Vergil’s Coffee

Hint: It’s really simpler than you think.

Let me tell you a story:

It begins yesterday when I’m listening to simply the best version of “Mack the Knife” (Sinatra and Buffet) in my 1993 Ford Escort Wagon heading north on US 33 South toward school. If you remember this version (and probably like other versions) there’s the part toward the end when the whole brass section builds to an explosion: Pow! and I’m hitting the “back” button on my iPod Shuffle to hear it again. In my mind, this is one of the best recordings of music ever.

I’m at school and after 3rd hour one of the music teachers motions me to talk and we’re discussing some arrangement for a student of his to get out of my class to listen to a pretty famous musician. I’m cool with that, but what I really want to ask him about is “Mack the Knife.”

“You doing the Jazz band thing, eh?” I verify.

“Yes, I’m the other director,” he says.

And then I ask him if they’ll be playing “Mack the Knife” at the Jazz Cafe this year and he says “Yes” like they always play it.

“It’s a standard, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he says.

And then I launch into my experience of listening to “Mack the Knife” and how it’s incredible the way that “ol’ Blue Eyes” includes himself in the list of names in the verses that he and Buffet add to the song. And then I ask him if he thinks it’s a violent song as far as the lyrics and I think it is and he stops for a moment.

“You know,” the jazz director says, “I don’t think I remember the words…I just listen to the music.”

And I say “Oh” and he responds “But I’ll have to look at the words now that you bring it up.”

Here’s another story:

After I got my teaching degree, my wife and I moved to Bloomington, IN so she could complete her graduate studies in speech/language pathology. It is simply impossible to get a teaching job in any school district within an hour’s drive from Indiana University for someone who is from the outside and who has no contacts. I did, though, interview twice for a school within 25 minutes and those were sorry interviews (mostly because I’ve been told that I don’t interview well). But in one case, I realized that I hated some of the people that did the interviewing.

I was answering the usual questions and trying not to sound too desperate in wanting to do anything to land my first teaching job. (In our senior ed. seminar class, we were encouraged to say “Yes” to any coaching assignment or an extracurricular activity). I was working as a bill collector in Indianapolis at the time and I was ready to mop the floors if the school asked. I simply wanted to teach.

The principal then looks at my application and is unsure of where Grace College is at and “where’s Winona Lake anyway?” I tell him it’s by Warsaw and he still doesn’t get the geography of Northern Indiana and then looks back at me and asks/tells “You know, you can’t evangelize in the classroom, don’t you?”

I was amazed at this man’s inability to understand my application. First he didn’t know his Indiana geography and second, he was being an idiot (or at least that is what I thought at the time). I took a breath and then calmly pointed out to him that I had been a bill collector for 5 years and it wasn’t my general practice to “share the Good News after I had just asked a person to pay their hospital bill.” I don’t think he wanted me and I certainly didn’t want that type of a person as a principal.

And a last story:

Last Friday, a student in my Expository Writing class (senior composition) challenged my requirement of a 15-20 page paper when I was teaching them about how to write good sentences.

“If we can’t write a sentence, then how are we to write a 15-20 page paper then?” he said. And the kid next to him was saying “Well, there’s simply no way I could write a 15-20 paper.”

When the murmuring died down enough for me to answer–and maybe he didn’t want an answer, maybe he just wanted to say aloud what was going around in his mind–I asked him for a favor: to ask me the same question after he wrote the paper and to let me know if it was worth it. And, if he could, to then let me know in a year (after some college/life work) if he could see why I had the class write a massive paper.

And I think he backed off a bit and I’m not sure if he believed me, but I added: “You might just have to trust me on this one” and walked back to the front of the class.

Each day, teachers and students and staff engage in sharing their religion with one another by the stories they tell. We talk about our passions and we sometimes actively try and convince others that they too should see or hear or feel those same things that rouse in us the stuff that dreams are made of. Other times, some folk may misread us and instead of seeing a person full of passion, they’d rather see a label and restrict human potential through an incomplete sentence. But most religious of all school practices is when someone asks the simple question “Why?” For in that very question, one is attempting to figure out place and perspective and purpose. And as long as public schools encourage questioning and discussion of ideas with others, the public school will continue to be a place of religion.