Ascension

(M-, then.)

When we met, he stood so close to the faculty lunch table that I had to look straight up him, as one might look up the contours of an overhanging cliff. Which meant he had to look straight down at me, as one might look over the edge of that cliff. May I also report this of my perspective? My colleague folded the elastic band of his underwear over the waistband of his dress pants.

He was being dismissed from our university. He was dilating his problems by writing students to ask for Christian forgiveness over any misunderstandings about any perceived impositions. In attempts to deliver the letters, he followed students in the afternoon dark of the winter quarter to dorm lobby, to parking lot, to cereal aisle, to coat check room of recital hall. He found students in the coffee shop or the pizza place and stood explaining himself in such a way that they had to stream around him, as if they were fish and he the refrigerator that had dropped from the sky into their creek.  

Where were his friends in the department? This is the question he asked me when we met, without either of us confronting where I actually was. I suppose he thought I was at least there, across a table in the basement of the library, which must have been somewhere for him. But here’s how I was there: floating and floating away from him with every meeting and with every piece of bad news I gathered about him.

There I was in the ascendant stretch of my career, after all, and with a young man’s ideas of why I was rising and why he wasn’t.

To my former colleague, M-, of the faulty zipper that by cruel command of the stars left your fly Napoleonically parted. Of the underwear band with the inside-out dashes. Of the dandruff on the tinted glasses. Of the carpal tunnel brace like a left-handed bowler. Of the stress-fracture walking boot and your-mother-who-only-spoke-German sitting outside the classroom in Milner Hall, waiting for her son to finish teaching his class, to drive the two of you back home.  

I of the new Ph.D.

I of the tenure track.

I of the corduroy jackets and the four-in-hand knots.

I of the pressed khakis.

I of the shapely wife and the photogenic first child.

Dear M-: You and I now remind me of a joke. Man falling to earth asks man rising from earth, You know anything about opening a parachute? Man rising says back, You know anything about lighting a grill?

‍‍I think about us often, M-. You dropping, heavy as a barrel, and me, on my way up, not realizing I’ll return falling strugglingly, too.