Nothing makes you want to vomit quite like adolescence

I was looking through a box in my room today that contains sundry minutiae and came across an old piece of writing I did in high school. It reeked of adolescence, a smell of utter naiveté and self-importance. How had I written this, I wondered? How had these words traveled through my fingers to my keyboard and onto a page to be read by whoever came across it?

The writing was for a class I had with Mr. McGraw. He was that teacher, for me, like Robin Williams' character in Dead Poet's Society. The thing is, I don't think he liked me that much. Maybe that was why I liked him.

At the beginning of class each day he would have us write a word we had found on the board. It had to be a word we didn't understand, or didn't know before. Then he'd go off on these rambling off-the-cuff etymologies with digressions that would take half the class. He'd take some word and trace it to some poem or line, from Milton or the Clash or somebody, and break it open, letting the word's meaning scramble itself on the classroom floor.

He coached baseball at the school and he had this whole jock/intellectual, Irish-working-stiff/Harvard-divinity-school, rebel/conservative thing going on. His hair was long for a man of his age, and haphazard, as if his inner contradictions had, in their chaos, tousled out any part he might have attempted.

He was a vet, the first I had really known. I had a teacher in middle school who had been in the army during Vietnam, but he hadn't actually gone overseas, and I was too young then, anyway, to know anyone really.

Once, he proudly told us, feeling that the buys on the baseball team were insufficiently awed by the horrors of the first Gulf war, he had forged draft cards for each of them and put them in their school mailboxes. The kids had panicked, calling parents, parents calling the school, the school calling the head of the English department, the head of the English department calling Mr. McGraw.

I think Mr. McGraw told that story out of gratefulness of the department chair who advocated for him not to get fired, but it was also partly an attempt to remain the rebel. Intellectually, he was certainly "out there". But he was teaching at a prestigious New England prep school - how rebellious could he be? He wrote everything on a typewriter and told stories of Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. He was steeped in the past, but I'm not sure how much of that was rebellion and how much was simple conservatism.

Still, I was glad he didn't teach like everyone else; we didn't do grammar and we didn't really write papers. We wrote, though. Every week, every Wednesday, we wrote. Not papers, just writing. And, though I can taste the sour-bitter sick at the back of my throat when I read the products of that era, that was the first time I wrote regularly. So, I credit Mr. McGraw for me writing at all.