When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
     And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
     I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
     Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
     Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
     And thought of him I love.
                    —Walt Whitman

    My English teacher prided herself on picking the right poet for each student. She would carefully study each of her pupils, consider our likes and dislikes, and then make the perfect match. Then, like a Yente with an English degree, she’d assign us a poem on which we were to give a forty-five minute presentation to the class.
    The students who studied for the vocabulary and grammar quizzes and read the entire book when assigned and didn’t pull all-nighters to complete papers marred by typos landed the good poets. Our class valedictorian got “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, our salutatorian snagged “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, and my best friend Lisa was assigned one of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Ms. Larusso gave her Pound secure in the belief that Lisa was conscientious enough to get the details right. Ms. Larusso did not think I was conscientious. She gave me Walt Whitman.
    I had no idea what special insight she imagined I could bring to “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” or why she thought Whitman would appeal to me. I’m sure she knew I wanted to be a writer, that I was liberal and into “freedom”—whatever that meant to me at seventeen. She also knew that I was a junior volunteer for our local ambulance squad. That one fact alone probably clinched it.
    Lisa was a good student and had considered herself my best friend since we were freshmen when I let her latch onto me our first day together in German class. She reminded me about assignments and laughed at my jokes, but we shared few of the same interests. We were a strange pair, Lisa with her calculus and penny loafers and me with my artistic pose and writerly ambitions. I guess I made her feel put together and competent, but being with her made me feel disheveled and careless.
    “You haven’t started reading The Sound and the Fury yet? But the paper is due next week.”
    “I’ve started it, I just can’t get into it.”
    “What do you mean you can’t get into it? Are you past the Benjy stuff?”
    “Yes. And it’s not that I can’t get over the whole mentally retarded narrator thing. It’s just…”
    “What?”
    “Nothing.”
    “No, tell me.”
    “I…I don’t think I like Faulkner.”
    She looked at me as if I had just stepped on an Easter chick. “Okay, let me get this straight. You’re telling me you don’t like it.”
    “That’s what I said.”
    “You want to be a writer and you can’t even appreciate Faulkner.”
    “Is that a requirement? ’Cause if it is, I can pretend to.”
    “Very funny. You know, every book can’t be Huckleberry Finn.”
    “I know. I just don’t like the story. And I don’t care about the Comptons.”
    “Compsons.”
    “Whatever.”
    “Maybe you’re just a philistine.”
    “I’m glad to see you putting our vocabulary list to use.”
    My main problem was not whether I enjoyed what I was reading, it was time. Not enough of it. Instead of taking it easy my senior year, I had enrolled in honors classes. I also worked part-time at the 7-Eleven to save some money for college. And two nights a week, I ran on our local ambulance squad from six in the evening to six in the morning.
    It’s hard to remember what motivated me to join the squad in the first place, but I did have a knack for handling medical emergencies. As the third of four active, foolhardy children, I was frequently drafted into performing first aid procedures. By the age of fifteen, my accident-prone older brother had fallen out of dozens of trees, shot his foot with my father’s .22, and fallen off the back of a moving pick-up truck. My younger brother was not much better—he once begged me to remove a fish hook from his thumb because he figured the beating he’d get from my father for using his tackle would be worse than submitting to my clumsy medical skills. I even fixed a nasty laceration on my mother’s thigh one night when she refused to go to the emergency room for fear that Social Services would notice how many times we’d been there and begin a file on her.
    Being a member of the ambulance squad was a natural fit for me, and I was soon hooked on the excitement. I liked hanging around with the veterans, and I liked the rush I felt when we were on a call and everything went the way it was supposed to. And although I denied it at the time and I’ll deny it to just about anyone who brings it up today, I joined the squad partly because I wanted to be more like Hemingway and Sassoon and Vonnegut and all the other writers I loved who had experienced the visceral and written about it. I wanted stories, real stories. But then a funny thing happened. After about a year on the squad, when I actually did have stories, I found I had lost my taste for writing about them.

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