Birthday Bench, Spring ‘18

The other day the weather was lovely so we had class outside at the professor’s slightest hesitation. We all picked up our bags and cups of tea and headed for the grass in the sun. There’s a bench that the class sits around. It’s a memorial bench with a plaque on its back for I’m not sure who. Everyone knows that the professor sits there because he’s old and we sit on the grass because we’re young. After making a circle and sitting down, we unpack our things. As we’re doing this the professor looks at the bench he sat on, the same one he sat the last time we had class outside. He puts his hand on the plaque with the name unknown to me.

“Today’s her birthday. She would have been 33.”

I realized that I had heard his daughter died. I didn’t know much but he went on to say something to the affect that it had been nine years since.

Then, unceremoniously, class started. It seemed like a travesty to me. Here he is on his daughter’s birthday, a day that commemorates the beginning of life, sitting on a bench memorializing her death at 24. And we are having class, sitting on the grass, hearing words from some student presenting about a metaphysical subject but not paying them any mind. We are zoning out, picking at grass or staring as close to the sun as we can, slowly getting burnt.

How he did it I’m not too sure. I felt that he had every right to tell us all to leave as he sat on the bench remembering his daughter as she was. I wish he had done that. But instead all our thoughts roamed free. When I looked at him he looked free too. He was engaged in what the presenter was saying, taking notes, writing down questions he was sure to ask later, always returning his arm to the back of the bench when he finished scribbling, his fingers dangling over the plaque.

It was odd to be sure. To see a man so close to both life and death of the same individual, his daughter, be so calm. I don’t know what I drew from it. I was just impressed. There is a time for everything I guess, and he knows when he needs to mourn and when he needs to be a professor. But if his hesitation to go outside wasn’t because he didn’t want to deal with these two sides of himself at the same time, I’d eat my hat. He knew it would be difficult. But he sucked it up and did his job. That was a human thing to do.

But maybe just below the surface of writing and looking interested, his daughter sat in his mind, waiting until he could be a dad and give her all his attention and cry as needed. I think that’s what happened. Memories become more clear with bleary eyes and tears. I just hope we as a class didn’t distract him from that, or take that away from him, annoying college seniors that we are.