nine months she served as my personal cheerleader, rarely mentioning her own views or ambitions. She majored in horticulture and owned three pet turtles—Lucy, Sally and Peppermint Patty. Her father taught history at a small college in Central, PA. Her mother had died long before.

Sarah called nightly and made obvious hints about her desire to settle down after graduation. She’d planned to visit in a few weeks. She had a matronly heft to her cheeks, a fullness to her figure that I admired and respected.

“Teaching’s easy,” I told her over the phone. “They make me say prayers every once in awhile, but I don’t really mind. I think some of the kids think I’m kind of dorky though. Isn’t that insane? I would have loved a teacher like me at their age.”

“What do you care what a bunch of kids think about you?” Sarah asked. “Especially in Scranton. You’re only staying for a year, right? You’re still going to apply for graduate school, right? Applications are due soon, aren’t they?”

She had the annoying habit of speaking in questions. It was something I was trying to deal with.

“I miss you?” Her voice sounded slack. In many ways we were perfectly suited for one another. She was the type of girl predisposed to disappointment and the law of decreasing returns. I think she foolishly thought I was sweet, at the very least something more than a self-indulgent man-child.

“I miss you too.”

We hung up. Then I masturbated with a fervor I had not mustered up since high school. After yet another phone call that dodged the topic of The Future, I permitted myself to call forth the image of Amy Ann Snyder. When it was over, I stayed very still and reveled in my own repulsiveness the way some men pass gas and inhale.

O’ Darcy’s football team was very bad that year, but it didn’t stop homecoming mania from taking hold of our school. Cheerleaders hung elaborate posters, and the football team began wearing their jerseys on Fridays. All of autumn revolved around Homecoming, climaxing with a parade at halftime, a ceremony in which Principal Fischbach’s old Miata—his sole extravagance—would circle the field with the Queen and school president in the backseat. Some teachers thought themselves above such pettiness, but secretly we began to discuss who we thought would win. Everyone knew the only true contender was Amy Ann Snyder.

Luckily, I didn’t have to deal much with Cookington during this time. Our lunches were scheduled at different times, but every once in awhile I’d pass him in the halls or in the parking lot, and he’d cast me a sly, knowing look, as if we were somehow in cahoots. He elbowed me in the ribs once when I inadvertently parked next to him. He whispered, “All those old fogies think we’re actually serious about being teachers, don’t they?” I nodded and hurried silently inside.

At the height of the Homecoming craze, Cookington caught me making copies during study hall. I’d left the school president in charge, a doofus with the permanent musk of egg salad and hoagie rolls. Cookington was reheating a plate of chicken and rice in the faculty lounge.

“Homecoming,” he said. “Takes you back, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“Updike’s got a great little story about football season. You a fan?”

I fiddled with the printer. I opened it up and reset the original. I changed the zoom. When it fired back up, Cookington was still looking expectantly at me.

“Sure,” I said. “Updike’s nice.”

“Wish I could give my students some of him.” The microwave dinged. “They’re reading Frost now. They love him. I can’t wait to hear their opinions on modern poetry.”

I found it difficult to believe that any of our students had much to say about modern anything, let alone poetry. I sat down and eyed Cookington suspiciously. Had they opened up to him in a way they refused to do so with me?

“Yeah? Your students talk much?”

He shrugged. “Not many of them. But there’s one. God, she’s a winner. Amy Ann Snyder? Smart as a whip. I’m starting an English club. Trying to convince her to be the president.”

I could feel the blood rush to my face. I knew it was trivial, but it still rubbed me the wrong way, the idea of Cookington interacting with Amy Ann, leading her in heartfelt renditions of love poems and God knew what else. Maybe they would meet at a restaurant somewhere. Maybe his house. I wanted to tell him about Sarah Milfort—her voice needy and full of longing—a plump little lovable thing that would bear my child if only I asked.

“Amy Ann’s very bright,” I admitted. “Has the brain of a historian. I’m surprised she’s even coherent in your class.”

