No more than twelve of us sat around the conference table that first day. This was January of 1995, the first month of the O. J. Simpson trial, but we were graduate students, not jury members. The room was quiet in that uneasily polite way all first days of class are, no matter the age of the students. We were waiting for Dr. R, whom I knew nothing about except that he was old and he mostly taught courses none of us fiction writers in the MFA program ever took unless the curriculum demanded it—courses such as this one, as a matter of fact: “Studies in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.” I understood why it was required, of course, but I was young and hungry to read only the writers I wanted to write like—cool Southern guys like Larry Brown, Chris Offutt, and Breece D’J Pancake—not bewigged old bastards from the Age of Enlightenment.
My like-minded friend Jeff was the only other MFA student at the table. Everyone else was in the traditional MA program. Neither camp much liked the other. We thought they were stolid and dim. They thought that we, along with the poets, were obnoxious poseurs and snobs. Fiction writers agreed with this judgment, but only of the poets. Meanwhile, the poets considered us to be nothing but tin-eared provincials only slightly brighter than the MA students. I was grateful there were none of them in our class.
When the door finally opened, a barrel-chested old man shuffled in carrying a cardboard box, which he dropped at the head of the table with a heavy thump and a tubercular wheeze. The fumes of his wake wafted in a few seconds later, enveloping us in the stench of decades of cigarette smoke absorbed by his very weathered skin. Without a word, he began removing books from the box and flipping them toward each of us like a Las Vegas croupier dealing Texas Hold’em. Everyone got at least three. Some were novels written by the likes of Horace Walpole and Frances Burney, while others were dusty monographs written by long-dead and entirely forgotten critics about the likes of Horace Walpole and Frances Burney. Most were on the verge of expelling their loose pages like dandelion fluff.
“What would you like us to do with these?” asked an MA student, one of the apple-polishers.
Dr. R chuckled in a way meant only for himself. “Well, there’s just some books I’ll never have the time to read again, so I thought I’d start passing them on in the hope you’ll get as much from them as I once did.”
I gave Jeff a look: Really? Cynicism was what I understood best, not whatever this maudlin business was. Who started a class like that? It reminded me of a substitute teacher in elementary school passing out candy. And I didn’t like the candy I’d been given—nothing but salt water taffy, Necco Wafers, and Black Jack chewing gum.
That semester, Dr. R assigned substantially more than a thousand pages of reading—Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, both Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Voltaire’s Candide, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy—though we quickly determined that he didn’t care all that much whether we kept up or not, which I appreciated. He was, for the most part, just going through the motions, and all we had to be was present. This is not to imply that he was critical or unpleasant; in fact, he was an exceedingly easygoing and friendly guy, though nobody seemed to like him much. We were young and dismissive, and he was old and slightly embarrassing. And so we sat there in silence as he recited lectures probably memorized decades ago, occasionally losing himself on tangents along the way, many that took him far away. Besides the novels themselves, which he seemed to love like the children he’d probably never had (the poor man looked like a wind-burned W. C. Fields with acne scars), he only showed enthusiasm for taking breaks to smoke. “Let’s go smoke seven or eight cigarettes,” he liked to say. “You nonsmokers meet us back here in fifteen minutes.” And then off he’d shamble to stand in a gray cloud for thirty minutes on the front steps of Flowers Hall, always alone.
Except that I somehow remember writing my term paper on Caleb Williams (a novel I recall nothing about beyond it being written by the father of Mary Shelley), everything else about that course has faded beyond recall except for what happened on the last day of class, which began as several others had that semester—with a distribution of books. Once again, I wondered what use any writer my age could have for books written fifty years ago on Samuel Johnson’s 236-year-old Rasselus. Or Aphra Behn’s 328-year-old The Rover. Or William Congreve’s 295-year-old The Way of the World. But now that we’d reached the end of the semester, I no longer cared about these questions. He could deal us whatever books he liked. Soon, we’d be done with him for good. Soon, we’d be lazily tubing down the aptly named Frio River with six-packs of Pearl beer tethered to bob along behind us. All we had left to do was hand over the term papers we all knew he probably wouldn’t even glance at.
When he reached the final book of the box—a thin, green hardback with no dust jacket—he turned it to face us: Robert Frost’s North of Boston. “On our last day together,” he said, “I’d like to leave you with one of my favorite poems, Robert Frost’s ‘After Apple-Picking.’”
As I so often did that semester, I looked across the table at Jeff. Seriously? Poetry?
