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I assume this isn’t his name, but I could be wrong; Dad is always saying not to go on assumption, but on fact merged with feeling. He’s also prone to using sports analogies despite not being particularly inclined towards athletics. Go team!
    “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, When?” Mr. Chaucer writes “Hillel”, presumably the author of this quote, on the wall-sized blackboard and slugs his worn leather case onto the table. “Welcome to my class — I’m Mr. Chaucer, as you may know — and yes, I’ve heard the jokes before. You might think that I was destined to become an English teacher due to my name. Possibly.” He looks around the table at all of us, we follow his gaze. “Names introduce us, but aren’t ours by choice usually — so they may not reveal as much as we think.”
    He asks us to go around and say who we are without using our names, just bits and pieces of what we do, what we like. For once — I am free of being Love Bukowski. With four people to go, I suddenly feel scared shitless — if I’m not Love with a capital L, who am I?
    One of the field hockey playing girls goes next. She’s got car keys in her hand, and fiddles with the Tiffany key chain as she speaks, “I play defense, transferred last year from Andover, and I like long walks on the beach.” A boy in a ripped Hadley Hall sweatshirt says in a fake-cough, “Not just walks” which lets us all know that he’s personally given Ms. Tiffany a sandy night to remember. She smiles and shrugs.
    Long walks on the beach? I’m in a beer ad, minus the bikini and hot twin sister. I have to come up with something more than my shopping tastes, or food preferences. These kinds of exercises always make me nervous. There’s clearly a cool response, or at least one that flies under the collective student radar, but is still truthful.
    One more to go. The guy next to me, not Gus the gasoline man but someone who will reveal himself in a minute, sits silent and hunched down in his seat. Then he sits up. I catch a glimpse of him from the side. Beautiful. Not hot; beautiful, like one of those English guys in a historical movie. Dark coils of hair dip into his eyes — green? Hazel? Can’t tell. And he’s kid-caramel brown from the summer. He looks around the table, unafraid and says, “Man of Words, Man of Music. A voice like sandpaper and glue.” He stops.
    Mr. Chaucer’s grinning and for a second I’m puzzled — then I click into action. Before I can introduce myself with saying “Love” I say to Quiet Boy, “That’s a David Bowie quote.”
    “Quotation,” interjects Mr. Chaucer. “And she’s correct.”
    “Yeah,” quiet boy nods, not ashamed at being found out. “It’s what he wrote about —”
    “Bob Dylan,” I blurt out. “Whose real name is — was — Robert Zimmerman.”
    Mr. Chaucer stands up. “Which brings me to my next point — do we think that the great, the infamous poet of a generation, the father of music as we now know it — would have gotten all the accolades if he’d kept on being Robert Zimmerman instead of The Bob Dylan?”
    Mr. Chaucer segues into name-changing as a cultural and societal measure of something — something I’m supposed to be following but really I’m sidetracked by quiet boy and his slightly obscure Bowie knowledge. I decide to test him after class. We’re given an assignment — to read the first half — not the first chapter, the entire first half of The Scarlet Letter by Monday. The first paper’s due at the end of next week. What happened to that beginning of school grace period?
    Quiet Boy stands up and I swallow and cough to get his attention. He turns to me. “Did you know that man of words, man of music is actually not a quote — quotation — of Bowie’s, but a title?”
    “Oh yeah?” He’s smirking so I can’t tell if he’s humoring me or impressed.
    “It was the original name for the Space Oddity