“She’s more than coherent. She’s eloquent. A real intellectual on the make. The type of girl I wish I could have met at her age.” He chewed dainty spoonfuls of wild rice. “Hey, you never know. Amy Ann’s got a good shot at winning Homecoming Queen. The King’s always the school president but the Queen gets to pick which teacher drives her around at the game. The honor guard. Maybe it’ll be one of us?”

He chuckled quietly. I nodded and left. I thought of Sarah Milfort, how she kept asking the same question again and again. What was I doing with my life? What was my plan? When would I become a great man? I focused on the Homecoming poster by my classroom. There was a black and white photograph of Amy Ann in a field, a flower in her hair, the sun warming her delicate skin. I tried to take some solace in that.

Student loans were nothing in the 1980s, and by the time October arrived, I made enough money to eat out nightly. I brought along tests and quizzes, my feeble attempts at lesson plans, and threw myself into the task of discovering Scrantonian cuisine. I grew to know the pizzerias of Old Forge, the diners that flanked Green Ridge, the wealth of chain restaurants in Dickson City, but I didn’t find a regular spot until, on a whim, I cruised into Cooper’s, a great wooden vessel of a restaurant with a lighthouse and purple octopus protruding from its mast. But what I found inside was even more surprising: Amy Ann looking crisp and professional, her name stitched across her heart in loopy cursive.

“Mr. Donovan.” Her voice rose sharply as she approached my table. “I didn’t know you ate here! It’s so good to see you!”

I told her I felt the same way. “I didn’t know you had a job. Must be hard to keep your grades as high as you do.”

She laughed and snorted a little, a charming defect that humanized her beauty. We smiled at nothing in particular while Amy Ann produced a pen from behind her left ear. Neither of them was pierced.

“You should try the lobster bisque. It’s our specialty. It’s spectacular.”

I acquiesced and assumed that would be the end of our conversation, but in between checking on other tables, Amy Ann sat across from me and tried to convey all the stormy contradictions that make up an eighteen year old girl. She talked breathlessly about how well Oklahoma was going and how she dreamed of trading Scranton for the life of the theatre but couldn’t imagine abandoning her family or handling the prolonged rejection standard to a career in the arts. She told me she was genuinely interested by all kinds of things, everything from the plight of Jamestown down to mid-nineteenth century slave narratives.

“I’m going to college next year and I’m going to have to select a major,” she said. “It makes me anxious. I don’t like narrowing down my options. I don’t like specialization. Competition either.”

I wanted to reach across the table and tell her me too, that I’d waited all my life to find someone who would say something so beautiful and full of truth. But then I remembered Amy Ann’s age and how pathetic it was that a man entrusted to teach minors could be so moved by a teenage girl’s soliloquy. I changed the subject to Homecoming and her chances, and as anticipated, she bashfully claimed she didn’t know and frankly didn’t care.

“I’m not riding on it,” she said. “It’s a very wait-and-see time for me, Mr. Donovan, if you can understand.”

I could. And when I parted ways with Amy Ann and returned to the parking lot, I found myself dwelling on my childhood, how the mere knowledge of being a boy with a limitless future had once so moved me. I remembered a carnival I’d attended with my cousins in Maryland, how I’d paid two dollars to have a Chinese calligraphist study my palm and draw the character at the center of my soul, my very essence. He scribbled something on my forehead that resembled an ampersand. “Chosen one,” he told me. “It translates to chosen one.” Even then, failure had seemed like a terrifying possibility. Inaction felt so much safer, a can’t fail if you don’t try strategy that I naturally gravitated toward. But seeing that Chinese symbol filled me with hope that I could become something more, the type of man surrounded by beautiful women, the type of man people would remember. Amy Ann reminded me of that time. So I began eating at Cooper’s weekly, then twice a week, then nightly, Amy Ann Snyder the sunshine in an otherwise bland existence.

