Free Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) by Tracy K. Smith Page B

numerous anxieties (“I just got out of the Big House”; “I brought an extra pair of underpants with me, just in case”), and they got to see her as a person in the world, someone who negotiated with strangers and moved smoothly through public space. Was it a mother they saw in the way she nudged them along, cautioning them here, cajoling them there, or was she simply their teacher, the figure in charge, a woman who existed for a few hours a day and then disappeared from thought? I wonder now if the hours when she was Mrs. Smith were a kind of respite for her, a chance to lapse from the figure her children required her to be and become someone who, like every teacher, exists just for her students, one at a time and in a different way for each, and then slips out of grasp into a place where a student’s imagination cannot reach.

    One rainy December afternoon before Christmas vacation—the kind of day that means winter in California, when the air is cool and the sky sits wet and gray and close to the ground—my teacher showed us how to make paper snowflakes. We were given scissors, construction paper, crayons, glitter, and glue and urged to make any kind of design we wanted. I was sitting on the classroom floor with my supplies around me. I made round snowflakes and square ones, snowflakes in bold vivid colors and others in austere white. I even made a garland of mini-snowflakes by folding the sheet as if I were making paper dolls. Gradually, I found myself losing interest in the art project and thumbing through a tiny Hello Kitty notebook I’d persuaded my mother to buy me from the neighborhood stationery store. On one of the first pages, Conrad and Michael, who were two grades apart in high school, had made a list of the teachers I should seek out once I was their age. Several more years would have to pass before I could take their advice, but it seemed key to the kind of future I wanted to be moving toward, so I guarded the list carefully.
Mr. Potosnak: Chemistry
Mr. Brodkey or Mr. Sumner: U.S. History
Mr. Lederer: English
Ms. Nacey: Trig (“What’s trig?” “A kind of math.”)
    At the top of the next blank page, I wrote 1980 . Under that, I wrote my full name:
Tracy Kathleen Smith
    Soon, I mused, people all over the world would be living in a new decade. I looked at the zero, the fresh, round, empty hole of it, and I imagined that every life, lived every day, everywhere, would go into filling up that space. Farmers, politicians, babies all the way in Africa, the boys and girls in my class, people I’d never ever meet—all of us would do our share to mark the coming decade. It was a knowledge populated, in my mind, by the faces on the nightly news: Americans and our leaders but also refugees and hostages, boys and girls looking hungrily at the camera, unbothered by the flies buzzing at their mouths and eyes. It was a view of the world, a world I’d be a part of. I’d live in 1980, and my presence would matter. The things I’d do every day would matter, not because of who I was but rather that I was.
    My classmates were busy with their scissors. Our teacher, Mrs. Alexander, had already begun to hang our finished snowflakes up in the windows and along the classroom walls. Along all the neighborhood streets, Christmas lights and holiday figures would soon begin flickering on. A family named the Hurleys kept a sleigh with Santa and reindeer up on their rooftop all year long. It had been lit up in the morning when I’d passed it on my way to school and would stay that way until at least Valentine’s Day, glinting in the sun and the dark of night alike, as if Mrs. Hurley (the one, it was rumored, who oversaw the decorations) was trying to flag down passing aircrafts or satellites. I wondered if leaving those lights on and letting them transmit their message of Here I am! into the distance gave Mrs. Hurley the same feeling of anticipation I experienced in the months that followed, every time I wrote 1980 at the