Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) Read Online Free PDF

soft, and her playlist dwindled to “The Circle Game” and “Send in the Clowns.” Beneath the layer of floral essences which distinguished her from the other teachers—old ladies who reeked of witch hazel and baby powder—I thought I detected a sharper odor: despair.
    “Ms. Hannah?” I said one morning.
    “What is it, Walter?” We were alone, the unit over. My classmates were all outside at recess celebrating an April warm spell with a muddy game of kickball.
    “You seem so sad these days,” I said.
    “I can’t say I’m very happy about our world right now.”
    Ms. Hannah laid her guitar in a black case whose satin lining was covered with decals. There were rainbows, peace signs, doves, and a chain of stick-figure children holding hands. I gathered that they were symbols of her hope for a gentler, kinder era. She’d told our class many times that music “healed” and had even asserted that it might end the war someday, if the politicians would just wake up. I took this to mean that politicians didn’t listen to much music for some reason, or at least not to the kind Ms. Hannah played. I couldn’t blame them. It was depressing, and they had jobs to do.
    “Well, I hope you feel better,” I said. I had a crush on her.
    “That’s hard when young men are dying for no good reason, but I promise you I’ll try.” She closed the guitar case, latched it, gripped its handle, and looked past me toward the door. She had other units to teach at other schools, which made me jealous when I thought about it. I feared she had a favorite student somewhere. A boy, perhaps, who wasn’t at all like me. Someone more concerned with peace.
    As she was about to go, she touched my shoulder. “Maybe I have been a little down,” she said. “Human beings have rhythms, too, you know. You’ve heard the expression: ‘The rhythms of the heart’?”
    I nodded as though I had.
    “That’s all it is. It’s nothing more than that.”
    “Have I ever told you how nice you smell?” I said.
    “No, but I’m glad you feel that way. You’re sweet.”
    “You’re welcome,” I said.
    “You made my day.”
    She kissed me on the hair and brushed past me out the door. A few minutes later, on the playground swing set, I reached the high point in one of my long arcs and felt the chains momentarily go slack. I could see out to the street in front of the school, where Ms. Hannah was getting into the brown van of the young man who sometimes picked her up and who, I suddenly knew, had hurt her somehow. The van stayed parked for a while, then rumbled off, and I realized I’d just learned something important—not about music, about teachers. They were people. Lonely people, often, who weren’t really free to share their lives with us but longed for appreciation, just as I did. And why not give it to them now and then? Maybe they would give it back to me.

    C ertain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable. For example: what is Death? To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff. What is Beauty? The thing that made me like things when nobody was pushing me to like them. And what is Art? In third grade, I felt I knew. An artwork was any useless, random object created in order to break up the school day and then toted home to show off to one’s parents, after which it was misplaced or thrown away.
    The art units at my elementary school were even emptier than the music units. They were like recess periods held indoors. Art, the way my teachers introduced it, wasn’t really a subject, as math and science were, but a state of mind. Achieving this state required glue and scissors, sometimes glitter, occasionally bits of yarn, and long stretches of silence. Art was a form of stillness, dull and peaceful, and yet we were urged to approach it with great excitement, as though enduring