He was sitting all alone on the bench, not reading anything, not doing anything. Just sitting there, looking down at the ground. I needed to catch my breath, needed to regroup, so I sat down on the far end. It was one of those autumn days where the air was crisp and the leaves had just started to fall. It was just plain pleasant, and it felt nice to sit for a moment and just look at things. But the old man wasn’t doing that; he was just sitting there, looking at the ground in front of him. Maybe he was just jaded, the way you get after you’ve lived in the City for thirty or forty years. It’s all the same after a while; the seasons change, year after year, the buildings decay and get torn down or fall down or burn down. There’s just nothing you haven’t seen before, so why look?
Maybe. I don’t feel that way myself. There’s always something new, always something different, always a different angle. But the old man’s business is his own, and I didn’t want to lose myself in his problems. I just wanted to catch my breath, relax for a minute, maybe buy a pretzel from the vendor and just sit here and eat it. It had already been a long day, and it wasn’t even noon. I was lining up support for that new convention hall, getting people to sign off on it, and I was running from one meeting to another, none of them in the same part of town. It was annoying work, to tell you the truth, and there was nothing in it for me other than a paycheck, but it’s a living. There are worse things I could be doing.
The old man looked over at me for some reason and said “good morning!” in a tone that suggested he meant it, even if he wasn’t entirely happy about it. I glanced over and returned the pleasantry, and it was then that I noticed the piece of paper he had in his hands. A fairly old piece of paper, the kind my Dad used to write on when he was in school. The old man was probably about the same age my Dad would have been, in his seventies, but he seemed older. I don’t know why I thought this, but it seemed as if that piece of paper was the key to this guy’s mood, the source of his gloom. I looked at my watch. Eleven thirty; one more hour before the next meeting.
“There used to be a school over there,” the old man said, gesturing with a nod of his head. “My old high school.” Whatever it used to be, it was an apartment building now, a soaring structure gleaming with glass and steel. “I graduated from there in ’53. Never went on to college. Got a job right out of high school. We did things like that back in the day.” I wasn’t really in the mood for a prolonged conversation, but you never know what you’ll learn in a day, never know who you’ll learn it from.
“So you didn’t want to go on to college?” I asked. He shook his head; the question seemed to sadden him. “I did, matter of fact. I did. And I would have, but there was this one class, English. Never did get along with that teacher.”
I nodded. I actually knew what he meant. I had one class in high school, one English class, with a teacher I couldn’t stand, a teacher who evidently couldn’t stand me. Even though I got straight A’s in every other English class I had ever taken, this one teacher gave me a C. I never forgot it.
“Didn’t matter what I did, how hard I tried,” the old man said. “This fellow just wouldn’t give me a break. It was like he just knew one letter, one grade. C.” Yeah. Some teachers were like that. I thought maybe it was just me at the time, but here was someone else with the same story. He waved the piece of paper at me. “This was my last essay in that class. Did a story on the atom bomb, communists, even threw Harry Truman in there.” He pounded his fist against the piece of paper. “Best thing I ever wrote. Even sold it to the Saturday Evening Post later on. Think any of that mattered? Look here. Look at the grade he gave me.”
I looked. Right at the top of the page, written large, written in red, was a single letter: C.
It was a C.
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