Teaching by daydream
Between failed drownings and chord progressions, a professor teaches music in another key of life.

BY CHRIS COLIN
Tchaikovsky jumped into the Moscow River one day. He was depressed but the river was too shallow for a drowning. He stood for 30 minutes, frigid water lapping around his waist. Pneumonia followed and Tchaikovsky spent the next months in a hospital bed, where he was informed of his first commercial success.

I was told this one spring, my music teacher leaning forward with the story's drama. A cold, shallow river was something moving but far away, anecdotal. What was true was cut grass, and sudden crocuses, and looking out the window in the last minutes of class in the last semester of college. My future was suddenly relevant, and it loomed wide and empty like a parking lot. I looked straight out the window. I didn't see visions or answers or my life, but I didn't see crocuses either. Crocuses were pretty, and the dull, gray weight of a parking lot future crushed prettiness like a flower.

This was music class. This was for freshmen, maybe sophomores. I was a senior and an British major, feeling great, sad things about Proust and graduating. I had found an exciting life in the English department, sometimes in the philosophy department, the sublime and quick worlds where life itself seemed to be under the microscope. Things that mattered were what mattered. I had a half credit to fill.

Music class was not my life. It was far from things that had to do with me. With its worksheets and quizzes, it seemed oblivious to the classrooms across campus revering truth, or poking at it, forming words for the sad, rich, best parts of life. It was a funny room with linoleum floor, on the quiet end of school property near the woods, something tacked on to my life at the edges.

But those days I was sometimes out at my own edges. Graduation hovered nearby, its threat pulling me from the life I had and turning me back to look. Is this me? Is that me? What do I do? Sometimes I didn't mind a music class looking out at flowers.

Mr. Rowe was English but not charming. He spoke earnestly and intently but also stared off into space sometimes. He didn't appear to be staring at the idea of music. Usually it was a bee or a fly. He would stare and finally swat at it, or back away a little, then resume his lesson.

So he was fine, and good. He did not speak about things relevant to my soul, so far as I could tell, but I learned my scales and chord progressions. I enjoyed class the way stoners do in movies -- the pleasantness of sitting quietly, the joy of disengagement. In March, he told the Tchaikovsky story. I liked it -- the jumping, the cold, the shallow, the pneumonia.

But in May he told it again. It was the last day of classes. He used the same words and put the same pauses in the same places. Everyone in the room seemed to feel the same question: Why is he saying this again? A few students shrugged, some smirked. Mr. Rowe, if he noticed, paid no mind. It was very much spring outside. He finished the story and soon we were reviewing pentatonics. People stopped shrugging and smirking. Still, his repetition of the anecdote -- senility? a joke? a test? -- had given me pause. I looked out the window some more and then the semester was over.

Grades came the following week and I received an A for the class. Surely he'd seen that I was often elsewhere, that my attention was sincere but peripheral. Surely he saw it because he was like this, too. There were moments, after all -- at the chalkboard, watching his own hand trace a bass clef for the 2,000th time -- when he, also, seemed to leave briefly. He had bigger things in other places. Why is one at a chalkboard when one is thinking of a symphony or a lover or a bee?

Walking home after getting my grades, I saw my mind wander. I thought the things that people graduating think about. I looked at the campus the way people graduating look at a campus. I ran into friends and we walked and talked and worried some. I was with these friends when I ran into Mr. Rowe near the library. He looked strange outside of the music room, lost and small.

"Mr. Rowe," I said. "Mr. Rowe."

He stopped and looked around. I reminded him of my name and he shook my hand. We discussed summer plans, him looking at his watch once or twice.

"Well," I said. I looked at him and thought of him staring off into space. There is comfort in a face that will launch itself into a separate world now and then. Executed in the right way, it's the brief lull of moments made simple. "I enjoyed your class."

"Yes," he said and smiled.

I caught up with my friends and we walked home. I told them about Tchaikovsky, though I'd told them before, because it was a good story. It had suspense, and intrigue, and closure. These are things that lift one out of more complicated places -- periods of confused futures, moments of time passing too fast. I thought about how complicated places puff themselves up, and how a twice-told story with a man in a shallow river can be just pretty.
SALON | Feb. 12, 1999

Chris Colin is a writer living in Oakland, Calif.

More teachers we loved:
+ Remembrance of things present By Carol Lloyd
+ Greek love By Hank Hyena
+ The vocabulary of wonder By Scott Rosenberg
+ Radical redhead Miss Smith By Jenn Shreve
+ One valentine too late By Karen Templer
+ My Latin love affair By Andrew Leonard
+ The warlock of grammar By Fiona Morgan

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
T A B L E _.T A L K _.

Did you have a teacher who changed your life? Write a him or her a Valentine in the Education area of Table Talk