Drifting Back Into Greatness

You Know Who by Matthew Brady

O.K.  I don't want to mislead you.  What happened with The Poet was nothing dramatic externally.  It was internal, that's all.  The Poet is a Great Man.  You sensed it when you spoke to him.  He was not a person you would like to exchange witticisms with onstage.  Perhaps not even privately.  He was intelligent, learned, prepared.  And he had developed a trunkful of tricks that he kept up his sleeve, inside his pockets, and, perhaps, even in his hat.  I admired him.

It was what I did or did not do that mattered to me.  In part, it was the role I was given, or rather allowed.  My part was to chuck him softballs that he could hit over the fence.  And he could really hit them.  I am not an obsequious person by nature.  Nor by culture.  But there I was, smiling through the dismissive gaze, the butt of a joke suffering minor taunts too small to matter.  Next question.

I won't do it again.  I'll tell it this way.  I kept thinking of the high school drama teacher that all the students adored.  He seemed sooooo. . . everything.  He made us dream, inside the cramped walls of his tiny classroom, of the great stages beyond.  He was too good for that half-pint institution, we thought.  He told us stories of acting in the theater, of meeting great playwrights, of performing with famous actors before they were famous.  He'd even had small parts in some independent films.  How did he end up here, we wondered?  He was by far the most interesting person in that drab and dreary place.  He seemed, to steal a phrase, to glitter when he walked.  The girls were in love with him.  The boys wanted to be him.  And he, on that smallest of stages, may have begun to believe it all himself.

And that is what I felt sitting with America's Poet.  A fellow who plays at art and literature and maybe starts to. . . but  I do not want to kid myself.  Maybe sometimes, and maybe a little, but really not at all.  And truly, The Great Poet didn't get there by accident.  There is luck, of course, but luck is what you ready yourself to greet as you prepare yourself for greatness.

And so you will not find his name here.  No, no, there will be none of that.  I know how Google works.  The thought sends shivers up and down my spine.

I was right, of course.  This did not get written as it was felt a day before.  It never will.  We are time travelers floating away from the things we no longer wish to remember, drifting further and further back into our own incontrovertible greatness.  It lies behind us like all the promise of the world.