Senator Daniel Ruiz unfolded the letter I wrote him the night before he graduated in 1991, the one he has carried in his wallet for thirty-three years, and said, And at the bottom, you wrote something about Mr Ellison. I think he should hear it.
Then Danny read it to the whole library. Daniel, I had written to a seventeen-year-old boy who could barely read when he came to me. You are going to be somebody. Do not ever let a person make you feel small, not even the people who are supposed to love you the most. I know exactly how that feels. Carry yourself like the man I know you will be.
Forty former students sat in that library and understood, all at once, that their teacher had spent thirty-eight years lifting them up while being made to feel small at her own kitchen table, and that she had quietly warned a struggling boy not to let it happen to him.
Howard told me to sit down and stop making a fool of myself. A state senator stood up to say the woman who made him was the least foolish person he had ever known.
Then Danny asked me to finish my poem. And I did. I stood back up at that podium, and I read every line I had written for my students, and this time nobody told me to sit down, because the only voice that ever did had finally run out of room to say it.
When I finished, forty grown students, some of them grandparents now, stood up and clapped until my hands shook holding the paper.
Howard did not clap. He left. I found I did not mind the empty chair at all.
Danny put the 1991 letter back in his wallet, where it has lived for thirty-three years. I taught English for thirty-eight years, and I spent too many of them believing the man at home instead of the children in my classroom. The children were right. I was somebody. I retired that day and started writing poems for myself, and I have not folded one up since.