I remember when I first met Tack McTeague. He burst into the men’s room and flushed every urinal by punching the handle, then stopped at the last one and said, while digging himself out through his fly, “This is how I know we’re doomed. I’ve been teaching here nearly twenty years. When I started, kids flushed the toilets. Not these days. Today’s kids are fucking primates. They’re disgusting,” he growled over the spray of piss hitting the porcelain. “Eat like shit, fucking life spent in a vap cloud. They don’t take care of themselves. They have all this technology they don’t actually know how to use. Like us navigating the stone age. I told some kid the other day, ‘eh, wash your hands after you shit. What’s wrong with you?’  He looked like it was the first time he’d ever heard it. These kids will be running the world soon.” Tack stuffed himself away and flushed the urinal. “Running everything right into the fucking ground.” He pivoted to the sink and flipped on the water. “Nice suit,” he said, lathering his hands. “You new?”

“Not yet. I just finished an interview.”

“Oh yeah?” said Tack, ripping paper towels from the dispenser, “for what?”

“Faculty. The Department of English.”

He nodded. “If you’re lucky, I won’t see you again.” He clapped me on the shoulder and left me standing before one of the freshly flushed urinals, my belt undone.

I got the job and within a month and a half moved. It was the first week of August, just two weeks before the semester started. I was setting up my office when Tack rounded the corner and paused before my open door. He had earbuds in. I couldn’t make out for certain what he listened to, but there was a lot of drumming and screaming. Tack’s jaw flexed below the thin penciling of a five-o-clock shadow as he gnawed gum. He was in a Hawaiian shirt, unbuttoned one button too many, and his hair was astray. I could see the very small form of myself in his mirrored aviators. He popped out an earbud, and the hall filled with a distant screaming, like a genie immolated inside a bottle.

I wasn’t sure he remembered me, but I said, “I got the job.”

He stared at me a moment, switching his gum from one side of his mouth to the other and back again, then stopped chewing, a ripple of me shifting in the round of his glasses. He nodded, then turned to unlock his office door directly across from mine.

On the first day of the semester, I returned from my classes to find a swell of students crowding the hall outside my office and Tack’s voice roiling from his open door and booming along the walls. I asked them if everything was okay. Most didn’t look up from their phones. A couple moved their heads just enough that I could interpret it as a nod. I worked my way through them to my door, fumbling with my key, as I heard Tack railing at a student in his office.

“College isn’t for you,” he said. “That’s not your fault. You didn’t build the American education system, but you want to be a part of it, and it’s not made for everyone. In fact, it’s just the opposite. It’s made to make all of you a certain way, and if you can’t be that way, you don’t make it through, and if you do, then you’re really fucked because you’ll be outside of this every-one-gets-a-trophy university, in a world that eats its young. That’s Tu-Pac,” he said. “The world eating its young. Not the Trophy thing. Write it down.”

“It’s literally the first day,” the student responded, too quickly to have written anything down. “I haven’t even had a chance to prove myself.”

“You don’t need a chance to prove yourself,” said Tack. “Look at all these accommodations. They prove everything. You need an audio recording of everything I say. You need someone to take notes for you. You need extended time on all tests and quizzes. You will likely have infrequent attendance. You may need to leave class unannounced. You need to complete all reading, quizzes, and tests in your own quiet space.  You know what these accommodations really say? You need your own personal classroom and your own personal professor who will do everything the way you need it done.”

I heard the ruffle of papers being shuffled and realized I hadn’t finished sliding the key into the lock.

“Look, there’s nothing wrong with you,” Tack continued. “You wake up, shit, shower, eat breakfast. Do you have a job?”

The kid mumbled something

“See, you work. You do your part. Pay your taxes. There’s nothing wrong with you, kid. You’re fine. If it wasn’t for college, you wouldn’t need accommodations in anything, would you? But now that you’re here, you see all these problems, and you need all this shit so that you might be able to skirt through your degree, just to be qualified in a world that isn’t interested in accommodating you.”

“Professor, I know that thi—”

“With all due respect, kid, whatever you’re about to say that you know, you don’t, not in this context. I can’t make these accommodations for you. How many students do you think I have?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m asking you to think. Take a guess.”

“Fifty.”

“Fifty?”

“I don’t know how many students you have.”

“No, you don’t. Fifty? Jesus. Try one hundred and seven. That’s how many students I have this semester. Think about that. And I’m supposed to teach you all how to write. Every time you all turn in a ten-page paper, I have a thousand pages to read and grade. One thousand. Have you read a thousand pages in your lifetime?”

