Monday, April 30, 2007

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Good Night

This weekend I baked somewhere around 250 cookies to celebrate the end of the semester, which was today. I made chocolate chip cookies and sandwiched them together with vanilla frosting, and I also made a double chocolate cookie recipe my college roommate somehow managed to steal from our favorite bakery in Fredonia. I turned out sheet after sheet after sheet after sheet of these cookies until they overflowed from the containers I was trying to store them in.

Today I lugged those cookies up three flights of stairs to my office, where they then sat until one of my students--one of my most-loved engineer boys--happened by my office and slumped into one of the crusty chairs the powers that be stuffed into our office in hopes that student visitors wouldn't mind sitting on something that looked like it'd been peed on by the entire population of the Whispering Pines Assisted Living Community.

This student didn't mind at all. "Hey," he said. He sounded tired, beat-down, half-dead.

"Hi there," I said.

"Can I just tell you about my weekend?" he asked, and I said of course. So he did. He told everything that happened since the time I'd seen him last. And it was a lot of stuff. The kid was having a rough week, and--more importantly--a rough semester.

When he finished listing all the things that went wrong, the student took a deep breath and slumped against the back wall. He looked like he was two seconds away from imploding. And if that happened, the only evidence that he had ever been in my office would've been a soggy Sabres hat perched above the pee stained chair.

I felt I needed to lift his spirits somehow. "Here," I said. I unwrapped the first package of cookies. "Have one. No, have two."

He took two. He stuffed them into his mouth. "I need help with my Works Cited page," he said, and he looked so sad and so tired that I nodded and peeled back the wrapping on the second package of cookies.

"Okay," I said. "And here, have another."

By the time he'd left my office, that student had eaten somewhere near six or eight cookies. I felt very proud of myself, very much like I was on the right track to becoming the type of mother and grandmother I want to be: the type who takes one look at her children and grandchildren when they step in the door and says, "You look skinny. Come into the kitchen. I'm making you a pie."

Later, this student and my other favorite engineering students sat in the hallway outside of our classroom shoving those cookies in their faces and eating half the pan before any of the other students even got there. But I didn't stop them. "Go, go," I said, because, really, I'd made those cookies for them. I'd made them so I could do one last thing for them, so I could extend one last gesture, one last Let me take care of you, okay, boys? We took good care of each other for thirty weeks. And there was nothing I loved better these last two semesters than having those boys around me all the time, having them around to say, We love you, Jess! and What are you going to do without us, Jess?

The truth is, I don't know. Mourn, probably. Mope. Kick around the campus and wonder what they're doing now, how they're doing in physics, how much they're eating, if they're getting enough sleep, if they need more cookies in their diets. But at least today I could contribute.

And at least I know I haven't seen the last of them.

"We looked up your fall schedule online," one of them admitted to me this week. "We wanted to see when and where you were going to be around. You know we're going to come by all the time."

And I thought, Thank God.

1 comment:

Diana said...

I know exactly what you mean.