It's the aftershocks that surpise you.

Note: I know I said I'd talk more about weddings and marriage today, and single people. I'll get to it. This morning, this started coming out instead. It's kind of about marriage, too.

Quite a while ago, I had a long and multi-faceted dream in which I was teaching in a very large high school. At first, thinking back this morning, I thought I'd had the dream the night before I started teaching at Turner, but it's more likely it was just a dream I had sometime well after I stopped teaching. Especially considering how I think one of the people in the dream was one of my favorite students, J. who was bubbly and deep at the same time, the sort of person perfectly suited to lead you through a dream. The dream covered a few weeks of classes, and a field trip, and as dreams do, the beginning and end of the school year, and lots of teaching and interacting with kids, and a lot to do with the end of the school day, bright and sunny and school busses.

The dream school building was made up of all different parts of other schools I'd been in, hodge-podged of different eras and insitutional architectural styles like Olathe North is. It had very long halls akin to my memory of visiting Lawrence High as part of a Stu-Co exchange back in high school (or maybe it was Free State; they're both huge). It had a central commons hub with hall spokes like Olathe South. A lot of the classroom halls were the two-story stacked hospital sterility of Olathe Northwest.

But the atmosphere of the whole building reminded me of my grade school's little theatre, which had a long snake-curved concrete wall that formed the back wall of the stage in the middle of a large room. The wall had a balcony you could get up to from behind, which is quite the amazement for grade schoolers, let me tell you. A balcony! Such fun! They cut some fat, curved steps into the concrete floor for seats. The whole thing, stage and seats and balcony, was thin carpeted. It was a wondrous place, a room open to the hall, right by the office, usually dark, except for special events. A room where anything could happen. I remember performing a melodrama there with the girl I always had a crush on, I wore a my dad's fedora and a trenchcoat and sunglasses, the first time I remember loving theatre. Brian Busby came once to speak about the weather. One of my most vivid memoeries is a speed arithmetic competition that I did not win, but always wanted to have won because I thought I was SO smart, and I still look back on for perspective on my own thinking processes.

So there was a magic and nostalgic sadness to the dream school. But also, there was the feel of the back stage, behind that snake wall, with the stairs up to the balcony, and the storage for the projection machine for making large primary colored posters with bold lines. I was in Mr. Lang's fifth grade class, and his room was down the hall behind the little theater, in between the two kindergarten classes. And on the way back from lunch or gym or music, or especially visiting the other two 5th grade classes, on the far end of the building, we walked in line by that backstage area, which was indirectly lit and littered with bulky school supplies like rolls of colored paper and that projector I mentioned, and there was a door to outside that we almost never used, but let light in like heaven when it was open, and it all felt like the back side of the world, God's scaffolding exposed.

They later filled the sunken seats in with more concrete and carpeted it over and remodeled the whole thing into an expansion for the neighboring library, and all the magic left. Which is the exact opposite you'd expect for filling a space with books, but that is what happened. That's the truth.

In this school in the dream, there was a sparsely-used wing, far off the commons, and the top floor had 50's style classrooms like Shawnee Mission North, with doors to the outside and untinted windows in the hall. But if you went down a dimly lit hall underneath, and then down a long ramp like the ramp at Olathe North, but done in the brick architectural style of Johnson County Community college and underground. Then you got to a small commons area, with a pod of classrooms on the other side like California/Chisolm Trail. But before that pod, on the left side, at the bottom of the ramp, across from the janitor's closet, was an old band room, dug into the side of the hill, which was my classroom. It had tiered seating going down, and I brought incandescent floor lamps, so it felt like home or a hobbit hole, and my desk was at the top in the right corner, surrounded by posters and shelves and knick-knacks, and I taught lots of interesting things, and it was good.

Last night, I went back to the dream school, and I thought it was Turner. Not until much later in the night did I remember what my actual classroom was like. I walked the classroom halls, and the corridors, and the dark overhang of the entryways off the commons, light streaming in through high windows, there in the waning days of the school year, after classes had stopped, but before the teachers had left. Summer school weeks away. This is when school buildings always feel the oldest. All the youth is gone home to play, and the motes hang in the shafts. It's closing time, you've cleared all your things and you've put them in boxes. But there are stragglers turning in last late projects, yearbook staff settling in for the last deadline work of the summer, football players hitting the weight room, teachers sliding laminated posters into drawers, finishing grades, really hearing the air conditioning fans deep in the ceiling for the first time since August..

I went down a hall, past a dark place that felt like the back side of the world, and down the ramp which was very much in the same place as Mr. Lang's classroom somehow, and into my old classroom. It looked much the same, the new teacher had posters, and her own floor lamps, and her own shelves. It'd been raining lately, and the ceiling had been leaking from the waterlogged earth above, and it was stained brown and peeling.

I had this long conversation with the wonderful woman who now taught in my old room. Some of her students came in and hung out, did some work, felt at home. She was young, and punky, short brown hair. We talked about how she was keeping up a lot of the things I'd done, without even knowing I'd done them before; the kids kept telling her. The incandescent lights, and the laid-back style, and hanging out with the kids like they were people, and teaching them with really good books how to read better. She'd had them reading Maus to expand their reading skills to graphic novels, something I hadn't considered. The year was good. She was hoping for another. Some of my old students came in and they said how much they missed me, but that the new teacher was good, so I didn't have to worry, that the new lady had taken over, and it was fine.

I've always felt a little guilty about leaving teaching. Sometiems I like to lie to myself that there's nothig I coud have done, but that's not true. There are many things I could have done, if I'd only started much sooner. If I'd known I'd teach before I taught. And yeah, I liked having a job that felt meaningful, but the profession? Meh, really. You can have that. Oh, but the kids? Ah, alas.

It's like I was SO important, and I needed to be there, those kids needed me to listen to their stories, and to teach them more stories. But this obviously isn't true. Other teachers can come along and be there, and other teachers do come along, and other people, too, adults and peers. I am just a man. Just a small part. But you love them enough, you think maybe you can change something. Surely you can change something.

I think the best teachers must feel like this. This is why they're always there, late at light, weekends, summers, preparing and thinking. Letting the building soak into you, and you become part of it. You've got something to offer those kids, like nothing else anyone can offer, so you've got to be there. Your life for theirs. Your life is theirs. That's why so many good teachers seem like they don't have other lives. Their lives have become the school. Giving your life up for someone gives your life meaning. Is teaching enough?

In my dream, I thanked the new teacher for for being there, and I meant it, she was good, and I said goodbye to the kids, and visted the teachers in the pod across the small commons, they had been my lifeline my "first year", and then I went outside on the hill next to the school and I buried my face in the cool grass and cried for a good long time, really letting myself mourn, for the first time, leaving teaching.