Notes to Myself

In preparing a lesson plan, I opened an old Norton Anthology to skim it for a particular work.  As I thumbed through the pages, it became less of a search and more of a discovery.  I had an accidental encounter with myself, long, long ago.

All along the margins, carefully written with the needle-pointed black pens I preferred all through college, were annotations, questions, lecture notes, commentaries.  Wallace Steven's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" contained terse notes on interpretations, plays on words.  Plath's acerbic "Daddy" is written almost completely up with marginalia about symbolism, biography, metaphors.

Inside the text itself are other little pieces of me at that time, a draft of a note I wrote to a professor I was going to interview and write about for a paper that became one of my all-time best was hiding in the works of Gwendolyn Brooks, an information slip about a get-together to go see Romeo and Juliet marked a segment from D.H. Lawrence.  As I rifled through the pages, the fragments of my undergraduate slipped around me, pulling me back to that time briefly even though there was not one single picture to be seen.  I remembered the hot, tatty lecture rooms of Lee Hall with their battered furniture, peeling walls, and tatty tile.  I remembered the roar of too-loud window units straining to cool us or the tick-ping-ping of a steam radiator fighting an early December chill.

I remember, too, all the other things that were going on in my life, a grandmother in the last stages of a battle with cancer, the unresolved and endless ridiculousness of my relationship (or whatever) with D., persistent questions about what was coming next in my life.  This bulky volume with its onionskin pages brings it all back, every golden gingko leaf on Engineering Row, every late-night conversation.

Sometimes the past comes rushing back in to swirl around me again, like a tide that shifted without warning. Just that quickly, the fragments I surround myself with coalesce, solidify, and that strange duality of the person I was then and the one I am now have to make peace with each other, find a way to share the space.