“I don’t know.”

“I would say no,” said Tack. “I’ve read one-thousand pages many times, and it sucks. When you do it, you know. But do you see now? That’s why I can’t give you your own private space or let you come and go as you please. It’s real nice that the institution makes it look like they give a shit by making these accommodation forms. Then they hand them out like fucking Adderall and leave it up to teachers to figure out how to make it all happen. The truth is if the American education system really gave a damn about you and what you need, I wouldn’t have a thousand pages to grade every time my students turn in an essay.”

There was a moment of silence, then, in the closest thing to a comforting voice I heard Tack employ, he said, “I know you feel like you need a college degree to get what you want, and you probably do, and I’m sorry about that. A long time ago, we linked our economy and industry to education so that education became all about training kids to fit certain jobs as adults. The problem is the model doesn’t fit everyone because the workforce doesn’t. That’s why you have a bunch of fucking idiots running around with college degrees, and kids spending five years at a community college and accruing debt, and kids graduating from universities, then moving right back in with their parents. Well, I’m not going to be a part of it. Every student in that hall right now needs a specialized education. With one-hundred and seven students, I don’t have time to specialize shit, not for you, not for anyone. I’ve been forced to make my teaching as generic as possible to meet supply and demand. Read your Marx. It’s not because you’re not worth it, kid; it’s because the education system says you’re not. Now, you have to go because I have to tell this to twenty other students today.”

I heard the student shuffle from the office and through the warm bodies in the hall.

“Next,” Tack said, as I finished inserting the key and opening the door.

I sat in my office, and though I tried not to listen to him excoriate neurodivergent or disabled students, it was impossible not to. Kids with ADHD, dyslexia, auto-immune diseases, to which Tack responded: “If you can’t focus on something for an extended period of time, how do you expect to read a book? Ditch your cell phone for a year, then come back to me,” or “You literally cannot read, literally. How are you supposed to pass a literature course? Work with a speech pathologist until you can read at the college level, then come back to me,” or “You’re so sick you can’t be in class? How are you supposed to pass an English class if you can’t attend? Take an online course.” Everything he said was against everything I had ever learned about teaching students. True, I was young, new, fresh out of grad school, but that also meant I was on the cutting edge of research in my field, and the research said Tack should be terminated. But I was scared, it literally being my first week, so I sat there, tried to work, and listened to him cut down one student after the other. After the last student left his office, the heavy door clapped shut with a bang. All was silent.

 

For the next two weeks, students came and went, and though the discussions sometimes grew heated, they were nothing like the first week’s, until a student came to discuss his response to a reading.

“Excuse me, professor,” I heard the student say.

“What’s up?” Tack asked, the click of his keyboard unflinching.

“I wanted to talk with you a moment about my thoughts on the reading.”

“Okay. What are they?”

“Well, I don’t think we should be reading something so graphic. This is very sexual.”

“Noted. Have a great day.”

“Professor?”

The typing stopped.

“I don’t think I should have to read something like this.”

“Well, Tyler, I don’t care what you think you should and should not read. This class isn’t about you and your preferences. Besides, if you don’t like what I assign, don’t read it.”

“If I don’t read, I’ll fail.”

“That is correct.”

“I don’t think it’s fair tha—”

“Using what criteria, Tyler? You don’t think it’s fair based on what?”

Tyler was quiet a moment, then said, “Based on the fact that the reading is gross. It really upset me. And it’s about sex. It’s like my dad said, can’t you assign literature and not smut.”

“How old are you?” Tack asked.

“Fifteen.”

I thought I must’ve heard him wrong.

“Fifteen?” Tack repeated.

“Yes.”

“Have you ever fucked someone, Tyler, at fifteen?” When Tyler didn’t respond, Tack said, “That’s what I thought. And your dad, is he a big reader?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do, Tyler. He’s so up your ass he knows what you’re reading in school. Now, does he read a lot or no?”

“Not really.”

“Not really or not at all. Tyler? I asked you a question. Not really or not at all?”

“Not at all.”

“When was the last time you saw him read a book.”

“Never.”

