There’s an odd pattern to my sleep that I’m guessing others share. On some nights, I am awakened shortly after falling asleep by a troubling dream. I am not one of those people who is blessed with stunning recall of the night’s dreams, but I think those that occur during what I’m calling First Sleep are accessible because I wake up so close on the heels of having dreamed them.
A few nights ago, I had a First Sleep dream that was distressingly similar in content to others over the years. The details and the setting may vary, but basically, they are teacher terror trips that feature me confronting a classroom that I cannot control. The students are either defiant or simply ignore my instructions and demands as if I’m not even in the room with them.
What amazes me about these dreams is, first, that I haven’t had a classroom of my own for close to 25 years now, but even more amazing, in all the 25-30 years when I was the teacher of record, I almost never experienced that loss of control. I had to add that “almost” because I can recall one day that I’ve written about elsewhere. It was my first day in a new classroom in a new school and town when I was clearly being tested by students’ acts of defiance to the point where I almost ended my teaching career by putting my hands around the neck of the leader of the mini uprising.
During my years observing novice teachers, I have been in classrooms that, had they been my own, could have triggered nightmares like the ones I’ve described. The absence of any agreed-upon ground rules and the clear lack of any relationship between the teacher and her students made me want to flee. Things were so bad that there was nothing that I – the teacher’s coach – could offer to alter the situation. All the critical junctures at which the teacher could have acted to avoid the present chaos were behind us.
I’m left wondering whether my terror dreams are the result of something analogous to getting lung cancer from secondary smoke. Can having been in toxic classrooms like the one I’ve described trigger a traumatic reaction? Or is that fear latent in the work of teaching, suppressed in order to show up and perform every day, but ready to surface at some unguarded moment? (The teacher in that chaotic classroom soldiered on until around Thanksgiving, when we transferred her to a more manageable situation before she suffered a breakdown.)
Teachers operate in territory that is suffused with trauma. It shouldn’t surprise us that some of that secondary smoke exacts its toll, however belatedly.
I wasn’t intending to make this a twofer’ but I’ve said what I had to say about my teacher dreams, so that leaves room for something else that’s on my mind. I have always been fascinated by work in all its forms – work as a process. What does it look like in the doing? How is it learned? What gratification does it provide? What is the irreducible amount of drudgery that exists even in work that appears to be totally rewarding?
Patrick Bringley’s book, All the Beauty in the World (Simon and Schuster, 2023), is my kind of book. I’m especially drawn to accounts of work enacted in the shadows, that’s intended to be virtually invisible — think waitresses and garbage men — and what occupation existsmore in the shadows than that of a museum guard?Bringley spent ten years in that role at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The author’s unlikely story of his life at the Met is intertwined with the tragic loss of his older brother who died at the age of 27. Until that point, Patrick had worked at a high-pressure job at The New Yorker. After the terrible pain of his brother’s death, he realized that he needed a place of calm, an environment with no pressure to enable his healing. He remembered his family excursions to museums and their feeling of peace when he was surrounded by the transcendent beauty of the buildings’ varied holdings.
Bringley is a masterful writer, capable of sharing the fruits of his reflections drawn from the many hours he’s privileged to spend in the company of centuries of civilization’s finest creations: the tombs of ancient Egypt; a banjo cobbled together from natural materials in the pre-Civil War south; his favorite painting of the Crucifixion by Fra Angelico, the quilts created by amazingly able Black rural women in Alabama. As he rotates through his shift changes, he shares with us his vast trove of knowledge of the historical and cultural context that birthed these extraordinary objects. His comments are not those of a critic who has visited occasionally. He has LIVED with these survivors of lost societies and relates to them with the respect and affection afforded to close family members. His words are completely without pretention, leavened by his humor, his irony. They never sound like the obligatory analysis one might hear in a college art class.
Along the way, we learn about which floor surfaces are easiest on the feet of workers who will be standing 8-12 hours each day. We learn about the special lingo of the profession, an inevitable element of every kind of work. He shares this vocabulary with an incredibly diverse army of several hundred colleagues with whom he stands watch and with whom he shares an occasional after- hours beer. We feel his affection for his mates from Guyana and Ghana and is convinced that he will miss them when he leaves, as he eventually does.We learn about the predictable questions asked by visitors to the museum: Is the stuff real? (Every bit of it. No reproductions here.) Where is the Mona Lisa? (It’s in Paris. The Met has no Da Vincis. There’s only one in the US. It’s in DC). These questions are part of the abundant opportunity for people-watching granted to the guards, of which Bringley takes full advantage, but he never uses his observations to belittle or mock those who pass through his galleries.
Over the years, the calm of the job and its insulation from the culture of striving and ambition lightens the grief of his brother’s loss and frees the author to marry and build his own family until he is ready to move on after ten mostly fulfilling years.
The book is a small miracle, a repository of wisdom and feeling from a source we never could have predicted. After reading about the work of waitresses, they became fully present for me when I now encounter them, no longer shadows. In my future museum visits, the guards who protect the museum’s holdings will be part of my observations, along with those precious holdings. What are they thinking? Seeing? What have they absorbed from being in the presence of all that wonder? Or are they just thinking about what’s for dinner and how long before he can herd us back toward the cloak room and turn off the lights?
