ENG 101n

I'm terrible with names, as a rule. I don't mean to be; I just get so busy meeting the person that the next thing I know I'm muttering to myself behind my smile.

"Crap," I think, "I did it again." I don't even try to fake it. "I'm sorry. I'm Allison. I know you just said, but you are?"

But sometimes the names stick, along with the faces and stories that I carry around, so many people that I'll never forget, whoever they are.

I look at the picture and see the kid from Kenya who taught me about his tribe's weddings, the silent Japanese teenager who wrote about fish. The warmly vivacious woman from Zambia who had a little boy, a job in a grocery store, and a laugh I can hear even now. What's his name--I've almost got it, something with an N--from Turkey. I bet it would come back to me, but man, it's been so long. I see Olga the Russian doctor with the American husband and the plagiarized paper I stumbled upon in a textbook. It was the end of the semester, she knew how to write, and, sleep deprived and overworked, she couldn't come up with a reason not to do it. She may have been right. I see the the sweet girl from the United Arab Emirates and the most unlikely appellation: Melanie Rodrigues! Sometimes even I remember. Especially when it's so hard to forget.

We talked about it at the time, there in the Fall of 2001, how it would undoubtedly become even more complicated to be a guy from Pakistan named Muhammad in the United States of America. Whether being out in the middle of nowhere was in fact a plus; as I recall, the consensus was yes. In mid-September we wouldn't have been a class for very long, but he was already a favorite student: funny and bright and articulate, confident and charming without being overbearing--an engineer or a computer guy who'd put off English 101 until he couldn't any longer. Lucky timing for me; he helped make a good class better, and regardless I was just glad to have met him.

So I wonder, as every teacher does, how he's doing or what became of him. I hope the complications of his post-9/11 world were minor, whether he stayed here or went back home. I hope his talents gave him a visa and a choice. He was from Lahore, I know, where trucks have been known to explode. Given that I cannot ID him more specifically than as being Muhammad from Pakistan, it's safe to say I'll never know. He could be anywhere, even sharing a zip code with me. The world changed that day; I don't dispute that truism. But I also think the odds are--and do we really think of this?-- it changed for some of us more than others.