Word After Word

I love teaching and I’m ready for classes to begin. Teaching organizes me.

Every semester there is one class to which I give my entire heart and soul; I spend months planning it, looking forward to it. I live for it. There is another class that takes, against my will, my heart and soul from me. And then there’s a third class, every time, that is low-impact and delightful and we are happy and goofy and bounding.

I always think I know which will be which.

At the Japanese restaurant the other night, a young woman in a white shirt at a large table of people said “Hello, Heather” and I had no idea who she was. I asked her and she said “It’s Lauren.”

“That’s funny,” I said. A few months ago, I recognized Lauren in a spectacular genius faceblind-compensatory triumph. I’d figured her out from the back, as she was walking to work, using my great sleuthing powers.

I think both of us thought after that stunning identification, I’d always know Lauren.

Face blindness doesn’t work that way.  This two-facedness aspect of the disorder one of the hardest parts of the whole thing. It makes me crazy. In some contexts I will know Lauren, in others not. The disorder is inherently unreliable. It’s like a person you would never have as a friend but have to take with you everywhere you go.

I told her Lauren I was bummed. She said, “It’s okay. Don’t worry. It’s okay.”

It is and isn’t.

I lie awake in the middle of the night, reviewing my day, wondering who all I have walked past, blown off? I’m tormented by this.

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Suzanne, my mail carrier, told me a story about a man who wore a nametag that said his name and asked everyone to say who they were, too.

I love this man.