“Here’s what we got, then, a fifteen-year-old virgin who’s bitching about a reading because it’s too graphic, sexually, as if he’d know, and a father who doesn’t read, both telling me I need to assign literature. Look, read the shit or don’t. I don’t care. I also don’t care whether or not you like it or approve of it because you’re fifteen and don’t know anything about reading, literature, or sex. You enrolled in my class, so do not question my assignments again, not until you have a degree of your own. And, Tyler, you’re in college now, at least for this class, so cut the cord with your pa. Now, shut the door when you go.” The typing started again.

I wanted to storm across the hall and tell him I had a degree and thought he was a prick and a bully and that I couldn’t believe after so many years of teaching he could be so piss poor at it. But I couldn’t. Even if I were not new, I knew enough men like Tack to know that hostility or directness would just lead to more conflict. I knew that to get through to people like him, you had to work your way into a conversation where questions or gentle criticism presented themselves organically, so I crossed the hall and knocked on his door.

In a muffled voice, Tack said, “I’m going to get up and open that door, and if that’s you, Tyler, be gone when I do.”

I waited. Then there was a click, and the door opened.

“Oh. It’s you. What’s up, rook?”

It felt like my heart beat in space, thumping and thumping in the weightless vacuum of my chest. I told myself, You’re just as qualified as him, his equal. You’re not a grad student anymore. Stand up for those students. It’s your responsibility now. “I wasn’t eavesdropping,” I started, “but did I hear that student say he was fifteen?”

Tack studied me a moment, then exhaled and said, “Come in. Sit.”

I followed him into his office and sat in a chair across from him. He sat, crossed one leg over the other, and leaned back. “You think I’m too hard on the students,” he said.

Of course! That’s why I had crossed the hall to his office, but when he opened the discussion for me that easily, my cowardice barreled forward. There was nothing organic about this at all. My hazy plan for addressing my concerns was derailed, and now it was like I was being interrogated, like Tack had turned a giant floodlight on me, when he asked me the question.

“I’ll answer it for you,” he said. “You do. You do feel like I’m hard on them.”

“It’s not really my place to tell you how to address your students,” I said, disgusted with myself before I finished the sentence.

“I am hard on them. I have to be. And I don’t mean in that abusive-father-banjo’s-deep-down-here kind of hard. I’m not trying to teach them hidden lessons they’ll learn years later or any of that shit. I’m trying to trim the fat. The education system is the most fucked thing. It’s a joke.” Tack paused a moment, likely to let me gather my thoughts on the state of the education system, then continued. “You’re all pumped about being in the classroom and blowing minds and fixing students’ problems, helping them be successful. I’m not shooting that down. We all start there. We, me, the education system, the world needs new teachers to start there. But as the system gets more fucked, it grinds everything to pulp, the students, the economy, the teachers. I don’t want to dispirit you. You go into your classrooms and change lives for as long as you can.”

“Why do you feel like the education system is so fucked?”

Tack laughed. It was genuine. “Take Tyler for example. To answer your question, yes, he’s fifteen. In fact, I had a fourteen-year-old in my class a couple of semesters ago.” Tack shook his head. “Children are allowed, no, fuck it, in this state, they are encouraged to enroll in college classrooms. All they have to do is get the right score on an SAT, and they’re in, even if they’re fourteen.”

I had been told during my interview that the state had, just two years earlier, integrated a new initiative to help students graduate college by allowing them to enroll earlier, while they were young enough to still have the stability of high school, family, and friends. I thought it sounded like a considerate and forward-thinking way to deal with a problem. I said, “I guess I don’t really know how I feel about a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old being in a college classroom, but I think a state-led initiative to help students succeed in school is promising.”

“It’s short-sighted,” Tack disagreed. “The state’s pushing students through because too many aren’t finishing college. They show up, party, and drop out. They don’t know how to manage their time, so they fail a semester and drop out. They don’t really know what they want to do, often because they’re eighteen fucking years old, so they drop out. Instead of addressing any of those issues, or, better yet, just letting the chaff be separated from the wheat, they create a protective shelter for them, allow them to be college students while they’re still children, while mom and dad can make sure they get their homework done every night. Sure, maybe more of them will make it through college. Time will tell, but how much will they offer the workforce or the betterment of humanity when they enter the workforce with a BA at twenty, little life experience, and no parents to babysit them?”

“I mean, it makes sense to some degree,” I added.  “Think about it. College is getting more and more expensive. It’s a good thing to ensure students get through instead of taking out a bunch of debt and then failing or dropping out.”

“Well, they think the same way at the State House, but you want to know the problem with that?”

“What?”

