Dear Mr. Deprado,

Everything is changing. I am getting older, and the days are walking by more quickly, and I wonder where and when I might ever get to sit down and talk with you about all I have learned. I know I am writing to you each month, and perhaps you get the time to sit down in an old soft chair and read these letters as they come in, but I am not sure if that even matters now. I just like to think that you are out there knowing that this punk-ass kid learned quite a bit about how to learn from you Mr. D. Because of you, I have had a chance to start "relearning" the lessons of the past and making them new again. We have all learned things in the past that mattered, if only to us. When we remember these things they create a small ripple in time, and the ripples stand out in the big pond of too many memories. It is hard to see clearly into a ripple. This is why so much of what we learn is changed when we try and remember it again.

But even on my best day, I struggle to keep what I have learned, fresh. "Fresh" is a strange word, but it is very much a word that means as it sounds. Yes, yes, I do mean fresh like a cold mountain stream, and that "Just out of the shower feeling," all of it is true, but when I think of things seeming fresh, I mean the way things look, early in the morning: a little colder. Like the world has a little less color in it and it needs the sun’s morning brush strokes to paint the colors all in.

Fresh like each time you get back home from a trip and everything you were tired of seeing before suddenly explodes into truth and familiarity. In San Diego, it is the tops of the buildings in Banker’s Hill set up like a railroad play set below my plane homeward bound.

So maybe if we can just tune ourselves in to what makes us wake up the first time, and we learn to value it in a different way, a just way, a real way, then maybe we will learn the way we once did when we really wanted to.

The other night I started cataloging my "relearning" of my experiences. I did it in the form of asking myself questions and enumerating memories:

Things that I have learned

When was the last time someone called you by name, and when you heard it, you felt the words melt through your skin, squeeze your heart, maybe plugged your nose or gave you that feeling like when you look down from the chairlift thinking, "what if I just jumped! "

When did you last run anywhere just because you couldn’t wait to get there?

Remember the things that made it "your" room when you were growing up: fish tanks, unread books piled on top of unwashed clothes, the poster of Heather Thomas at the hot tub.

I remember walking the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the sterile hallways lined with suits of armor–wishing they would come life, and they did for me, their young king for a moment.

Eating hot dogs loaded with onions, sauerkraut, relish–you know the ones if you’ve been in New York–the orange onions–sweet and slimy.

The Golden Eagle Sled rides down "Dog Hill" on 82^nd street.

I remember the soft lips of the first girl I kissed, how cool they were to touch, how I pretended to kiss her again and again all the next day until enough kids asked me, "why are you kissing your hand?"

Will I fall back to what I was—because just yesterday there were moments when I felt uneasy, bitter, alone, and reckless again?

Am I supposed to feel reckless?

Sometimes I wonder what would happen to my heart if I were struck down on the way to miniature golf, or to play basketball, or simply driving. What If someone, the kind of person that just has to look when there is an accident, pulled over to the side of the road and ripped open my chest and tried to take my heart. They wouldn’t be able to lift its density with only human strength. My heart is not for them.

Sometimes I think of my student, Onye from Nigeria. I want to remember him each time I feel I am in a rut. I imagine his slow rhythmic voice humming what it means to grow up hiding in the desert, watching the handless victims of rebels walking ghostlike from village to village.

This catalog will continue because even now Mr. D. as I look it over, I can remember the way that I felt when I walked in to your class the first day. I had a life-changing summer (which I will talk about in the next letter maybe) and when I walked through the door that first day of my eighth grade year, I knew I was different and everyone could see. I relive that moment again and again as a reference point, a touch stone of so many moments in and out of time and space that tie the universe together for me and let me know that I am a part of time as it unfolds, that every new moment is a "fresh" chance to relearn what we have learned so that nothing ever has to be the same. So what if what I am staring at is a ripple in the water of memories, tiny waves changing the form of me as they roll. I like to see the way I look when I change.

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