20181210.0430

To go back a bit, on 31 August 2017, Silvia Foster-Frau's "'Literary Bridge' Still Beating Heart of San Antonio" appeared in the online San Antonio Express-News as part of its series of articles commemorating San Antonio's tricentennial. The piece describes and narrates the history of a particular bridge across the San Antonio River, one currently in place on Johnson Street in San Antonio's King William neighborhood. Hailed as the "literary bridge" due to being noted in the works of O. Henry, Sidney Lanier, and Margaret Cousins, the bridge continues to attract attention from artists, tourists, and locals who value it for its ongoing ability to let people simply be.
What attracted me to the piece was its title, I admit; I am and remain a nerd about such things, and an article talking about a literary bridge called to me. Given the area I study, I'd not been aware of the literary associations of the bridge in question, though I've been on it any number of times; I used to spend a fair bit of time in and around downtown San Antonio, usually to my benefit if not to my wallet's, so I've crossed that bridge, having come to it more than once. And I was pleased to see the described associations with poets both noted and less so; there don't seem to me to be enough such, and I know I've not got the writerly heft to be able to make many more that people would actually see.
As I read, I also found myself in mind of how I might use the piece in the classroom. (Still do I think of such things, and often, despite my classroom work being a shrinking part of my daily life and income.) Foster-Frau offers an excellent example of a profile, a genre which I do not seldom teach; I find myself wishing I had had it in hand earlier in the session I'm currently teaching, as it would have done me some good. I also find myself hoping I'll be able to keep it in mind as I continue teaching--not for the current session, which is already well past the point at which offering a sample profile would be helpful, but for future sessions when I might actually teach the genre again. It's not likely, though; I've often had such hopes, or I seem to recall having them, but I don't remember that I enacted them regularly or often. It's not to my credit.
Thinking on such hopes, though, even if they have been unrealized far too much, does serve to remind me of one of the reasons I thought to be a teacher (at some level of teaching) for quite some time. I do much of what I do because I love it; I play my horn for the love of it, and I study literature for the joy of it. I had thought that by going into teaching I would be able to help others find their own loves of such things by my example, that I would be able to share my love of the thing with them and awaken a love of it in them in response. It's not always been the case that I've been able to do so, sometimes because of my failures; it's never often enough the case that it is so. Sometimes, though, it has been and is, and to be reminded of it by Foster-Frau's piece, however obliquely, is no small comfort.