Public Speaking

It was the first night of the new semester. The sun had beat down on the classroom all day, leaving it way hot. I looked around at the other people, not really excited about any of them. The professor was late. One guy, dressed in a suit, looked particularly impatient. He was switching between reviewing his cell phone, his watch, and the clock on the wall; all punctuated by his nervously bouncing knee. I didn’t like him most of all. His neck gurgled out of his white collar (I imagined how dirty the inside of that collar was), blending in with his round red face. His red hair was thinning, and he seemed to be sweating more than the rest of us.

Our first assignment was simple, just provide the class an introduction. I can’t even remember what I told the class about myself, probably some garbage about rock and roll.

But that guy, the gurgling neck guy, when he got up, he put it to me. He told the class that he worked for First Security, I’m assuming in their Marketing department because he seemed particularly proud of the First Security logo he had had a hand in placing on the scoreboard at the new Rice-Eccles stadium.

Then his back story: he went to high school in some small indiscriminate town; maybe a year of college, maybe not, but then an LDS mission. When he returned, as he put it, he was the luckiest guy in the world to not only find that his high school sweetheart was still single, but still hot for him. They married and had children; I think two, but this was a long time ago, so I’m pretty fuzzy.

One normal night he and his wife went to bed. She had a blood clot in her leg which killed her. He woke to find her dead body the next morning. It got worse. He sunk into a depression he couldn’t break from, and child services had to take his kids away.

It took two years of I’m assuming medication, counseling, and brutal emotional exercise before child services deemed him healthy enough to again be a father to his and his wife’s kids.

He stated this as matter-of-factly as someone deciding whether to watch TV or read a book before bed. There was no request for pity in his voice. He was simply objectively fulfilling the assignment set forth by the professor by describing who he was with what made him up.

What a shit I was.