Dan Gray Today Story

“What’s your name?”

“Farmer One. What’s your name?”

“Pig One.”

These simple sentences are the zenith of the third graders’ English at the school where I teach in Dresden. Today we are acting out the three little pigs: I say a line, the students repeat it, and then I tell them what it means so they can act it out. There’s a beautiful delay between when the kids say, “I have some bricks!” and when they pretend to hold bricks by sagging their arms and buckling their knees.

As I teach, I think about Aidan, who I angered by calling his essay about Emily Dickinson pompous. He’s my only friend, so I was happy when he sent me a bouquet of Dickinson’s poems that reference flowers, like ancient lilacs and a window filled with a permanent rainbow. Aidan thinks Dickinson is afraid of dying and losing the beauty of the world; I think that the transient radiance of a hyacinth rainbow is a perfect metaphor for the way that we, dying, live: defiantly displaying our beauty and never quite believing that we could be anything but eternal.

I think about how Nora, my niece, doesn’t yet have the words to describe the fleeting, chaotic beauty of experience, and how Neil, when a butterfly landed next to him, said that “it just seemed to delight in opening and closing its wings and just actually being beautiful for that period of time.” I look at the tissue paper roses that I have in a waterless vase on my window: they won’t live and they won’t die.

Lily’s text says “Maurice Sendak.” I know that he’s gone and I imagine a boat sailing in and out of weeks and through a day. I think back to the last time I heard him, when he said, “I cry a lot because people die and I can’t stop them. It’s like a dream life, but, you know, there’s something I am finding out as I’m aging: that I am in love with the world.”

And I sit on the banks of the Elbe and the water is always rushing away but the river never leaves me, and I am calm.