Jay
At the Greenfield Center School, 7th grade started with a new boy in class. I immediately didn’t like him. His swagger, his already-changed voice, I didn’t like his weird name, “Darius,” and worse, that the girl I’d spent a year liking liked him on day one. But soon, I had to allow, he did have redeeming qualities too — like an affinity for Zelda and a willingness to sneak out of class and off to Jon’s market for Rolos and Doritos. And by Halloween that year, we were best-of, forever friends.
We had two steady teachers in those three middle-school years: Ruth and Jay, husband and wife, who called this little school their “laboratory,” the place they tinkered and titrated in their not-white coats, perfecting their formula for growing us student-kids into good humans.
One Fall afternoon forty years ago when the other 12-year-olds had left for the day, I stayed in class next to Jay, who’d somehow made me feel that kid-me could talk to grown-up him. So with us each seated on high stools at the long bench desk under the window that looked out at the orange leaves of a sugar maple, I cried to him about my hard life. My father lived far — in Boston — and what I wanted that day was to be held in my tears and told, “poor boy, poor you …” But Jay said a different thing (his big hand on my shoulder): “When life is not easy, you can choose to be strong, boy.”
This morning, I got a text from my still-best friend, Dar (He’s now 51 but looks much older). My phone chimed and I read the sad words, “Jay has passed away.”
Together we mourned with gratefulness at the lessons in living he’d left, this old man in Western Mass who’d taught scores of us 12-year-olds to believe they could and should be good and strong in a sometimes unkind world.
Misha Collins
Los Angeles, California