That moment, with the tug on the hair, me at the desk, the precise distance between us and the angle of eye contact still haunts me two and a half days later. Gabriel's gesture, for it is more gesture than action to me, took me back 25 years to another occasion when I sat at a desk, my hirsute arms evoking curiosity in a young boy. He is a boy who has been in my thoughts throughout the 25 years that have passed. For a time, I pondered naming Gabriel after this boy, but with the reviews in, it seems we did a decent job of choosing the name that we did.
The boy's name was Marcusi. With my son, I might have dropped the terminal "i" or made it a middle name, but the time for that musing has passed. Marcusi was the lone boy in the first class I taught when I began my teaching career in 1991. He was the youngest in the class and we bonded over hockey in particular but recollections of him evoke memories of him visiting my home for soup and Oreos, the boundless energy with which he brought the milk to everyone's desk, the way he played Ebeneezer Scrooge during our second Christmas concert together and the insistence with which he protected me. A wealth of fond memories for a teacher after two years in the classroom. Outside the classroom, I recall the unbelievable, fortuitous opportunity to take him out for dinner to a sports bar in Montreal where he marvelled at the array of televisions that ensured he had every chance to keep his eyes on the game between the Penguins and Blackhawks in 1992. His curiosity about the lemon wedge in my Coke earned him a wedge for his water and one of my indulgent smiles.
But the memory of Marcusi's tug on the wrist might be pre-eminent among my memories for its intimacy and boyish wonder. When Gabriel did the same, it brought so much of that time back to me that it has been overwhelming. Perhaps there is some vague universal in that act or gesture - that a plurality of boys have that habit of pulling wrist hair - but it has ineffably connected Gabriel and Marcusi. When I think of the angles as our eyes met, I am certain that my chair heights then and now were such that I met Gabriel's eyes at the same angle that I met Marcusi's nearly 25 years ago. When I consider the Inuit belief that a name is handed down because of the belief that an ancestor's spirit is embodied or reincarnated in the child, I get spooked by the common gesture.
Marcusi is no longer with us. He would be 35 if he were but he took his life in September 2001, just as he turned 21. There were issues even when I. Was teaching him when he started abusing solvents because of bullying. I managed to stop for a while and he even graduated from high school - no small feat for an Inuk. There are time when I wonder if there was more I could have done, especially having taught during those formative years but there was only so much impact I could have in the course of the years that followed my departure from his village when he was twelve. He even kept in touch by letter while I was in Japan. A teenaged boy writing letters? Mailing them halfway around the world? You would readily acknowledge that he's rare, but I'll tell you he was special.
For me, the repetition of that gesture was so many things all at once - cautionary, spooky, puzzling, spectral and reassuring - and a harbinger of second chances. It is a reminder of how fragile and fleeting childhood and innocence can be. I will need to be vigilant about the things that will challenge Gabriel in the years ahead and I will need an internal strength to prepare him and to face them with him. If there's something mystical or spiritual at play in this echoed gesture as well, then I take from it the message that the too-brief dry run with Marcusi was a gift and that there is a lot of him in the boy I had half a mind to name after him.
No comments:
Post a Comment