This is so not real.
It's
May of 2008 at the local high school where Drew and Amber had attended
high school. They are sitting in her classroom to avoid the
mindless small talk of the faculty room at lunch time. Amber,
over a nice salad, which they had cooked the past weekend after returning from
a digital poetry symposium in the next state, was telling him about her
experience that morning trying to teach Calvino to her advanced
students. Drew listened and nodded, smiling at her student's
innocent questions about one of postmodernism's finest novels.
Amber,
between bites, spoke of their complaints
about the complexity of the novel. He leaned back and examined her, head tilted
slightly. She really was the kind of woman you'd want to marry.
If you believed in that sort of thing. An old debate
between them
began again as she mentioned her intention to teach the essential
DeLaurentis article about the novel. They'd been sparring about
this since graduate school. Drew always took Sullivan's side in
her response to DeLaurentis. They
laughed at the same time when the ten minute bell rang. A teacher
walked down the hall, glaring inward at the two teachers who rarely
spent time with other faculty members.
Drew and Amber, one or
another, or another, would say, were lost in a world of their own
creation. She was very traditional, more interested in guiding her
students through a text via close reading. Drew jumped right to the
conclusions, picking apart little bits of pieces of the book, and other
books, to recreate them in his own vision. He struggled with teaching
high school students because his conclusions were often pretty off the
beaten path. His recreations didn't work in the real world of high
school English.
Amber stuck a tofu filled fork at him,
smiling as he chopped down on it. Amber always brought him back to
reality. She was much more grounded in the real world. The five minute
warning bell rang. Here, she helped Drew make all the right decisions.