memories

A Dream Come True

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In one of those coincidences that isn’t, after seeing one of my nightmares in real life, I never had that particular nightmare again. For years, it was a recurring nightmare: a storm was coming, and it was coming specifically for me. What plans it had for me, what might happen to me if and when it successfully caught me, I never learned and I never hoped to.

(What is the number, how many appearances in one’s psyche does it take for one to realize or decide that a dream is a “recurring” one? I do not often write about dreams because they are too private; I will almost certainly fail in any attempt to bring you into my head, and who wants to visit that strange inner land, anyway?)
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Talk the Walk

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“You should be on the radio,” was what was said. What was heard by my 16-year-old ego was, “You shouldn’t be on TV.”

The compliment was first given to me when I was a kid, when my voice suddenly and without the typical teenager’s pitch shifts and volume wobbles—the “Peter’s voice is changing, this week on a very special episode of ‘The Brady Bunch'”-type changes—deepened and thickened to its present baritone/bass.
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Teach Your Children

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I taught freshman composition at two upstate New York colleges in the early 1990s for five years. My last class met for its final session at the conclusion of the fall 1995 semester, just over two decades ago now.

From the start of that school term, 20 autumns ago, I knew that this was going to be my last semester teaching or attempting to teach or even correctly referring to myself as a “teacher”; thus, of course, two of the three classes that semester were two of the best groups of students I had yet worked with, and they almost made me regret my decision to retire at age 27. Almost.

The decision never was mine to make, however; I was not a good teacher, and I am grateful that I learned this on the sooner side of “sooner or later.” I am, perhaps, an entertaining lecturer but I am an even better student; as a 20-something freshman composition instructor, I must have been execrable. It’s too bad that I had barely made even the faintest start in what eventually became my pose as a long-suffering anything by the time it was all over.
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