The phone was ringing in my classroom when I arrived yesterday morning. It was our facility director calling with some sad news: a young man we both knew, I as a former student and he as an employee of the community center attached to our school, had unexpectedly passed away. The director was at kind of a loss as to who to inform; the guy had been a student in my class 30 years ago, my first year of teaching, and we talked about who is still around who might remember him as a middle schooler.
Turns out, nobody but me. I have been in the building the second longest, one year behind my friend and colleague Laura, and one year ahead of Heidi, but neither of them knew him. I considered reaching out to the few of his former classmates I'm still in touch with, but decided against contacting them with sad news after it's been a while since I last reached out.
Later in the day, a younger colleague stopped me to recount how her students had asked her if she was here, teaching, on September 11, 2001. "I was in 7th grade!" she informed them, and her comments were similar to those of another colleague earlier in the day who had been in 5th grade at the time.
"You were here, though, right?" she asked me, and I told her I was. She teaches social studies, and I could tell it was the historian in her who listened to my account of that day 22 years ago. To me, it was a memory of a time that seems both distant and not that long ago, but to her I was a primary source and witness to history.
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