One Summer for Professor Adams

"Father Brown was silent; then he started a little, almost as if he had been nodding over the stove, and said: 'I beg your pardon. Yes...Absence of method...Absence of mind, too, I'm afraid." – CK Chesteron, from "The Secret of Father Brown"








1.

This would be the first full season that Professor Adams would be on his own since he was a boy; it was April, the cruelest month, he couldn't help but always say this to himself when he thought of the coarse weather, and he looked forward to some of the very things of his own boyhood – fine long days full of sunshine and the sound of the ducks across the street along the Yahara River skimming across the water as they landed. Quite nice, actually, he thought, that this particular band of ducks over-wintered here, as the flow of the river never quite allowed for a full freeze, and those various waterfowl became the only animation in the sky. Soon, here, there would be children to teach, and for that he was exceedingly tickled, for he never really was quite cut out for professorship, a very closed and solitary existence really that rarely showed itself to live on the same plane as reality or for that matter the rest of the people alive. He had always seen himself, somewhat ironically, as something more of anti-intellectual, maybe a third grade teacher, watching over kids, reading them books, looking out the window along with them. Yes, that was it! That was how this all happened, his little experiment in a neighborhood school; now, if only others around the nearby blocks might agree. He had been thinking these things the day after a 48 hour long snow which had newly laced the soon to be classroom of his courtyard with half a foot of soggy snow. He bent over to shovel but it was the kind of ice that had essentially sealed itself like a gum of sorts to the concrete slabs. He looked up over the withered grasses still griping against the wind along the planting boxes and could see an image of a long line children coming in for lessons. It's never too late, he said to himself, and began to flush out in his mind the first week of lesson plans.