While Dr. R read, his perpetually florid face gradually grew more florid, and his gravelly voice grew phlegmy with emotion. This was not the same jolly man we’d mostly ignored for the last four months. Barely holding himself together, he had to pause frequently to breathe. By the time he got to the poem’s last lines, his cheeks were damp with genuine tears. Silence followed. Mortified by such a naked display of emotion, I couldn’t even look in Jeff’s direction. What sort of professor cried in front of his students? About poetry! This was why I was a fiction writer, I probably said to myself: no sentimental melodrama. Larry Brown’s Joe and Chris Offutt’s Kentucky Straight didn’t make men cry. Along with the rest of the class, I fled the room as if from a contagion, leaving Dr. R sitting there alone at the table, the book of poetry still open in his hands.
*
Twenty-seven years later, I still occasionally feel haunted by that moment, especially since I never saw, or even heard of, the man again. After graduation, I went on to eventually earn a PhD in English with a focus on nineteenth-century American literature. The goal was to make myself as competitive as possible on the academic job market, especially since I’d yet to publish any of my stories. My younger self, the serious writer sitting in Dr. R’s class, would have seen this move as surrender. I then got married, accepted a teaching position, and had two children. My friend Jeff also took the professorial route, and he, too, became a husband and a father. Meanwhile, we both grew older, as happens. Nowadays, we catch up over the phone when we can, which is not often, usually no more than a couple times a year. For an hour or two, we kvetch about the state of everything, crow about the accomplishments of our amazing children, and reminisce about how, once, all we ever did was gather with friends at my tiny apartment to drink Pearl, listen to Son Volt’s Trace on repeat, play poker, and talk about books, writers, and writing.
During the early days of the Covid lockdown, Jeff and I met on Zoom for the first time. Having not seen each other in person for at least ten years, each of us laughed at the old fart staring back. As usual, wives, children, and elderly parents were asked after and reported on. In a toast to continued survival, we each tilted a beer toward the camera and then drank. Eventually, however, as we always do, we fell back into the stories of our shared youth—departmental intrigues, workshop horror stories, mishaps at bars like the Green Parrot, classmates lost track of long ago, long-lost classmates reconnected with. Possibly spurred by more alcohol than I was used to and thus welling with nostalgia, I asked him what he remembered about Dr. R’s class, which was something I had never brought up with him before, for whatever unknown reason. To my shock, he didn’t remember the poetry reading at all.
“How can you not remember that?” I said. “It was excruciating.”
“All I remember is his coffee, which I was convinced he spiked with bourbon. And the smoke breaks. I remember the smoke breaks. The man loved his cigarettes.”
Though I hadn’t been familiar with “After Apple-Picking” at the time because of my foolish dismissal of all poetry, I have since come to know it well. Sometimes I even teach it in my American literature survey courses, which often leaves me feeling a bit uneasy and out of sorts because of my memory, especially when I read any of its lines aloud. “But I am done with apple-picking now,” the speaker of the poem says. “Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.”
Why had Dr. R shared a poem with us, especially such a world-weary, mournful one? This is a question that has nagged at me for years. “For I have had too much / Of apple-picking,” the speaker says. “I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired.” What had apple-picking meant to him? Had he merely been retiring, or had he been dying? Regardless, I wince—and have winced for quite a while now—at my callousness that semester. What a self-centered prick I’d been, so deaf to anyone but myself and my lofty goals, so disconcerted by displays of sincere emotion, so allergic to earnestness and sentiment.
Then, once I discovered that the memory of this day was mine alone, I started thinking about it even more, so I looked Dr. R up on Google. Though I couldn’t determine the date of his retirement, I located his year of death easily enough, and I was surprised to discover that it hadn’t happened soon after our class, as I’d feared. In fact, it wasn’t until 2015, a full twenty years later. And he hadn’t been in his late sixties or early seventies back in 1995, as I’d always assumed, either. In fact, born in 1938, he’d been only fifty-seven that semester—at least eight years away from retirement age. More shocking, he’d been only five years older than I am today. How could he have seemed so much older to me? And what did that make me now?
