Nows and Forevers

Three years ago this week, I was in London and Wales, blissfully unaware that within a month or so London would be gripped by the Covid-19 pandemic. The highlight of the first day was Westminster Abbey.

It was incredible to see a place so steeped in history, so connected not only to British history but Western Civilization. It’s been the home of almost every monarch’s coronation since William the Conquerer in 1066. It’s the final resting place of Henry VII, Queen Elizabeth I, and so many other monarchs.

But what moved me the most was Poets’ Corner, the final resting place of so many of the British writers that I grew up reading and still love. So many, I can’t count them all: Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Johnson. There are memorials to William Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, the war poets including Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke.

And it’s the final resting place of Geoffrey Chaucer, whose masterpiece — The Canterbury Tales — I was introduced to by Jan Hart, my beloved British Lit teacher at Westbrook High School in Westbrook, Connecticut, in the mid-1980s. It was there, in her classroom long ago and far away from London, that I fell in love with British literature. I won Student of the Year in British Literature in 1985, and it probably the award I hold most dear given that it was given to me by Mrs. Hart.

I paused a long while to pay my respects to Chaucer and to remember Mrs. Hart, who I learned a few years ago died way too young, about a decade after I graduated from Westbook High School. It was crushing news, hearing she had died, even though it was almost 20 years later before I found out. I have two teachers who mean more to me, above all others. She was one. I hear her words to our class and to me when I sit down to read and to write. She encouraged, she inspired and she fanned the flames of a love of literature.

Bless teachers like her.