(A reposting of an earlier work)

DAYDREAMS AND TALKS TO HIS NEIGHBORS

I could have called Ralph's name, to bring him back to the lesson I had planned. Instead, I followed his gaze out the window, to the empty playground. Beyond the playground lay the empty field, just plowed under, naked against the blue sky. Beyond that were houses, speckled across the horizon. Beyond that was all that was farther than I could see.

I removed my glasses to clean them. I did this even though each time they were just as dirty before as they were after. But everything was a blurr without them. A green and blue haze. Impressions. The place beyond the furthest point I could ever see, even with my glasses. A place I thought about often. A place that looked like this, that looked like the world without my glasses, that looked like tomorrow, how tomorrow fit against the cotours of my life. A vague semblance of something I once had seen so clearly.

And then, at that moment, I could sense the other students waiting. They were near that point where they would look around the room at each other to wonder why I was no longer talking. That morning he gave me a picture. He folded it over like a card. I don't know what he meant by it. It was as if he knew something I didn't. And I don't mean about my job, that I was losing my job. I mean about me. Like he knew something I didn't know about me, about what I was thinking, about what I'd already thought, what I might think. He looked at me without saying anything as he handed it to me. Never once smiled, his eyes without expression except to tell me, without a word but for the look in his eyes, that the piece of paper he held before him was for me, jabbing it in the air in my direction for emphasis. It read, "Some Shoes Are Hard to Fill." Beneath it he had drawn a picture of a dog, walking casually, with a shoe in its mouth. He even signed the picture in the lower right hand corner, the way he usually did when he intended to be remembered for what he'd done.

Sometimes, his actions carried this cache. He had signature actions. This staring he did, this gazing out across the world with so much determination was one of them. Even then he was looking out across the field in a way that said, I look this way. Whenever I called on him to return his attention to the room, it was with that same exact stare that he gave me when he handed me the picture. It was with the same identical signature.

Sometimes, I would just let him go on gazing. Every time I asked him to turn from the window, within minutes he was either at this pose again, or he had engaged his neighbor in a conversation, a joke of some sort. I don't believe that I was ever the source of this laughter. He told me once, while the kids were all copying the last three pages of the D's from the dictionary (a punishment I often used when they could no longer be controlled . . . we started with the A's) that he knew why and that he never wanted to hurt me. He smiled only in the corner of his lips and walked quickly back to his seat, slowing just enough to tickle the ribs of the girl who he had proclaimed to love once during show and tell (much to the surprise of the girl and the laughter of everyone else). She then, in turn, stood and told the class that she loved him too, which was followed by "oohhs" and a chorus of "first comes love."

With the card in my hand, I turned my head to face the window, to hide the moisture in my eyes, which I had no name for. I stared a good long time, before it was apparent that I was being watched by the students, who had one-by-one lifted their heads from their work to gaze upon me with wonder, the same way I was staring at something I once believed to be true, as if I had done something profound. I meant to look at them sternly, but smiled instead. They all returned their gazes back to the task before them, which they each worked on diligently, stopping only to shake the cramps out of their hands now and then, until the afternoon recess bell rang. Without one reminder, they lined up single-file, without a single shove, without a single tease, and shuffled out the door, Ralph at the head of the line, stepping in a rather calculated rhythm, which each student behind him followed.

When I went to pick up their work, I found a note, an apology, which Ralph had written and gotten every one of the students to sign. Some students wrote hearts beside their names, some wrote smiley faces, while others wrote in the neatest penmanship I had ever seen from them before. I watched them as they filled the empty space before the empty space whose depths I'd never seen, each of them playing diligently, absorbed in that very moment, as if no other moment existed in time, either before or ever after. I sat and watched, filled with what I thought should be shame. But it wasn't.

I placed the note in the top drawer of my desk and joined them outside, playing tag, and four square, until it was time to go in. When the bell rang, they all turned to me for direction. And there, in the middle of that open green field, we stayed. We finished what we had come to do, we finished what we had started.

Then, after we returned to the room, we each wrote a story about a stranger, someone we had never met before, who always was different than we were. I wrote one too, my story filling three pages before I stopped to see their faces watching me, asking me to share my story first. I stood, and after clearing my throat, I read to them.

When I was done, and I looked up from what I was reading, I found them all looking out the window, to the very farthest point beyond the very last thing they could see. We stayed this way, looking, listening, breathing in unity, remembering not to forget each moment of our lives that came to us this way, with far off gazes, with wonderment, with nothing but the world laid out before us just like this, whether we were here or there, but always just this way.

When we each of us had shared, we posted our stories by the door, to remind us every time we walked out into the world from no matter where we were that felt just like this, that it was we who believed or didn't believe. Those stories stayed up until the end of the year. Students added to the wall pictures of their pets, their families, their favorite movie stars, building and layering the stories of their lives as strangers until the stories were the stories of themselves. Some even took down their papers and replaced the names of their characters with their own.

From that day on, we never wrote from our dictionaries again, except to look up words we wanted meaning to, which we added to the wall, until the wall was filled from floor to ceiling and spilled out into the hall.

At the end of the year, we took it all down, sharing the pieces of ourselves with each other, writing notes on the backs of pictures to say "stay in touch" and "you are my friend even though we never say it." And, I think this is what Ralph saw. I don't know how, but I think this is what he saw when he handed me that card, that card with nothing in it but vast improbable horizons, far beyond the one's I 'd never seen. And he wasn't telling me, but asking me, and asking me to ask each one of them just what it meant to mean this to themselves.