“It doesn’t fix the problem, rook. The problem is the cost of education. The students who graduate and make it through college, students like you, still have to pay that high cost for the rest of your lives. Letting children into college doesn’t fix a single issue in education that’s actually hindering students’ success. But it will create a list of new ones. Besides, it’s not like this generation is the first to have students who fail out of college. The millennials and Gen Xers didn’t invent failing in college. It’s been around a while. But this is the first time we’ve tried to address it, and, as usual, we don’t address the actual problems. We fuck our way into new ones.”

I still felt Tack’s behavior was uncalled for yet realized I didn’t know enough of what I was talking about to support my position. Tack’s office was not social media, where I could spew whatever trash I wanted, then close my browser. If I said something stupid, Tack would eviscerate me. Luckily, I didn’t have to figure out what to do next. There was a knock on Tack’s door, a sullen-eyed young woman with a ballerina’s figure, her eyes cast down. I took that as my cue to leave and crossed the hall to my office, where I shut the door and turned music up so I couldn’t hear him peel her apart.

 

When taking the job, I moved to a place with seasons, something I wasn’t accustomed to. The humid, warm air faded just long enough for the trees to burst in color and lose their leaves. Tack went from button-downs to old sweaters. His hair grew in full and shaggy, his beard like Tamarack bark.  Toward the end of Fall semester, I attended my first department meeting. We discussed summer course options, reducing printing costs by not printing emails, and the possibility of hammering out a new transfer agreement with a local community college. The rest of the meeting was Tack castigating the university and higher education in America. A few faculty members pitched solutions, action plans, offered to chair workgroups that might begin to tackle some of the problems, but Tack cut them down, arguing that those steps had been taken before or that the ideas were too lofty, noting that if more members of the department had institutional history, they’d see the foolishness in what they said. When Tack preached, he did so peripatetically, as if in his classroom. He slammed his fist into his palm and ground it there as he macheted any positive momentum. Just once, I cast a furtive glance at the department chair, a sniper-eyed woman (who, even in August, when on my interview committee, wore a scarf and complained about the cold), expecting her to pull rank at some point and put an end to his foul-mouthed philippics, but it never happened. The whole department let McTeague tear through the room like a ricocheted bullet. I was exhausted by the end of the meeting, though I’d said nothing, just watched a middle-aged man grouse about the world as if we were already living in the post-apocalypse.

That was the end of fall. I spent Christmas break looking for houses but couldn’t afford any I was interested in on my income. I had done the math, and in ten years, when I was forty-three, I’d make enough to get a small place without it being fiscally irresponsible. But I still liked to look at properties anyway, just to keep the future close in mind. Until then, I’d make do at the apartment complex where, all Christmas break, I’d spot the snaking tracks of children’s feet in snow but never see the children.

 

After a grueling winter, it was hard to believe there would be another spring. I never knew the sky could be grey for so long. But it got a little easier when classes started. It was still cold and gray, and there was still snow, but I was able to keep busy and focus on things, and even my own students started coming in to see me, a testament, I hoped, that I was becoming a bit more competent in the classroom.  Across the hall, Tack’s discussions with students were less hostile. Many students came to Tack’s office to review their writing and discuss readings and, in some cases, even chat about the world. I heard him chuckle once, at something a student said. Despite the occasional McTeague lecture on life, a few of which seemed merited for once, the space across the hall was less volatile than in the fall.  That’s why, after the end of a long day, I knocked on Tack’s door. He turned from something he read below a small desk lamp.

“Rook,” he said, as if we were long-time friends who hadn’t spoken in decades. “What’s good?”

“Well, it’s the end of the workweek, and I wanted to see if you wanted to grab a drink.”

“Who gives a fuck about the end of the work week? Drink every day.” With that, Tack shut off the lamp, grabbed his coat, and left the office as it was. Though it was cold, we walked to a bar a mile or so from campus, a bar I wouldn’t have pegged as Tack’s kind of place. It was nice once, the bar and walls decorative wood, a stamped tin ceiling. But the age was evident, the bar deeply grooved and chipped from wear, the wood polish flaked in fractured shapes like continents seen from space. The walls were covered in tacky paraphernalia that made no sense to me, a license plate from Texas, a lacrosse stick, a pair of pink and green panties hanging from a boar’s tusk, a ferrotype of a family sitting on old chairs. The bar was dark and, to my surprise, full of students. I assumed Tack would want a nice cocktail or scotch. I figured the students would want club music and laser lights. I was learning I didn’t know anyone or anything like I thought I did.

