That day the above note failed to bring me back to earth. I was flying high and for good reason. Each class had gone better than the class before, culminating with sixth-grade American history, where I somehow pulled off a dazzling deconstruction of Francis Scott Key’s lyrics for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” managing vividly to set the scene, shape the context, and in forty-four minutes, turn eighteen sullen sixth-graders into patriots.
I’d lost all sense of time since that class, my last of the day, and now I sat in my office. What now? What next? I snatched up my office phone, hit 9 for an outside line, and punched the numbers that connected me home. There the phone rang, and Kate answered on the third ring, and I started to tell of my triumph only to be interrupted by Kate’s squeal: “It’s Daddy!” She handed the phone to Sam, who said something indecipherable. But by his tone, it was clear something big had happened, something worth celebrating, so I said, “Good, that’s so good, Sammy,” and Sam got more excited, babbling at a higher pitch, and I was cheering now, for what exactly I didn’t know, but it was good, life was, yes, wee-ha, and then I said, “Let me talk to Mommy.” Kate came on the other line, and so what if my good news was aborted, soon to be topped by Kate, who had quite a story to tell. So what if I’d left my guts on the classroom floor. So what!
“Did you get any of that?” Kate asked.
“Jesus, no,” I said. “Tell me!” And she did. History had been made moments earlier when Sam woke up from some form of group family nap in the living room, wandered down our narrow hallway, stripped off pants and diaper, climbed up the helper step, sat on the toilet, and produced all by himself a single, perfectly proportioned poop.
Kate was ecstatic, recounting every step along the way, telling how Sam had told her as he’d pointed to the toilet, “Mommy, look what I made.”
Oh, I had to laugh. Yes, I was calling because I’d had a triumph, too, and while it wasn’t literally poop, it was a kind of metaphorical poop all the same.
“Are you crying, honey?” Kate asked.
She can always tell by the way my voice gets softer. The long, odd pauses between words.
“You know I am.”
“Hurry home, okay? We won’t flush until you get here.”
After hanging up, I wiped my eyes and thought, Life can’t get better. There was no person in history with whom I would want to change places. And I’m an ordinary man, which made this feeling all the more improbable.
Please understand I’m a great believer in lowering expectations. From a young age, I learned to speak the worst about myself, expect the least, and later, if lucky, be surprised to find out I’d been wrong. So am I ordinary? In the best sense, yes. Physically? I get a B, if I’ve bathed. “Unusual-looking” might be the most apt description: my frizzy mop of hair; my easy-to-read eyes hiding behind the tiniest of wire-rimmed glasses; my naturally straight teeth. I’m attractive enough that my students from time to time have had crushes on me, and yet not so attractive that you’ll find me modeling underwear on a Times Square billboard. I’ve always thought this to be a good thing. Otherwise I could have been cruel and dull. Why? Because perfect-looking people are often cruel and dull. I was an odd-looking, gawky kid who grew up to be not such a bad catch, or so my wife has been known to say. I like to think my rocky start forced me to develop other key qualities—kindness, empathy for the underdog, a tendency to be enthusiastic for new and strange ideas. All of this, I’m now convinced, helped in my quest to be worthy of Kate Oliver.