These Dreams of You

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Up until around the time of Sheba’s adoption, Zan taught popular culture and Twentieth Century literature at a local college. The popular-culture course began with the year 1954, because that was when a white nineteen-year-old truck driver wandered into a Memphis recording studio — only weeks after the Supreme Court ruled racial segregation unconstitutional — and instinctively, unconsciously miscegenated, in the language of the time, white and black music. Caught up in the sweep of a story, by the end of every semester the students invariably shed their old-school/new-school distinctions to afford Zan an ovation. It’s the closest he’s come to telling an epic; he doubts he’s told a story better, certainly not any of his own.

The rest of the teachers in the department were childless and, as certainly was the case with Zan before he had children, there was little comprehension of the infinite variables that children bring, the way that children lay waste to rational odds, how one always has to err on the side of the long shot. Someone who doesn’t have children may grasp the volume of time they take up but can’t understand the way children won’t be compartmentalized, the way children can’t be consigned to their own rooms in the city of one’s life. Children are the moat that surrounds the city, the canals that run throughout. They get everything wet.