Tack ordered two pints of something from a local brewery. He didn’t offer to pay or ask what I wanted. He simply ordered, and when the drinks got there, he lifted his beer, foam sluicing down the glass, and said, “To the beginning, which has always already been the end.”

I touched glasses and took a long drink of what tasted like pennies, then set the glass on the bar.

“How’s your semester so far?” Tack asked, watching sports highlights on the T.V. on the wall across from us.

I felt good about my semester, had had a couple of really great classes, felt I was starting to hit my stride in my composition courses. But as I studied the side of Tack’s face as he watched the T.V., I knew there was no reason for me to gush like that. Besides, he’d take my good experience by the balls and explain to me why such a sentiment was a waste of energy. I suddenly wondered why I was there, what I was hoping to accomplish. If I were being honest, which I was not then, I was just lonely. That’s all. “Suitable,” I replied.

Tack turned from the T.V. and looked at me. He took a drink and asked, “You’re not getting burnt out already are you?”

“No.”

“When I ask something, I’m genuinely curious.”

“You genuinely care about how my semester is going?”

Tack laughed from his gut. “Of course! You think I’d come out here and buy you a fucking beer to make small talk about shit that doesn’t matter to me?”

I tried to avoid giving him the chance to hack away at my words by saying little, yet there he was, cutting away. “It’s been pretty good.”

“Say that, then.”

I looked at him a moment, then took a drink.

“You thought if you said shit about being happy, I’d try and bring you down?”

“Yeah.”

He nodded.

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Depends on what you say. If you say something stupid, I’ll let you know it.”

“Well, there you go. I didn’t really feel like being attacked like that.” Attack wasn’t the word I wanted to use, but I could feel a bolt of adrenaline blooming within my head, a tingle on the back of my neck, a swirl like my guts were breathing on their own, all in anticipation of words he hadn’t spoken but that I believed he would.

“Attack? Telling you I think an idea is ignorant isn’t an attack, rook.”

“I know.”

“This is what we do?” he continued. “We are idea makers. We are purveyors of human thought.” He jabbed his head with an index finger. “We challenge the old and the new, even as we make it. If as professors in the humanities we can’t call bullshit on bad ideas, what are we doing? Really, what’s our role?”

“That’s no—”

“You get what we have now,” he interrupted, “an ignorant president, an ignorant electorate, the death of facts.”

“No, that’s no—”

“You get a bunch of peo—”

“Tack,” I growled too loudly, slamming my beer on the bar, the bartender peering at me while drying a glass. My face was flush, my ears so hot I could feel their radiant heat on my neck. “I’m not one of your students.”

“You’re right,” he confirmed. “I apologize. I asked a question and should let you answer. Go ahead.”

I thought back to the question but couldn’t remember it. I was angry, logic and memory like a ribbon on a balloon too high up. I couldn’t ask him what the question was, not after taking such an aggressive stance. I wasn’t his student, but I also couldn’t recall his question.

“What are we supposed to do?” he asked, my face no doubt belying the uncertainty of my words.

Then I remembered the question, about our roles. “I don’t know,” I said, finally. “I’m just a writing teacher, Tack. I mean, you’re always talking about the big networked systems, the government and the education system and economy, and you’re using those to inform how you teach students.”

“Well of course I am,” he boomed, like he did in department meetings. “They’re all related, so of cour—”

This time I cut him off. “We’re all supposedly related to a big bang, too, but it doesn’t mean we have to take every star and galaxy into consideration when we’re trying to teach students how to put a sentence together.” What a stupid analogy, I thought, though I hoped my face didn’t show it. But when Tack didn’t respond, when he just stared at me and appeared to study the ephemera of my words, I felt emboldened, sturdy confidence rising through the tumult of ambling adrenaline. “I mean, look, sure, all kinds of everything are very big and very connected. That’s right. I don’t disagree. And I’m subject to challenges and so are you and so are our students. But we each have individual roles to play, regardless of those other forces, and we have to play them. We have to do them. We have to fight them, if that’s what it takes, and I see you as a fighter, Tack. I do. I see you as a person who sees a bunch of really bad stuff, and you strike out at it with your words and what you tell students, and it’s not that it’s wrong, what you say to them. It’s not false or inaccurate. It’s brutally honest, but honesty without empathy is cruelty, Tack? How are you fixing any of the problems by burying your students like you do?”

