my Proustian moment

One of my favorite videos on the internet is this one, featuring Arsenal legend Ian Wright’s story of Mr. Pigden, the primary school teacher in South London who genuinely changed his life — and the moment in 2005, some years after Wright’s retirement, when the two of them were reunited. If you ever doubt that teachers can make a difference, watch this video.

It’s such a beautiful scene: Wrighty stands looking around the pitch at Highbury, smiling in memory of his great accomplishments there, when he hears a warm, kind voice: “Hello Ian. Long time no see.” Wrighty turns and looks and two things happen. First his mouth falls open in astonishment … and then he snatches his peaked cap off his head, in what I can only call reverence.

When he can speak he says, “You’re alive.”

Mr. Pigden, turning to someone behind the camera with a smile: “I’m alive, he says.”

Wrighty, trying and failing to compose himself: “I can’t believe it … someone said you was dead.”

Watch the rest of the video to learn exactly why Mr. Pigden was so important to young Ian Wright.

I love everything about that video, but the key moment for me is when Wrighty removes his cap. It’s absolutely instinctive: I don’t know where or when Wrighty learned his manners — he grew up in a very tough environment, but in the toughest of environments there are women who teach their children well — but he learned them. And the moment I first saw Wrighty snatching that tweed from his head, my memory leaped back to Birmingham, Alabama in 1973.

What I remembered was my friend Don. Don was the coolest guy I knew. He was very funny and very smart though (at the time) not the least interested in academics, and he always had weed, and he wore his black curly-kinky hair long, in the style that people call a Jewfro when Jews wear it, but Don wasn’t Jewish: He was a Scot by background, and his family were very proud of their ancestry. (So we could call his do a BRU-fro, amirite?)

In our senior year Don actually cut his hair quite short, just as everyone else was letting theirs grow long. Which just proved that he was cooler than everybody else. But this memory goes back before that.

Several other guys and I spent a lot of time hanging out at Don’s house, because it was the nicest house most of us had ever seen. My dad worked in trucking (when he wasn’t in prison) and that’s what our neighborhood was like: lots of plumbers, electricians, Teamsters, at the upper end factory-floor supervisors. Some stay-at-home wives and mothers, others who worked more than their men, as my mom did. But there was one road not far from our high school featuring a handful of big houses, set on rising ground, with what seemed to me enormous front yards, and Don lived in one of those. In fact, if I recall correctly, his was the only one that was modern, and the best way I could describe its modernity to you is to tell you that it had a sunken living room, with a plate-glass window covering one wall and a big fireplace on the opposite wall and built-in sofas extending all along three sides. You walked down into it by steps set at the corners of the room flanking the fireplace. I had never seen anything like it except in a handful of movies and TV shows.

One other feature of the room: a tall flipchart easel at one end of the room. Don’s father used it for group therapy sessions: he was a psychoanalyst, and his chosen method was transactional analysis. The family had fairly recently moved from somewhere up north — Pennsylvania, I believe — presumably to reach Birmingham’s vast untapped market of potential TA patients. Don’s father had an EAT MORE POSSUM bumper sticker on the back of his car, for protective coloration, but since the car was a Volvo the sociological message he sent while driving around town was complex and possibly self-contradictory. (Of course he knew that.) Copies of Thomas A. Harris’s I’m OK — You’re OK were scattered around the house, but when I took a peek at what was written on the flipped-over sheets, words and symbols equally incomprehensible to me, I found it difficult to believe that anyone was OK.

Don had (I think) two older sisters, but they were away at college, and it seemed that his parents were never at home, so we had the house to ourselves for weekends and summer days. And what did we do with our time? Basically four things; we smoked pot; we played Risk; we ate heated-up frozen pizzas — something that I had not known existed before I visited Don; and we listened to Beatles records, especially the White Album. (Of course we played “Revolution 9” backwards and listened with maniacal intensity for secret messages. Though sometimes being stoned limited our attentiveness.)

For obvious reasons, we hung out at Don’s rather than at my dilapidated junkheap of a house, with broken springs emerging from the ancient sofas on the front porch — kept the stray dogs off, my dad said — and grass two feet high in the front yard — higher still in the back — and an ancient air-conditioner in one room that had broken down when we had been in the house only three or four months, never to be repaired. But once, for a reason I don’t remember, Don did visit.

Now in those days were were not allowed to wear headwear of any kind of school, nor could we leave our shirts untucked. (The rules on jeans were intricate and changed from year to year; that can be a subject for another post.) But whenever Don wasn’t at school he wore this white silk peaked cap like the ones automobile racers wear in old photos. It was awesome. When he pulled it down on his head his hair stuck out at angles that seemed gravitationally impossible. And that’s what he was wearing when he visited my room.

At one point we heard steps approaching. The door opened and my grandmother stood there — I don’t remember why she had come. But the moment the door opened Don, who had been sitting on my bed, popped to his feet like a jack-in-the-box and simultaneously plucked the white cap from his head and held in in both hands pressed to his chest like an undergardener approaching the wrong door at Downton Abbey. I told my grandmother that this was my friend Don and he said “How do you do, Ma’am.” I’ve never been more shocked in my life; I stared at him blankly for a few seconds. I don’t know where or when he had learned his manners, but he had learned them well.

And the first time I saw Ian Wright’s removing his cap in the presence of Mr. Pigden everything that I have just told you flooded into my mind.