Talking To Bob Ashe

Yesterday I took the stage at my old high school, spoke into a microphone, and told three hundred teenagers what it was like to come to an affluent private school in a big city from my life on a small sheep farm. There was so much I didn't understand: I had never tasted a Coke or a candy bar; I had no idea how to negotiate the whole boy issue; I had none of the right clothes. There was plenty to share, a couple humorous bits, and all the words came easily.

In my days as a student, though, I had a speech impediment that left me stammering and stuttering in class. I would wade into a discussion trying to force words out of a throat that had tensed and closed. Without graduate school (where I was forced to speak extemporaneously, over and over again) and without my time in the monastery (where I learned to short-circuit a stutter-in-progress by putting my mind in my feet) I would be tongue-tied still. So these days words usually come easily, and even on stage they issued forth neatly and succinctly.

I was supposed to be speaking to the kids, but really I was focused on the row of teachers at the rear of the room. Many of the old-timers who taught me are still at the school; the house lights refracted through their glasses and glinted off the occasional bald head. These were the people who prodded me to think, to stretch my limits, and--most importantly--to write. Words and ideas were available, even if speaking was difficult. I wrote essays and research papers, an epic, and poems. I am still in awe of those ones who guided me, and still feel very much in their debt.

The teacher who had the biggest impact on me, though, is gone. Missing him has become a defining part of my re-experience of the school. The more serious I become about writing, the more motivated--and the more willing to face the mystery of expressing myself in words for the sheer joy of the experience--the more I love and miss the man who taught English my sophomore and junior years.

Bob Ashe, from Northern Ireland, still had an accent after twenty years in the states. He was an avid soccer player and coach; he moved and spoke with the energy of a much younger man. I loved his class, and I wanted so much to please him and earn his respect--which only made the stutter worse! We were on the same wavelength, though; whatever I wrote seemed to please him, and I valued his insight and viewpoint tremendously.

We disagreed once, over abortion. Actually, the whole class disagreed with him. That was the only time I detected sadness in his voice. These days, I'm not sure I would disagree so much, but back then I would not allow myself to consider what he was saying: that actions have consequences, and that by taking action we take on the results of that action.

I never saw Bob Ashe after I graduated. He left the school suddenly, in the wake of allegations of improper conduct with an underage girl he had coached in soccer twenty years before.

When I got the news--it was in the city newspaper--I had to think hard about what I knew about my hero. What could I think? I knew this person, or thought I did; I had confidence in him; and...perhaps he had made a terrible mistake.

I never had the chance to hear Bob's side of things. He moved back to Northern Ireland, and died a few years later. There was no chance to tell him what an incredible and indelible impact he had on me. The school seems empty without him now, as if it's limping along ever so slightly out of kilter. I keep expecting to see him in the hall, or to see his small wiry frame trotting across one of the lawns.

I do encounter Bob quite a bit lately, in dreams. I know what they mean: this teacher of mine embodies the secret part of myself that knows I can write, that knows I can do terrific work if I polish a piece, that finds joy and wonder in the process and in the unexpected result. Bob is my guts, my courage--my often-buried capacity to argue, to be brilliant, and to inspire.

Yesterday as I sat on stage and talked about my old self, about the awkwardness and naiveté and lack-of-wealth that distinguished me from my peers--as I watched the familiar heads at the rear of the room--I saw Bob. It was the strangest thing. I caught him in every glance at that row of teachers' heads. I could almost tell you which seat he was in. But when I looked more closely, I couldn't quite see him.

I wish so much that I could talk to him now. It would be a great conversation. I know what I would say to him about intention and consequence, and becoming the person you feel yourself to be. And I think I know what he would tell me. I need to hear it from someone.