I felt much better.

Still, I was in a sad, sad mood as I pulled Teddy and Sam down State Street. It had started with the scarf, an admittedly nice gesture, but enough already—now my tears were freezing to my face.

Back home, and in an attempt to shake myself out of my funk, I gathered Teddy and Sam in our living room/dining room/toy room, where we made a bed out of sofa pillows, stuffed animals, and the almost beanless beanbag chair I’d had since college. The three of us cuddled. I told them how happy I was and how much their daddy and I loved them. I kissed them on their forehead and on their soft, warm cheeks, and they sensed, I think, that if they didn’t do something fast, I’d kiss them all over, so they began to squirm, push me away, and demand TV. We spent the afternoon watching animated and live action videos, all of which they’d seen numerous times. We had our own little film festival, and instead of making them lunch, I prepared a series of snacks that I brought out over the course of several hours. I made open-face grilled cheese cut into small squares. I made faces out of pieces of produce—grapes for eyes, a carrot stick for a nose, a banana split down the middle for a smiling mouth, and a handful of raisins, placed just right, to suggest a head of hair. I amused them and even myself, and for a few hours I was not only the mother I never had, I was the mother of all mothers.

TIM

WHENEVER I GIVE, SAY, MY ANNUAL LECTURE ON THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS, WHEN I dress up like Lincoln, or recount the Cuban Missile Crisis from Castro’s point of view, and whenever my students clap and cheer as I exit the classroom, and after I climb the school stairs to my cork-lined faculty office/cubby where I sit in my broken oak swivel chair, my heart racing, exhausted but elated from my brief dance with brilliance, and just as I’m about to announce to myself I am the god of all teachers, I usually have the good sense to do the following: I pull open my desk drawer, rummage through the assorted chewed-on pens and pencils, the packages of Post-its, the pair of green-handled lefty scissors, the loose change, and the leftover Halloween candy pilfered from one of the boys’ orange plastic pumpkins, until the aging envelope is found—“Ah,” I sigh—as I take out the single piece of crinkled, now yellowed paper and reread what a former student wrote a few years back:

Mr. Welch, yore my faverite teacher ever.
I don’t care what anybody els says.

The writer of this note—who for obvious legal reasons will remain nameless—was not learning-disabled, dyslexic, or a product of the oft maligned New York City public school system. He was one of Montague’s own. He is at present in his junior year at a swanky private northeastern college. His major? Elementary education. Soon he’ll be teaching children. Maybe yours.