Student-Teacher Confab

“I could be teaching your class, you know.” That’s his opening shot.

We settle in a booth at Butch’s Diner, opposite one another on plastic-covered bench seats, and arch our backs as a tray-balancing waitress shakily, with one hand, plops down two mugs of coffee. The diner’s a convenient dozen blocks west of the campus where I teach. Mark, my coffee mate, is a new student, one of a growing number of senior-adult back-to-schoolers. The sun’s just up this mid-November day, and incoming patrons are blowing into and rubbing together their hands.

Mark wriggles free his long arms from a leather-sleeved baseball jacket. An old high school letter jacket? A lost-in-his-youth old guy? Underneath he’s wearing a gray warm- and soft-looking V-neck cashmere sweater over a white polo shirt. Neatly combed thinning and likely-dyed dark hair sits atop his amber-tanned face. A golfer, I figure. Being one, I know the look. He’s 55, seven years my senior. Not supposed to, but I peeked at his admission application yesterday.

This rendezvous started with Mark's rather demanding – “Let’s meet” – response to my email message to him, sent three days ago, suggesting he rethink and redo a class assignment. I reluctantly said O.K., recommended Butch’s.

“Thanks, hon,” Mark says to the departing waitress. I stare into my coffee with sarcastically raised eyebrows, resist the urge to shake my head. A neanderthal?

I look up, and Mark, leaning toward me with his forearms on the table, blurts out this exclamation.

Again, I arch my eyebrows, but this time without stealth. “You could be teaching my class?” I rhetorically repeat. “How so?”

What I teach is an overview course, a prerequisite for advanced ones leading to a certificate in hotel and restaurant management.

“It’s like this, Gwen,” he starts, immediately stopping to ask if it’s O.K. to call me by my first name.

“Better than hon,” I answer, unable to resist, “but sure, fine.”

“O.K.,” Mark says with a smile, seeming to concede my gotcha remark, sheepishly lowering his head, “now you know what an old goat I am.” I grin, too, at his boyish contriteness.

He proceeds to tell me he’s spent his entire adult life in what he calls the hospitality business. He recounts in lengthy – but fascinating – detail his overseeing of food and beverage operations for cruise lines, running resorts on four continents, and working with famous hoteliers and restaurateurs. Now he consults, serves as a go-between for investors with resort owners, and oversees the management of investor-owned resort properties.

“I’ve done it all,” he concludes, “but you know what? It’s a craft, an art. It’s not a science, not something you can learn from a book.”

“That’s quite a resume, Mark,” I say, not bothering to ask permission to address him by his first name. I am the teacher, after all.

“So, why are you taking my class?”

“Because I never studied this stuff,” Mark says.

“I went to college, played baseball and partied, got into this business totally by accident. Maybe there’re things I can still learn. I’d like a credential, too, something that says I’m expert at what I’m already good at.”

“You say you accidentally got into the business. How so?” I ask. Mark responds with an intriguing saga.

He tells about being recruited by the Los Angeles Angels to throw baseballs over home plates in Japan. Summoned back after three years, he’s just-arrived and jet-lagged in a hotel room a stone’s throw from LAX. Two henchmen of Gene Autry – the cowboy singer-turned baseball club owner – rap on his door, enter, tell him to get back to the airport, and head to their triple-A team’s dugout in Indianapolis. Mark, weary of travel, asks for a $75-a-month raise. The two Autry acolytes look at each other, nod, then one pulls two fifty-dollar bills from his pocket, hands them to Mark. The pair wish him good luck and leave. Worriedly wondering about his future, Mark, within minutes of having been forever relieved from the pitcher’s mound, descends 30 odd floors in an elevator, corrals the hotel manager, asks for, and gets a job. As a bellhop.

Concludes Mark, “I learned this business from the ground up.”

“How’d you get to where you are?” Mark asks me.

“Not from the ground up,” I explain, elaborating on how I won a full-ride golf scholarship and earned two degrees from Cornell, both from its School of Hotel Administration in Ithaca. Then I spent 15 years selling convention and meeting services for Marriott, took an early-out package during the 2008 financial crisis, got divorced, saw an ad for a teaching job, got it, and have been doing that ever since.

“About my homework,” Mark interjects in an interrupting way.

“So,” I explain, “when I told your class to turn in their assignment by last Friday, as you did, I said to keep it under 300 words, double-spaced. Pretty standard rules.

“You got back to me with a treatise, Mark, a book, more words than I could count, with single-spaced lines, and all in a phonebook-sized typeface. I’m sorry, it was too long and wrongly formatted for me to get into.”

Silence engulfs us. Mark finally breaks it by saying, “You think I should quit?”

“Of course not,” I say. “I don’t want you to, especially not now, knowing what I do about what you do, where you’ve been, and what you’ve done.”

“O.K.,” says Mark. “Thanks for the second chance. I’ll get cranking, follow your rules, and get my homework back to you. Today.”

Not one who seems hesitant to break a train of thought with a from-left-field query, Mark asks if I’m married. I repeat that I was divorced and am still single. I half expect a blunt how come? But I beat him to it, ask if he’s married.

“Divorced, too,” he says. “Many years ago, long story, lots of hurts. Too much time on the road, too little to stay home.”

We order more coffee. Mark insists we split one of the diner’s specialties, a gigantic sticky bun that’s oozing with a sugary glaze. He carefully picks away the pecans stuck to his half, looks up, and says simply, “I’m finicky.” Again, I can’t help smiling at his boyishness.

We linger over yet another coffee-refill, and I notice he’s noticing me in a way different than how he first saw me. I’m reacting to him differently, too. I don’t want to but can tell that I am.

“That’s a beautiful pendant on your necklace,” Mark says. I explain how a jewelry-making friend made it. He doesn’t repeat that it’s beautiful, looks straight into me, not at the pendant, and says simply, “It goes with you.” God in heaven, I can’t believe it, I’m blushing. I lean back and instinctively wrap my hands around the sides of my burning neck as if I’m suddenly cold.

We spend at least another half-hour together, lean forward on our table, talk about golf and things other than my course and his homework.

Finally, Mark pays, and we exit our booth.

“Gotta get going,” I say, feigning urgency.

I get in and start my car, rub my now-cold hands together for warmth, and silently admit to myself how comfortable and soothing my time with Mark has been. For a moment, and as if waiting for my engine to adjust to the approaching winter, I let my mind wander and wonder more about him.

No sooner do I shift into reverse and turn to look over my passenger seat to make sure my path is clear than a soft thumping on my window jolts me. I turn, see Mark, and roll down my window. “Did we forget something?” I ask.

“No,” says Mark. “Can we do this again tomorrow morning?”

“I can’t,” I quickly answer, “have an 8:30.” Why did I so promptly lie?

“How about lunch?” he immediately re-asks.

I pause, inhale the cold air, step hard on my brake pedal, stare wide-eyed out my windshield as if a deer is there, calibrate a lifetime of instincts into a precious few milliseconds, then look back at Mark. He’s shivering but confident.

“Yes,” I tell the truth, “I’d love that.”