RACHEL S. 2002

Rachel and I met in the summer of 1992 at the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts -- we were writers, both from Pittsburgh and had a few friends in common. We re-met at JFK, Thanksgiving 1997. I moved into her place one month later. I loved living with Rachel and listening to her intense stories of teaching kids in Harlem. They were all at once hysterical and uplifting while being painfully heart wrenching.

This picture was taken at her wedding to David, Labor Day weekend 2001. It was such a wonderful evening of old friends and fun. I had a small part in introducing David and Rachel, so I felt especially proud on this night.

Rachel had just moved out of Brooklyn, back to Pittsburgh, when she wrote this on September 11, 2002.

Wendell slid into my classroom on his knees, Elvis-style. "I love you, Ms. Rachel, love ya, love ya, teacher," he crooned. A brand new group of eighth graders was shifting into my first period language arts class, the sluggish energy of teenagers filling the room. Mid-day light painted the tops of empty desks with the weight of so much history. The light traveled from the Apollo Theatre and the historic brownstones, just a few blocks away, to this space, where my students wrote their days on streets named for Frederick Douglas, Adam Clayton Powell and Duke Ellington. (In fact, I had no time whatsoever to imagine such poetic thoughts while teaching. I was probably asking Edward to pass out copies of the poem so that he wouldn’t flirt with Janae. My eyes would follow Paul as I talked cheerfully to Destiny, preventing a fight between her Bianca. These are the motions of juggling the difficult intensity that accompanies the first week of school.)

Once my students were seated and looked sufficiently bored, we started by reading Robert Frost.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth

When I was a teenager, someone gave me those lines. The reading of this, and others, has made all the difference. Words and books and stories sustained me as a child and as a teenager. Now, as an adult, I read it with my students who were making a switch from calling me Ms. Rachel to calling me Mrs. Stack -- just married and returned from a summer in Pittsburgh, where I was caring for my mom. She was two months into fighting cancer with grace.

I would call her during my lunch time, as the dramas of new crushes, new sneakers, and new CD’s echoed in the hallway. My mother and I began our year of daily phone calls around that time. We began speaking the language of cancer a few months earlier – blood counts, dilantin levels, and Oligodendroglioma laced our evening talks.

At the end of the day, I would take the M3 from 110th Street, down 5th Avenue to my last semester of graduate school. The bus would weave past the Met, those huge stone steps hugging a mosaic of legs, backpacks, and hot-dogs. As we pushed out of Harlem, I would lean against the window, my head murkily swimming between ideas about the chemistry of my class and thoughts about Pittsburgh. I live in two places, travel two paths constantly. On this Monday in Manhattan, I would have been traveling towards Astronomy Class.

Coming back to Brooklyn, after a lecture on the heavens, I’m sure I was exhausted. The first week’s return to teaching gives you a tiredness you feel in your bones. David was in our apartment, working on his computer and complaining of Indian Summer heat. "Hello, Husband," I might have called as I walked through the door. "Hello, Wife," he might have answered. I was home.