At the core of many philosophies is the principle of dualities. How does one describe darkness but as the absence of light? How does one define ignorance without a demonstration of knowledge? Perhaps this is why we are reminded of our own mortality when someone close to us dies. It is then that we think of the joy we shared with them and compare it to the sorrow we feel with their absence.
Mr. Rey Flores was one of the most difficult teachers from the time Simón Rivera High School opened its doors in 1988 to his retirement in 2012. He was a legend. I remember how Mr. Flores would return my essays “bleeding,” drenched in red ink after he was done with them. Yes, Mr. Flores would make my essays bleed, but he served the English language arts and his students religiously. He had no problem staying after school with me for two hours a day until my college application essays were perfect.
Throughout college, I kept in touch with Mr. Flores through e-mail and phone calls. During my last two years as an undergraduate, I began visiting him frequently. Mr. Flores and I would sit on his porch and discuss literature and all aspects of life while he would smoke a cigarette. It was then that I discovered who he truly was. In high school, he portrayed himself as a godless existentialist to his students, never defining just who he truly was because he believed impartiality was important as a teacher. As a friend, I knew he was a Catholic man who loved the world more than he cared to admit.
Following in Mr. Flores’ footsteps, I became an English teacher at 22. A year before I became a teacher, he gave me a maroon ribbon bookmark with a small charm that read “teacher.” Whenever I would complain about something going on in my life, in or out of teaching, Mr. Flores would remind me about how people complain, “Why did this have to happen to me of all people?” His response was, “Why not you? What makes you so special that you don’t have to suffer like the rest of us?” After that, I decided it was absurd to complain. Instead of focusing on the negative, he taught me to acknowledge those situations, let them go and use them to become a better person–a better teacher.
In late September, I visited Mr. Flores, sat on his porch with him, talked about life and shared how I was reading Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” with my seniors. We spent some time discussing the novel he assigned to me in 2010 and talked about other works. When I was leaving, he told me, “Thank you for visiting me, Ricky. It made my day. It really did.” Two weeks later, Mr. Flores died of a massive heart attack. In the subsequent days, I ran across several of the first emails he sent me. One was regarding the loss of my grandparents and read, “Think of how much better they are now instead of living in this lousy world of ours. Dwell on the good memories and the happy times you had with them and the comfort they provided instead.”
Our culture focuses so much on that end goal–that job we want, the degrees and titles we feel we deserve and the happiness we want–so much that we become numb to the scars we get along the way. We live our lives looking forward to the next best thing, and oftentimes, we find that we’ve forgotten to live aesthetically. This Thanksgiving, I choose to be thankful for living the life I create blink by blink and the scars that I earn along the way because they are all part of the human experience.
Rick Saldivar is an English language arts teacher at Rio Hondo High School and an adjunct lecturer at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. He received a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Texas at Brownsville and a Master of Arts in English from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
