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When you’re old, dreams\u00a0<\/strong>become your memories. The mother raises her voice from another room while you’re alone at the table. The father drives a Buick with you on the bench seat so close that your thighs touch — or is that what you think should have happened?<\/p>\n The brother who bites you is missing, and you’re frantic. A phone call next afternoon finds him, and we share how it feels to be together in various times.<\/p>\n The teachers, they come back too. I cannot focus their faces, in the way we use tricks to pretend to ourselves that someone in a mottled snapshot was our friend. Three teachers each look toward the whole class, not at me. I can’t hear their voices, not the way the mother’s still insinuates and even startles, whether I’m asleep or awake.<\/p>\n Yet the teachers are here, are mine.<\/p>\n Miss Keneally<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Elizabeth Keneally would hate to be described, and, as I’ve said, I can’t remember how she looked, other than she was tall, thin, with straight brown hair. She dressed in a way that made no fashion impression, and I knew straight away that that had been her intention. This was a Queens, New York high school in the early 1960s.<\/p>\n When she went to the blackboard, Miss Keneally seemed athletic, a runner, because her stride was sure. She spoke and wrote on the board of the gravity and elegance of plant-and-animal life — without irony or doubt. I have just learned that my teacher had first been trained and honored<\/a> as a chemist, yet she went beyond measure, through fact and formula, to dunk us into the wet, confounding beauty of the biological world.<\/p>\n I spied amoebas, whirling-wheeled rotifers under her classroom microscope, and wrote a poem about them. Everything could be examined.<\/p>\n She never said that, not that I can remember. She demonstrated it, and I was always challenged. Elizabeth Keneally led her spit-curled and Ringo-collared prisoners out of domestic cages with clarity and a smoldering generosity that may have puzzled even her. Sometimes you see calm, fine things as a child that you’ll never see again.<\/p>\n Mr. Onorato<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n I’m certain I have written about “the dream” before, and it’s never left me. But let me find the papers I turned in to him in my early college years, the first about Keats’s “Ode to Autumn.” Season of mist.<\/p>\n Finally, you understand poetry.<\/p>\n He didn’t write that exactly, but it’s what I took from what he did note down in his easy script. Then I came out to him, more or less, in a poor piece about Proust, typed on my gray Lettera 22. After that, a screed about Lolita<\/em>, analytical and even lyrical without any understanding of its frigid passion, but, I must say now, it did have a sense of how language throws things under the car.<\/p>\n