The Beauty of the Last

And now the counting begins.

On Friday, James, my best friend and roommate called me to say "hey tonight is my last Friday night in New Orleans." There was something so weighty about hearing these words.

As the school year draws to an end so concludes my time in the Teach for America program, and most likely my life as a teacher. I have decided I will stay in New Orleans for at least another year. The plan is to find a day job that will allow me the freedom to devote more time to comedy. Yet even though I am staying, this still seems a time for endings and goodbyes. And therein I find a strange and unexpected beauty.

There is something about feeling the approach of the end that makes us live that much more fervently. We begin counting our lasts - our last visit to our favorite restaurant, our last walk down a familiar route. The familiar and totally ordinary becomes sacred. Our last time washing the dishes.

Yet given that I am not leaving, all of my lasts are last encounters with people that I care deeply about.

The last "family dinner" at Nirvana - a tradition we started to keep ourselves from dying with stress and subsequent malnutrition. Rolling out of the door full bellied into our last Sunday night prep for the coming week.

Playing guitar with James, standing in the middle of our stairwell - a place whose supernatural acoustic qualities were discovered by accident. Singing at the top of our lungs. Making up lyrics as we go. Wondering if this indeed will be the last time we play together.

My last week of teaching. As teachers are boxing up books and taking down wall decorations, I am putting more up. Posters and signs I create knowing that I will have to take them down within four days. They carry images of DuBois and Douglass, sayings I've kept for two years and neglected to ever put up. "We don't just run to the finish line; we run through it." "Fall seven times, stand up eight." So many lessons I have yet to teach my students and so have condensed into a chart paper slogan I pray they will read and come to own as part of who they are : "we never ever give up" "I am a maker of history" "impossible is nothing" "education = freedom" "I believe in myself."

A last kiss. Standing on her porch. A kiss urgently held as if it were possible to breathe it in and keep some part of it. The kind that compels you to suddenly turn around and bound up the front steps you just descended to kiss her again in a way that might be more permanent than your last one.

It is truly beautiful. There is something about the approach of the end urges us to live, to seize the moment.

"This is it," I whisper to myself, "Make it count."

"Make it count."