As the world turns

The globe spins; day gives way to night. The tide recedes; the geese fly north again. Babies learn to sit, and then crawl, and talk; retired ballplayers become managers; students in music education take jobs as music instructors, at local preschools.

And now one of my own former students instructs, according to the same beautifully inevitable logic, my own little girl. Yesterday the Yellowbirds and Redbirds climbed onto a bus and headed down to the Walters Art Museum, where Kate (whom I once taught and who is now a full-time employee in the museum's education program) led them from a Egyptian mummy to an example of Gothic stained glass, teaching them how to see and speak about works of art made centuries ago.

What trickles down, through such connections? Were any of her words informed by mine, of years ago? Perhaps - but likely only very faintly, if at all. For Kate, in fact, had also worked occasionally for us as a babysitter, when Cleo was still a tiny toddler. She was wonderfully gentle and invariably positive - and yet, when I asked Cleo who had taught them at the Walters, she simply responded, "Two ladies." Kate is, it seems, a total stranger to Cleo now, even if she once held Cleo and calmed her, while L. and I enjoyed an evening out. If such warm gestures are forgotten, surely lectures are even less permanent.

What is remembered, and what forgotten? The mummy still stares into space, intact, after thousands of years. But the words that I once uttered in a classroom are now beyond reclaim; they're evaporated. We live in the moment, doing our best to craft durable, generous legacies. But at the same time we are governed by larger forces. The preschoolers take up their instruments, and even as they become more proficient over the course of years, the memory of the name of the woman who first instructed them fades.