Today’s episode is guest hosted by Jason Schneiderman.

Transcript

I’m Jason Schneiderman and this is The Slowdown.

One of the reasons I became a teacher is that I love semesters, and one of the things I love about semesters is that they end. I know that sounds like a weird thing to say, and it might sound like I’m saying that I just want the whole thing to be over, but the truth is that I love the arc of it. I love starting with a fresh faced group of new students. I love guiding them through sixteen weeks of exercises, readings, and assignments. I love reading their final papers and submitting their final grades, and then having some time to myself for other projects before the next semester starts.

Another way to say this is that the semester structures the student/teacher relationship. I think my students get the best version of me, the smartest, most capable, and most expert version of me, and I get the most open and interested version of them. Sometimes I wonder if we choose our professions—or at least those of us who get to choose—based on the kinds of relationships we want to have.

Doctors and nurses know that they’re going to try to help people whose bodies are failing them. Funeral directors know that they will spend their days with people at the nadir of grief. Firefighters, police officers, lawyers, programmers, architects, astronauts, politicians, the list goes on—whenever I think about a profession, I think about the relationships which structure those professions, and how every kind of work also entails a specific kind of love. Or if love seems too strong a word, a specific kind of intimacy.

Today’s poem is by Sean Singer, who, like me, is a teacher, but at a certain point he became a cab driver to support himself. In his poems about driving a cab, he experiences not a lilting relational arc of guiding students through a semester, but a staccato chord of intense contact, a brief and unguarded glimpse into a life, one in which he is equal parts service provider and witness. Often, to make sense of the experience, he turns toward Jewish theology. Singer uses religion not to comfort the suffering passenger, but to make sense of the larger experience. His role is neither to comfort nor participate, but merely to transport.

Burnt Plastic
by Sean Singer

Today  in  the  taxi  I  picked  up  a  Wall  Street  type   on  Park
Avenue near  48th  Street.  He was going to  Montclair,  New
Jersey.  His  house was on fire and he  spent the trip  on  the
phone  barking orders at  his wife, his roofer, his  contractor,
his insurance company, and at me. 

He   kept   saying:   “Go   this   way!”  or   “Which  way  are   you
going?” He  said to  someone  that  there  are   firearms  and
ammunition in the house. Periodically he held  back tears. It
was a long  25  miles for me, and I suppose, longer  for  him.

We got there, and the house was burning. The Talmud says:
Nature rules over all things except the terror it inspires.

"Burnt Plastic" by Sean Singer from TODAY IN THE TAXI © 2022 Sean Singer. Used by permission of Tupelo Press.