On the afternoon of Sarah Milfort’s arrival, I waited out the final bell in the faculty lounge while inspecting a Homecoming poster I had never seen before—Amy Ann surrounded by half a dozen girls showering her with flowers. Fischbach walked in during the final prayer, clapped me on the back and smiled that crooked grin of his.

“Mr. Donovan,” he said, “I’ve been reading those lesson plans of yours. Fine as frog hair. I had some doubts about you in the beginning, but I think you really have a future here at O’ Darcy. A few years down the line and you might become one of our superstars.”

It had never occurred to me that I might be praised for any aspect of my teaching. I nodded my thanks.

“To tell you the truth, I thought Cookington was going to be our go to guy, but boy, you ought to see the work his students are handing in. Nonsense. It’s all navel gazing and feelings and new school feel goodery. Your style is classic, Donovan. You’re style’s old school. We respect that here.”

We shook hands and I disappeared into the parking lot. What worried me as I drove to pick up Sarah was the tiny beacon of pride in my chest. It’d been so long since I’d been singled out for approval, and I suddenly felt potent and courageous and strong. I parked my car at the bus terminal and leaned against the side door. I wished I could see myself as Sarah did: a powerful young man on the make. And before I knew it, she emerged from an unwashed Greyhound. Her rolling luggage made an awful scraping noise against the pavement. She looked tender and off balance here in this foreign landscape, a sweet recognition in her eyes when she spotted me. I’m embarrassed to admit now, but my first thought upon seeing her was that she looked a touch heavy in a navy dress that clung to her lumpy stomach.

“The boy,” she squealed as she pressed her nose against my chest.

“Yes. Hi.”

We drove aimlessly through town as I pointed out the highlights—City Hall, the train museum, Lake Scranton, the Archbald pothole—and all the while Sarah unfavorably compared the town to Philadelphia, the type of metropolis deserving of a fine man such as myself. After awhile, she complained of hunger pains and I could think of no better place to convince her of Scranton’s rustic charm than Amy Ann Snyder and Cooper’s.

Amy Ann was waiting for us inside. The Oklahoma star never got used to seeing me in what I’d begun to think of as our booth.

“Amy Ann. I’d like you to meet Sarah Milfort.”

They exchanged pleasantries while I explained how intelligent Amy Ann was. She blabbered on about how I was the type of person who not only taught history, but also taught life.

“What a kid, right?” I asked when she’d gone to retrieve our orders. “You know, she’s the frontrunner for Homecoming Queen. The kids vote Monday and the winner gets to pick a teacher to drive her around the football field. She might pick me.”

Sarah looked hard at me and frowned. “Are you still planning on graduate school or are you considering staying in Scranton?”

I picked up the salt shaker in my palm. “I’ve considered staying. Yes.”

Her posture turned rigid. I knew this was the purpose of the entire trip, but I hadn’t expected her to go for the jugular so soon. Sarah had always been a finicky girl, and I wondered if her time in Philadelphia without me was beginning to change her.

“And why are you thinking of staying exactly?”

I’ve considered that question for a very long time. That day in Cooper’s, I sheepishly told Sarah Milfort that maybe I’d been under too much stress in Philly and needed time to figure things out. But that wasn’t true then, and it’s certainly not the case now. I don’t think I’ll be able to admit the truth for a great long while.