After learning that Dr. R had been neither retiring nor dying, I realized that his distribution of old books might have been nothing but a pragmatically necessary culling of his bookshelves. But even so, why read us that Frost poem, especially when he must have known he would end up reacting as he did? I didn’t like having no plausible explanation. Had someone else died? If so, why force us to witness his private memorial? His obituary in the local newspaper told me that he “always said ‘there was a poem for every occasion.’” So what had the occasion been, and why had that poem been the right one to commemorate it? I think now about its end, when the speaker is looking back at his life of apples:
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth. (30-36)
Had we been twelve of his “ten thousand thousand”? If so, had he “cherish[ed]” us and “lifted [us] down”? Or had we “struck the earth” and been of “no worth”? The former seemed unlikely, considering his inability to connect with us, so that left only the latter. Had the sad state of his students, who obviously held so little interest in the novels that he loved, been the reason for his tears? There’s no way to know. Had I not been in such a hurry to leave that day, had I hung back, I could’ve spoken with him. But then again, I don’t remember ever speaking to him. I was too consumed with myself and my writing. Confident that I knew best what was both good and good for me, I resented every minute in his class, convinced as I was that my valuable time—time that I could have spent writing, or at least reading something more relevant to me—was being wasted. I needed things I could use. Something I could apply. What I didn’t need was three hours of undiscriminating appreciation for three hours a week.
Does it need to be said that I came to learn the error of my ways? Then let it be said. Tristram Shandy alone deserves to be the subject of a class all by itself, as far as I’m concerned, and I love Tom Jones and Candide, too. Meanwhile, my love of Larry Brown, Chris Offutt, and Breece D’J Pancake has cooled considerably, as has my love of many other writers I was once a strident fan of, and my appreciation of poetry has increased at least a hundredfold. Wisdom may not necessarily come with age, but at least appreciation does—and sometimes even reverence—especially for so much of what youth dismisses out of hand.
When I first stepped in front of a class as a young graduate teaching assistant in 1994, the year before I took Dr. R’s class, I wore facial hair and my most professional attire in an attempt to fool my students into thinking I was more than just a few years older than they. I even avoided certain bars on the weekends, not wanting to blow my cover by having our paths cross in questionable ways after hours. I have absolutely no such worries now. Today, my gray beard and bald head immediately inform my students that I’m old. And if my facial hair and scalp don’t give me away, my cultural references will. The first time a student referred to the 1990s as the twentieth century, I felt someone walk across my grave.
Maybe Dr. R’s reading of “After Apple-Picking” had merely been an acknowledgment—and likewise a mourning—of the unrelenting passage of time. After all, even though he wasn’t terminally ill, he was dying. As were we, but obliviously. Not being a scholar of Frost’s work, I’ve always assumed that this poem must have come to him late in his life, but he’d been only forty when he published it. He went on to live another forty-nine years. I don’t know what to make of this fact. It bothers me.
Since discovering that Dr. R’s death took place in his seventy-seventh year, I’ve read his obituary a number of times, taking solace in the knowledge that he was survived by his wife of many years, three daughters, and seven grandchildren. I take solace in this because, even though I hadn’t cared to get to know him, he’d seemed like a good and decent man. He had a kind smile I can still see and a generous laugh I can still hear, even after all these years. On the day he read that poem to us, maybe he was trying to tell us something without coming straight out and saying it: Slow down. Pay attention. Sooner than you think, you, too, will have harvested ten thousand thousand apples. Maybe his tears were for us, knowing all that we would come to know, each at our designated time. After all, he’d once been us. We, on the other hand, had yet to be him.
But now we are. But now I am. And why do my students not love what I love so much? How the hell can they not feel the painful punch thrown by the last two lines of Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”?
Besides my lack of concern for a fellow human being, my biggest regret from that semester’s class concerns the books he handed out. I don’t have any of them, and that’s because I didn’t even bother to carry them out of the classroom. Each time he came in with a boxful, I left my allotment in a pile under my chair for the custodial staff to do with what they wished. If that meant they ended up in the trash, I didn’t care. I now wish I had at least one of them for my bookshelves. Let’s say Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker. Though I’d almost definitely never open it, much less read it, at least I could be comforted by knowing that it’s sitting with me here in my office, passed on by a man who once loved it with all of his heart, while the cycles of all my students, semesters, seasons, and years continue to roll on into a future that will soon become the past.
In honor of him, I suppose, I’ve started passing books on to my students, too, though never to the degree that he did. Mostly they’re duplicate copies of favorites, so I’m not sacrificing much, but it still feels good to do so. I hope they’ll be cherished and loved, but I try to be honest with myself: most likely they won’t be. My students’ lives are full of their own passions, just as mine was. Maybe at least one of them will take pity on me and hang on to my gift. Maybe they’ll toss it in a box, lose track of it for years, and then rediscover it once their life has reached the stasis of adulthood. Even if they don’t read it, I hope they pause for a second to flip through its pages and remember their younger selves. And me, too—that would be nice. But if not, that’s okay. I’ve forgotten so many of the professors who taught me things over the years, though not Dr. R. Him I still see standing in a cloud of smoke on the steps of Flowers Hall, alone with his thoughts.
