I am You, and You are me…
Give a damn & figure it out
I feel like one of my students: it’s the night before my big presentation at All-school-meeting, and I still don’t know what I am going to talk about. I just know I am supposed to talk about me…
That’s pretty scary for me because, well, I’m me. At any given time I know myself too well, and at other times I’m like, who is this guy?
I’m the guy whose socks probably don’t match, and one of my socks is on onside out.
I’m the guy whose engine warning light in my van was probably on the whole way to school–and I never noticed.
I’m the guy who forgot to post an assignment on Fenn.org and his students are plotting a revolution and mass protest.
I’m the guy who tries to be a teacher–and so he is…
So, how does one start something like this?
I am John Fitzsimmons, and let me tell you about me…
(No–way to vain and presumptuous)
Hi, I’m Fitz, and I may be old, but I’m slow…
(No–you are not here to hear the truth)
Hi, I am Mr. Fitzsimmons, your new teacher: I just flew in from Chicago and boy my arms are tired…
(Nope… That was funny forty years ago)
Hi… so glad to be here: Last night I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out…
But if you know me, you have heard this all before…
I’m the kid who got grounded if I ever got a B for a grade… Because my mother would think I cheated…
I’m the kid who went to Peabody and Sanborn and CCHS and who warns all you going CCHS next year to wear thick-soled boots to school…so you don’t cut your feet on the broken hearts I left behind.
Not really, because I’m really the shy kid who spent an entire summer after 8th grade trying to find the courage to hold Megan Tassini’s hand–and I never did!
I’m the kid who spent entire dances lurking in the corner of the Hunt Gym fearing that Stairway to Heaven would start, and a whole night would have gone by–and I wouldn’t have asked a single girl to dance…
I’m the kid whose father spray painted his sister’s figure skates black and told me everyone would think they were hockey skates, and I’d walk home in the dark from Greenes Pond, down Plainfield Road to 38 Longfellow road, still wearing my black figure skates…
I lived in and on and through Greenes Pond, Whites Pond, Walden Pond, Warners Pond–The Concord River, The Assabet River, The Sudbury River. I was fish and fisherman, sailor and boat, landmark and explorer–all within this beautiful, precious, magnificent expanse of earth called Concord.
I was an ADD wonder child whose eyes could dart in a thousand directions in a single glance; whose head was built out of dreams; who made sunburned skin a living, breathing whirl and endless dance of motion and adventure…
I was you, and you are me, and our lives are inextricably linked in this adventure called life… We know that nothing gold can stay, so we breath in the best of each day and never let it out.
I was a wrestler and now a wrestling coach. The coach whose only wise words to a wrestler heading out on the mat against a Goliath of a monster–a skinny kid from Fenn facing certain annihilation–and I shrug and say, “do one good thing. Do one good thing and accept defeat with a smile, for you don’t learn anything much from winning, but you learn a lot by trying.”
I was a reluctant, timid student–and now I am a teacher. Go figure… Maybe that’s why I drive my students crazy with answers that are not really answers. I respond to simple questions with things like:
Get through it, get over it. Give a damn and figure it out. It’s your essay not mine. Make it as long as it should be and as short as you can… Give me a pebble and I’ll show you the universe; show me the universe and I’ll give you a pebble… It’s not where you go; it’s how you go… Good writers don’t always make good poets–but good poets always make for great writers…don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.
And that list goes on and on because a good question is better than a good answer.
The question I ask myself each day is “Who am I and what should I try to do?”
And that is why my life is shaped and formed, sculpted and forged out of the fire of my mind–a fire that is as bright and intense as it was when I was you–you who are probably dreaming and scheming of what is possible as soon as the old guy finishes his presentation and you can go off to recess.
After 61 years on this planet asking the same question, what then am I?
In short, I am a poet–and everything else are tentacles on the octopus that is my life. So I am also a folksinger, a songwriter, a tinkerer and a maker of meatballs. I’m a father to seven wild and unadorned children, and a husband to a beautiful and forbearing wife. I am everything I ever hoped I could be, and far short of where I still can be. I am you and you are me.
I love teaching, but I equally love the coming summer as much as any of you, for for summer gives me the time to live in the woods of a rustic summer camp in New Hampshire (and also Camp Sewataro in Sudbury were I first met and sang many of you); to swim, fish, sail and hike; to write in my beloved journal and to sing at campfires with piles of weathered, mosquito-bitten kids bunched like starfish on a beach, singing their heads off–even though, technically, starfish don’t have heads…
And so I will end this presentation of me–the immutable me–with the only gift I that is truly me and has never–as in ever–let me down–Song…