I awoke that night in a cold sweat for the first time since the insomniac days of my youth. I propped myself up on my elbow and studied her blanketed body, the rise and fall of each breath, her hair on my pillow. She suddenly reminded me of fast food, how empty you felt after you ate it. I tossed off the covers and started to pace, a habit I’d developed in undergrad during times of acute stress, usually before I’d blow off whatever it was making me so nervous. Trains hummed in the distance and the streetlight outside cast the apartment in a sickly yellow. Something about how it tinted Sarah’s face made me do it. I found a pen and some paper and tried explaining why I didn’t want to see her again, a sprawling mess about big fish in little ponds and how I needed a year or two out of the city to get my bearings straight. It was self-indulgent and nonsensical, and I ripped it up and simply wrote that it was over, that it would be better if she called a cab and left before I returned. Then I drove to a convenience mart. I ate a double cheeseburger with bacon and onions and barbeque sauce and felt it sitting in my stomach like an anchor. I slept in my car and watched a film at noon. It was about a New York City watchmaker who killed off everyone in his apartment building so he could be alone. I sat through it twice. Then I drove to the boonies with a six pack of Yuengling in the passenger seat. When I finally returned home, Sarah Milfort was gone, my meager belongings strewn about on the floor, the couch overturned, a can of tomato sauce opened on my bed. She’d written a response claiming that I lacked ambition and manners and wasn’t much of a catch. She didn’t even think I was very intelligent, had only told me those things because that’s what I wanted to hear. She said I’d never amount to anything. So I sat in the filth of my life and for the first time in months felt relieved. Now there would be no more expectations. Now I wouldn’t even have to try.

I arrived early at Bishop O’ Darcy that Monday and was walking down the hall when I heard that peculiar snort of Amy Ann Snyder’s. It came from Cookington’s doorway, so I hid and peered inside. They were sitting close together while a handful of inferior students looked on. It was only seven-thirty and class didn’t begin for another forty minutes. At first, I thought they were discussing the Homecoming election slated for later that day. But then I remembered Cookington’s English club.

Cookington leafed through a book on his lap, giving Amy Ann the type of deep, reverent look I thought had died with John Barrymore and all the other antiheroes from the silent era. “I’d like to read you something very beautiful and terribly profound.” Cookington cleared his throat. “Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky.” He continued on, his voice a marriage of music and earnest confidence. “Of insidious intent/To lead you to an overwhelming question…/Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’”

I couldn’t concentrate on the rest of the poem. All I could focus on was Amy Ann’s star struck look, the way she bashfully crossed her legs at the ankles and stared at her Mary Janes. She held fast to the chair, and when Cookington finished, all she could do was whisper, wow, as if his very voice had slithered its way inside of her.

I retreated to my classroom and awaited my slack jawed students, the mutant overgrowth of Scrantonian youth. I was a fool to think Amy Ann Snyder would ever pick me as her honor guard, and I took it out on my students, assigning them open book essays about the fate of Jamestown following John Smith’s departure. And when the Homecoming assembly began, I ducked out a back exit and grabbed the Lucky Strikes I kept in my dashboard for emergency situations. I sat on the hood of my car and gazed into the valley of Scranton’s Central City, the rust spotted spires of City Hall, the domed Steamtown Mall, the smog that hung over our heads like clouds drifted too low to the earth. It was a fine place to think about failure.

I didn’t learn the results until just before lunch. I was walking towards the faculty lounge when Principal Fischbach chased me down, his tie flapping over his shoulder.

“You’ve done it again, Donovan.” Fischbach socked me in the arm. “No Homecoming Queen’s ever picked a first year teacher to be her honor guard before.”

“What?”

“The assembly. I’m glad Amy Ann looks up to you so much. I just hope you’re man enough to drive my Miata.”

I don’t recall exactly what I said to Principal Fischbach next, but most likely it was a subdued thanks, something breezy and quick so I could escape into a bathroom stall and revel in my success. I’d won. I’d beaten Walter F. Cookington and The Paris Review and the love struck ghost of T.S. Eliot. I’d bested them all and imagined the smell of freshly cut grass, the cheer of the crowd, the give and pull of Fischbach’s candy apple red Miata.

We assembled behind the bleachers. Principal Fischbach and his Miata, the egg salad smelling school president, the one and only Amy Ann Snyder. The sky was overcast and Fischbach kept looking up and shaking his head.

“I hope we get this over with before it rains,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. Only Amy Ann noticed, smiling slyly, wearing what appeared to me like a communion dress from a previous century. The school president made awkward small talk about lowering the price of cafeteria candy bars, and after what seemed like a lifetime of anticipation, we heard the referee’s whistle that signaled the end of the first half.

I held the backdoor open for Amy. I touched the small of her back.

