In the Valley
What was teaching in that first Pennsylvania winter but listening to directions and learning how to drive on icy two-lane roads from Easton to Bethlehem? You were tested by a deer standing starkly on the yellow line and a dead opossum freezing in the gravel and the radio playing spirituals about going home on a lonesome highway. The sun skidded to a halt in the smokestacks over the river and I can still see you climbing the snowy hills and coasting past the empty factories and abandoned warehouses to a Catholic school on the edge of town. You were a skeptic in the Valley of the Lord who carried “Pied Beauty” in your jacket pocket and drank scalding coffee in the teacher’s lounge with two old priests and a lanky young nun who played pickup basketball and noticed all things counter, original, spare, strange. What was teaching but quieting a classroom and learning how to stand at a blackboard with an open book and praise the unfathomable mystery of being to children writing poems or praye...