Recovering Teacher

JO SCOTT-COE

        The only hope, or else despair,
       Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
       To be redeemed from fire by fire.    
         —T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding”

The Christmas after I broke away from my career teaching English—at the public school from which I’d graduated sixteen years earlier—my husband gave me a license plate frame that read, in plain black letters on a silver frame, Recovering Teacher.
Although I appreciated his part-silly, part-celebratory gift, I put off attaching the frame for a month or so. Something in the phrase bothered me, sounded bitter or regretful, suggested a distance from teaching that wasn’t entirely accurate for me. In the months after screwing the frame in place, I noticed it preoccupied me as I drove. When a car pulled up behind me at a stop, did the driver read the message, I wondered? What if I made a poor lane change, ground from one gear into another, or made a hasty left turn at a yellow light? Did the driver blame me more because of the frame, or did he blame me less? 
One afternoon, a man called at me across the YMCA parking lot: “Recovering teacher?” 
I kept moving but looked over my shoulder. “That’s right,” I said. I was headed to the gym not just for sweat, but for healing and distraction: I was missing someone who had recently died from “un-recovery,” a person I hadn’t seen in two years.

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