Amy Ann and the president sat up on the backseat while I adjusted my aviators. We waited for the marching band, and as soon as I heard the opening drums, I put the car into gear and drove towards the field. We passed the bleachers at five miles per hour and the fans launched into applause, Amy Ann waving, her body young and wonderful. I tried to remain stoic at the wheel but waved to Cookington when I saw him. He was sitting alone in the front row, tugging at the sleeve of his ratty sweatshirt. I waved again. And as we approached the first turn at the end zone, Amy Ann leaned forward, gave my shoulder a squeeze, and permitted me a wholly innocent kiss on the cheek. Her lips felt like silk.

And then, even before I made the very first turn of our journey, the sky opened up—one drop, then two—and drenched us all. The marching band scattered and Amy Ann put her arms over her head and screamed.

“Get her down,” I yelled to the president. “Get her down!”

The boy did as he was told. He took Amy Ann by the hips and they fell into their seats while I cranked up the roof. The vinyl covered our heads and left us silent with nothing but the ping of rain and the soft, sniffly tears of Amy Ann Snyder.

“It’s ok.” I touched her tangled hair. “It’s ok.”

But even this small act of kindness felt like a lie, and Amy Ann shook her head free. She buried her face in the dimpled shoulder of the school president and openly wept, and for the first time I considered that all along this had been my true competition, not Cookington but the pimply, philistine masses of Bishop O’ Darcy. He took her in his hands and cooed, “There, there. There, there,” a gesture so familiar it’d be obvious to anyone he’d done it before, that he’d received Amy Ann like this countless of times. I faced front and squeezed the steering wheel. I couldn’t even beat an unpopular teenage boy.

I drove back towards the bleachers and watched people in the stands rush toward their cars or cower under shared umbrellas. I could make out Cookington sitting as though nothing happened, allowing the rain to soak him through. Something about him made me worry for the future, about what it held for us all.

As I mentioned, this all happened a long time ago, and I rarely see Amy Ann these days. But I did run into her last Friday at the First National. I’ve arranged my banking habits so that I don’t have to see her, but there she was at three-thirty on the dot. I stood by the entrance and tapped the sad little check creased in my chest pocket. There were three other tellers alongside Amy, but she spotted me before I could react and waved me over, bringing me back to those long ago days at Cooper’s. How could I have declined?

Amy Ann Snyder Reece is still a beauty. She’s gained weight, but she’s retained her porcelain skin, the honey of her voice. She smiled at me from behind the plate glass window that stood between us. She told me how good it was to see me.

“Sure,” I said.

She deposited my check and handed me the receipt, told me her twins, the eighth grade soccer stars over at St. Anthony’s, were entering Bishop O’ Darcy that fall, that they’d signed up for my history class. I told her I was delighted. I told her I couldn’t wait. But in the intervening years between Amy Ann and her children, I had long stopped noticing the individuality of students. They had each transformed into a single shuddering mass.

“Well,” I said. “I better get going.”

She called me by my first name while waving goodbye. I didn’t like how it sounded on her lips and longed for those earlier days when she wouldn’t dream of calling me anything other than Mr. Donovan. I don’t enjoy avoiding her, but there’s just too much we refuse to acknowledge. She knows I remember her aspirations, her dreams, how quickly she abandoned them for the stability of The Family Life and Dean Reece and his tiny franchise of swimming pool stores. And in some ways, I imagine she’s always been cognizant of my own aspirations, of becoming a great man, of accomplishing something vague and important. We don’t speak of those unopened doors just like we refuse to discuss Walter F. Cookington. He only stayed at O’ Darcy for a year until a small university published his forgettable book of poems. He left for a teaching position at a writing program in Mississippi. His meager accomplishments only highlight our lack. But sometimes Principal Fischbach will read one of his poems over the loudspeaker. He tells the students that the poet Cookington once taught right here at Bishop O’ Darcy. They don’t care. They don’t remember him. They don’t want to know about things that are old, of people who are mediocre.

by Salvatore Pane