asked, easing the tension caused by their fears.
“If I cannot feel, am I not already a dead person, a thing of no passions?” His softly accented voice still had no trouble carrying around the whole room.
Hercules stood and walked unhurriedly to the other end of the seminar table where Edwin sat. He put a thin, parchment-colored hand down by Edwin’s big brown one on the top of the book. He waited, their two hands resting side-by-side, liver spots and wrinkles next to dark youth and strength.
“Here is difference, and here is the same. Blood, muscles, nerves, same pain, same pleasure. Look carefully please.” He paused, every eye on him and Edwin. I was holding my breath. I knew I was not the only one.
“When I do not see the same, only the different, I lose my own humanity. When I make a friend,” here he slowly grasped Edwin’s hand and shook it, “my life becomes richer. I have the good of friendship. But good is not without risk, because my friend is different from me. But that is also a pleasure.”
I would give a lot to become the kind of teacher that makes the classroom a real place. I met Hercules’s eyes down the length of the seminar table. Under his bushy white eyebrows, a brown eye winked at me. I laughed aloud with pleasure in this friendship. The students looked at us like we were crazy. All except Edwin. He shook Hercules’s hand back so vigorously that the little man’s whole frame moved up and down.
But the ice was broken. Hands rose all around the room. Friendship as both pleasure and pain is something young people trying to live in community are deeply concerned about.
8
I need to get out of here
Go somewhere
Get away
From myself
“Escape”
Amber Brown, #1100
StreetWise
Thursday, May 18, noon
By the time class ended, I was on such an adrenaline high I could have set rebounding records for the Chicago Bulls. Especially this year’s Bulls. I headed down to my office, trying to process what had just happened in class.
When I’d run away from being a cop to being a graduate student in philosophy and religion, I’d not thought much at all about the teaching part of that career. I’d imagined myself sitting at a desk in a beautiful library made golden by light streaming in from stained glass windows while I did abstract scholarly research. In other words, I wanted to make a clean break from my former life. I’d tried that for a while and it was really boring. Not enough human contact for me. So I’d signed up to be a teaching assistant while I was doing my graduate classwork and I found I liked it. Liked it a lot, but I knew I needed to get better at it. Now, teaching with Hercules, I realized I needed to get a lot better at it. So far I had been taking the ideas from my notes and trying to pass them on to the students to put in their notes. But teachers like Hercules were—I dumped my books and bag on my desk—well, what were they? Soul shapers?
I shook myself briefly. Nah. Too romantic and sentimental. Well, Hercules was amazing in the classroom, whatever you called it. I checked my watch and could hardly believe the time. Adelaide was waiting for me. I grabbed my keys from among the pile on my desk and quickly locked the door behind me though I knew it wouldn’t do much good since these doors all opened with the same key. But I was still on edge from the events of the fall and I dutifully locked up.
I hurried down the hall, but slowed down as I passed the coffee machine, tempted by its glorious coffee. But I thought I’d better hurry up. Adelaide’s door was open so I knocked softly on the door jam and looked in.
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