My whole body felt like it might float away. I realized I was squeezing my pint glass as if it were anchoring me there.

“That’s just the point, rook. I’m not burying them. The system is burying them?”

“Well it’s a system we’re both a part of, so what are you doing to fix it? To change it?”

“I’m transparent about it. I’m honest.”

“You think they don’t already know all that stuff you tell them? You honestly believe your students with ADD, your students with dyslexia, don’t understand the education system isn’t made for them? Christ. Of course they understand. They may not understand it like you understand it, with the whole history of education slant, but they know it, Tack. They know it personally. They know it every day they wake up and come to a class they can’t pass but enroll in just to be able to put a foot forward in their lives, just to have anything at all. Then they get you, no gentle reminder of how they will never make it.”

“But they won’t.”

“I know,” I laughed. “I’m not debating that.”

“And you’re not sharing that with them. Who are you if you don’t tell them? If you don’t identify that?”

“Tack, telling them isn’t fixing anything.”

“So you just try and not fix it then? Just ignore the problem?”

“Let them learn how fucked everything is from their history professors and their sociology professors. Show them how fucked things are through the literature of the world, but don’t tell them how fucked they are. That puts you at fault because you said can’t and won’t.”

“I try and make it right the way I know how. How do you fix it?” Tack asked, squarely.

“By making things right the way I was trained to.”

“By teaching students how to write sentences?”

“And paragraphs,” I joked.

“Right.”

“And critical thinking and analytical thinking and argument. All of that.”

“And you think teaching students how to write sentences and argue in papers that are unlike anything they’ll ever write outside of a classroom about shit they don’t care about and never will, shit they’ll likely never even understand, that’s what’s going to fix everything? That’s what’s going to make the world go ‘round? It’s utterly brain-washing bullshit, rook. A hot pile of bullshit.”

“I don’t know, but that’s my skill set. That approach is what I know how to do.”

“It’s not your approach, rook. You didn’t make it. It’s been around a long time, all the shit you teach and how you teach it, your field, its methods, all of it, and do you see what’s out there.” Tack looked out the window. “It’s a fucking war zone, and those people, the problems, the violence and ignorance and small-mindedness, it’s all from college-educated people as much as anyone else. They’ve taken your classes and my classes and all the classes just like ours all over this fucking country. There’s your model. That’s what it gets you.”

I didn’t respond. I just took a drink of my beer and let out a long exhale. I was suddenly tired.

“Look, rook, I meant what I said before, about you being passionate and caring in your job. You’re right. You’re working with human beings, young human beings. It’s a tremendous responsibility, a real honor and privilege. And maybe your approach, your trained approach to making the world a better place will stay with you until you die, and maybe it won’t. My way is not right and yours wrong or vice versa. But for me, to teach what I was trained and how I was trained, that’s what led to what’s out there now. Though I may not be doing something better, I’m doing different. I refuse to be complicit in the mess. I mean, really, how does a country more educated than it’s ever been behave this way? How could it not know any better?”

Tack’s voice broke as he asked the last question, like he wished someone could answer it for him, like it often kept him up at night.

“I guess that’s the hundred-dollar question.” My brain felt fatigued, like it had been grappling and exchanging blows in a grueling fight.

“The million-dollar question,” he corrected, finishing his beer, then nodding at the bartender for another.

We each had one more, then headed back to campus in a whisper of fat snowflakes that fell hush atop each other, gradually building. We didn’t speak for blocks. As we approached Old Main, Tack stopped and looked at the four-story building, at the way the snow stacked on the column work and fenestrations, the way it clutched to the Rhododendron that stretched around the brick foundation like a long white sarong. “Some days I don’t know what I believe in anymore, rook. Then, some days, I think that’s my belief; I don’t believe in anything. There’s one thing I know, though. That is beautiful,” he said of the building. “It always is. But I can count on one hand the days in a year it looks like that, the days it’s covered in fresh snow.” Then, Tack clapped me on the shoulder. “I’m heading home.”

“It’s back to the office for me,” I said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow. And, eh, thanks for the invite. Let’s do it again soon.”

With that, Tack turned and made his way towards a faculty lot, and I stood there taking in the way the snow laid across the angles of that very old building, the first building on campus, at one time, hundreds of years ago, the only building. Back then, it was the whole school. Despite its indelible history and place on the campus, it was as Tack said—the building looked like it did right then so few times a year, so I studied it. I wanted to see it that way, wanted to see it just like that, while I could.