Black Cross for a Penitent Angel  

Black Cross for a Penitent Angel                                                                      
                                                                        
     With only a master’s degree in music, I am lucky to land an instructor job at my local junior college. I am an instructor for these acolytes of the baroque masters of melody. Young pianist, flutist, and organist birth notes on high with fingers on fire. This is a two-year college where young Olympians excel. During their practice sessions, I just melt in my soma zone while the students strum my heart with the music of the Gods.
     The young ladies chatter like Chickadees with budding gentlemen in a college-lyceum where Bach can’t compete with green grass and blue skies. So we follow the sun onto the campus green where lads and lasses in their salad days do cartwheels while I sit in a Buddha pose with the heart of a child. My boyhood has passed me by without fanfare or trumpets. Mine is a stoic solitude lost in inner chambers.
     One student seeks my counsel under the blue sky cathedral that arches over oak pews of the green grass church where her youth paints its dream. Her name is Gloria. She takes a seat in front of me and assumes my full lotus pose. My gaze is somewhere beyond this time and she waves her hands in my face saying, “Yoo-hoo—is there anyone there?”
     My eyes come unglazed. She brandishes her wrists with her scars from her dark moods. She opens, “I’m unipolar. I go into deep depressions. I’ve tried to off myself many times. If I’d had someone like you in my life back then maybe I would have understood how precious life is. People like you who can tune out the world can teach me. I know you can.” Her supernal vision sees into my spirit that I have a prismatic mind that leaps the bounds of linear logic. She finds this fascinating. I babble merrily as a mountain brook.
     She says, “You remind me of John Nash.”  He was the schizophrenic genius depicted in the movie,
“A Beautiful Mind.”
    I reply with a beam of a grin, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
     When the bell tower chimes we gather back in the classroom. Deep in the cloisters of terracotta youth sits in fluorescent solitude among rows of wooden desks where they have sat for a century.
     Gloria pops my bubble of solitude. “It’s raining.
I would ask you to hold my umbrella for me to the car since I’ll have my hands full with my cello. But while I know your heart is pure it might look fishy. The students here aren’t klepto but would you mind me hanging in here with you until the rain lets up? I know this is your last class for today. But you’d be doing me a big favor.”
     “That would look just as fishy as me holding your umbrella for you.”
    She says, “You are right. I’ll just leave it under your desk and trust in the Lord.”
     She comes to my throne often seeking my words of Shamanic wisdom. One day she comes to me in need of guidance. She says, “I’m not sure what college to attend next year. I may go back to the Catholic college. My credits here would transfer. But I may stay here at the community college.”
     I say, “Here you will learn among a more diverse student population. The world out there is diverse.”
     She plunges into a deep well of affront. She says, “Yes here I won’t get discriminated against for the color of my skin.” Her Brazilian roots burst into a scarlet passionflower.
     Gloria says, “You know it might do me good to take the plunge into a four-year college. Since I’m a Catholic maybe a Catholic college would be best.”
     “I admire much about the Catholic Church.”
     “You see you are speaking of Catholicism like it is old fashioned but in some limited ways relevant. Please don’t put down my faith.”
     “Your faith is part of who you are and that is precious to me.”
     “You are so sweet, Mr. Boswell. But there is another reason for staying here. There is a male of the species who caught my eye. He is everything I dreamed of in a man. He is shy but lovable. He is my heart’s desire.”
     I ask, “Would he happen to be older than you?”
     She replies, “You are so funny, Mr. Boswell. He is a sophomore while I am a freshman. Does that sound like too great of a difference?”
     “Gloria, you are like the daughter I never had.”
     She giggles. “Mr. Boswell, no professor has ever said such a sweet thing to me. But I’ve got to get to my next class. Catch you tomorrow.”
     One day Gloria tracks me down to a music theory class whose professor I am filling in for as he is sick. My info bite about having studied Latin in college makes me out to be an expert in her eyes. But then everything about me seems to inspire her awe. Yet, contacting the department to seek my whereabouts and doing the footwork across campus clues me into her more than academic admiration of me. Her Latin grammar question meets my answer, “It has been a long time since I took Latin. Sorry, I don’t know.” She recedes into the building while I feel the eddies of her presence like vibes from the idolization zone.
    One day they see a biographical movie on the life of Mozart. Gloria asks me, “Why don’t you join me to watch the movie? You look so lonely and forlorn behind that desk. I don’t have any popcorn but would be glad to share the coke from my thermos with you. The cola is fresh because the ice hasn’t had time to melt.”
     I reply, “Naw, I wouldn’t fit in those desks anyway.”
     “Would it help if I gave you some of my trail mix?”
     “My sweet tooth is on vacation.”
     “Just a friendly offer, but I understand your reticence with you being my instructor.”
     The urgency to corral the wild horses of our mutual endearment comes like a flash of lightning in the night that illuminates the darkness. The classroom is an empty church of silence. It is just me and Gloria alone with each other. I watch her pack her book sack. Her gaze beams sunshine into my soul. She smiles and speaks coquettishly. “Mr.
Boswell, would you take me to Taco Bell?”
     “The burrito express ain’t in the curriculum.”
     Gloria clutches her book sack to her chest and her words turn to dry ice, “Jeez, I was only kidding.”
     I reply, “It wasn’t your fault.”
     “Don’t feel bad. We cool. Those greasy tacos don’t agree with me anyway.”
     “Do you require your food to agree with your opinions? Can tacos express a political belief?”
     “Get out of here you crazy goof.”
     “Just some overdue humor.”
     The Hadrian’s Wall that separates students from the instructor gets a much-needed repair. Our boundaries are rebuilt but still porous. At the end of the semester, she says, “I’m going to the Catholic college next year.”
     I reply, “Won’t you pine for that shy but lovable boy who stole your heart?”
     “That is the beauty of it. I don’t have to choose. He is following me to the Catholic college.”
     “You get your pie, a la mode.”
     “For joy, he is my Cuba Gooding for life.”
     “He won a prize more precious than an Oscar, your heart.”
     “I’ll miss you like I would my father if he disappeared.”
     “I’ll miss you being the only student who sought my Shamanistic wisdom on anything other than if it is ok to skip class for a shopping spree because it is Black Friday.”  
     “Mr. Boswell, you gave me a life-lesson that even my philosophy professor never did. I learned that guys like you are wiser than the starched shirt crowd.”
     I reply, “Well, don’t knock the stockbroker and banker guys. They may not shine like crazy diamonds but Vienna waits for you.”
     “You’re so funny, Mr. Boswell. You didn’t break me but handled me well with neither a thimbleful of shame nor a dewdrop of blame. You used kid gloves with me because after all, it wasn’t so long ago that I was a kid and I am still a lass with tender emotions. Is that a tear in your eye Mr. Boswell?”
     “Just allergies. I’m allergic to mushiness.”
     “It must be all the pollen in the air. My eyes are getting watery too.”
     Gloria meets a young man at the threshold where sunlight meets fluorescence. She walks with him through the door haloed by sunbeams.