my notebook and voice recorder, and head off in search of exquisite worlds. The worlds I tended to seek and find were those on the borderlands between the natural and the man-made, the civilized and the wild. I liked such borderlands because within them interesting questions and contradictions tended to flourish, like wildflowers on a vacant city lot. I also liked them because I have since childhood found natural history more enchanting than nature, whatever that was. I’ve never heard the howl of a wolf or felt a strong desire to answer its wild call, but I have often found myself entranced before the diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in which taxidermy wolves, though suspended from wires, appear to be racing over the Alaskan tundra under a black-light moon, leaving footprints in the plaster-of-paris snow.
More than most of the students at the private Quaker school in Manhattan where I taught, Big Poppa could have used a little luck. The only child of divorced parents, he was forever shuttling back and forth between his mom’s apartment and his father’s studio, leaving behind a trail of unfinished homework and misplaced books. His backpack was an experiment in chaos. When he was supposed to be studying, he instead stayed up all night playing fantasy sports games on the Internet. He loved playing real sports too, baseball especially, and he was by reputation a good infielder, and the team’s best batter, but he was chronically late to class, and his attendance record was so poor that midway through the baseball season during the spring of his senior year, he had to be temporarily benched, per school policy. Most of his classmates were Yankee fans, whereas Big Poppa rooted avidly, hopelessly, for the underdog Mets, whose paraphernalia constituted a large portion of his wardrobe.
A class clown of the masochistic rather than the sadistic variety, he liked to amuse his peers at his own expense—for instance, by announcing one day that he wished henceforth to be known by the nickname Big Poppa (a self-deprecating reference to the babyish pudge that was for him a source of shame, but also to the rapper Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. Big Poppa); or, for instance, by rooting too avidly for the Mets; or by arriving late to class prematurely suited up in his baseball uniform (the cleats, the red stirrups, the white tights), fielding imaginary grounders and swinging at imaginary pitches as he crossed the room, before dropping himself into a chair, looking about at his smirking classmates, and inquiring, with an interrogative shrug, “What?” He’d once asked a French teacher for permission to go home sick because he’d eaten “a bad knish.” It had become an inside joke. “What’sa matter?” his friends liked to ask him. “Bad knish?”
He could also be poignantly emotional. He felt strongly about bicycle helmets and upbraided teachers who biked to school without them. The degradation of the environment upset him, sometimes almost to tears. Once, when another of my students discarded her water bottle in the trash can, Big Poppa made a great fuss, rescuing it and depositing it in a recycling bin intended—the bottle’s owner wryly observed—for paper products only.
He dreamed of becoming a sportswriter someday, and I, faculty adviser to the student newspaper, had encouraged him in this dream. I encouraged him because he could turn a phrase and because when it came to baseball, he knew his stuff, and because I sympathized with him (I, too, had been a pudgy, myopic, late-to-pubesce child of divorce), but also because Big Poppa was charming, and bright, and kind—just a little rudderless, a little juvenile, a little lost. Old enough to carry a rifle in Afghanistan or Iraq, he instead carried a rubber duckie for good luck. Earlier that winter, during a snowball fight in a classmate’s backyard, his glasses had disappeared into a snowdrift. This wasn’t the first time they’d gone missing. Afraid to ask his parents to buy a new pair, he’d decided to wait for the snow to melt and his glasses to resurface, which they eventually did. In the meantime, he’d spent three weeks stumbling through the halls, his face contorted into a squint. He lost Luck Duck for a while too, and the loss inspired what appeared to be genuine distress.
While researching his essay, Big Poppa had happened on a newspaper report, perhaps the very same one that Eric Carle had happened on. In a paragraph cataloging rubber duck trivia, he’d included a four-sentence