There’s a spot in Brooklyn that’s commemorated with a plaque. It’s impossible now to get a feel for the place, to realize how special it was, how racial barriers were broken and underdogs triumphed, how so many kinds of people came together to root for one thing. The players themselves weren’t millionaires. They played for sport. Many of them lived in the surrounding neighborhoods and could be seen walking to work. It was truly something remarkable, the harmony of athlete and region. Then it was over and Ebbets Field became Ebbets Housing.

The commute from Brooklyn to the Hamptons is quite a haul, and not just in terms of distance. It’s often like driving through your favorite social studies lesson as the city gives way to former boomer developments and the last strip mall is overtaken by pine barrens and baby deer. Then along that final stretch, if you hurry, you can make it back in time to watch history repeat itself.

It’s difficult to walk the campus of Southampton College these days without that obnoxious real estate mantra ringing in your ears. It’s loud enough to cancel class, block that final shot at net, and make the baby deer flee deeper into the woods.

Location. Location. Location.

Somebody somewhere is reciting these lines louder than any actor at Avram Theater, louder than any coach on a soccer field. The sound of it is deafening and we can only hope that once the bulldozers are through they’ll be kind enough to erect a plaque.

Citing a $9 million deficit as its root cause, Long Island University has decided to relocate Southampton’s undergraduate programs this fall to its C.W. Post campus in Brookville. The general feeling on campus is that the property will eventually be sold to the highest bidder in order to make up this deficit. LIU denies any such plan exists. Aside from the many classes, plays, and lectures that will vanish this fall, the East End will no longer have ties to a NCAA sports program.

“The news came as a complete shock,” said Mark Dawson, a Southampton college graduate and the last coach the women’s soccer team will ever have. “One minute the school was telling me to push recruiting, tell them about the new library, tell them about the gym. Then I get an e-mail saying I have two hours to tell my team it’s over before the news hits the papers. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do.”

The team responded to the news by having the most successful season in Southampton history. They went undefeated and won their conference (NYAC) then competed in the NCAA playoff tournament for the first and last time. “It was just this magical ride,” Dawson said.

Like his players, Dawson was offered a chance this fall to be absorbed by Post’s athletic program. He accepted a position as an assistant on the women’s team. “The only reason I’m going,” he said, “is because I want to see my players through. I promised them.”

The athletes at Southampton were never mercenary superstars. They were students who loved sport. They played soccer and basketball, lacrosse and softball, and they played them well. They came from all over the country, all over Europe, and all over Long Island. They rented housing in the surrounding neighborhoods and could often be seen walking to class and practice. They were a wonderful part of the East End community, that rare harmony of athlete to region. Then it was over and Southampton College grew as dark and silent as any old neighborhood in Brooklyn.

No, not the cushy adjunct work at the college where you got the MFA. This will be the crack your knuckles, roll up your sleeves type of teaching that New York City has to offer. Once you realized that The New Yorker was just as happy to ignore you with or without those precious writing awards attached to your name, it finally hit you that it was time to seek shelter.

Let’s face it. You gambled. You lost.

So you’re teaching again. You know, those who can, do. Those who can’t, well, makes your eyes burn just thinking about it, doesn’t it? Go ahead. Give yourself a moment to let it sink in. You, the one currently hiding behind the second person present form, the novelty act of writing tenses, will be in the classroom, wearing a tie, and teaching once more.

Years ago, during an entirely different era of fear and loathing, you thought it might be interesting to teach high school English in Las Vegas. The newest boom town, they said, flashing cartoon lights, a handgun in every glove compartment, a strip club on every desert corner, living, working, and melting inside the Great American Freak Show. You returned with nothing but a definite maybe, a bloody nose from the heat, and a box of liquefied protein bars you left on the passenger’s seat during mid-afternoon. But there was that time coming back from the interview, gripping the steering wheel, thinking, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this…

That’s when you saw it, the fake Manhattan skyline they’d built for a casino, this freaky Western homage to some kind of wonderful, rising comically, yet somehow miraculously, in the center of your windshield. You were lost and just wanted to get home so you headed straight for it, blinking insanely into the sun.

And now you’re back, the largest school district on the planet, the greatest skyline in the universe. Sinatra anyone? But you still have Long Island to contend with, don’t you? Your Long Island, rolling its eyes at your decision to teach in The City:

“Wow, lucky you…”

“Hey, what area? Oooooh, good luck with that…”

“Really? I grew up there, years ago, you know, when it was safe.”

Geographically, your new area is as much a part of Long Island as the Hamptons, yet even Fitzgerald described it as “a dismal valley of ashes,” the faceless eyes of T.J. Eckleburg watching over a “solemn dumping ground.”

Everyone tells you not to worry. You can always come back. But you don’t think so. You may have backed your way into this, but that doesn’t mean you’re taking a dive either. These are people’s children, not some prima donna’s second choice. So if you are going to do this there must be some rules, something as concrete as the description of a NOUN.

Because you are the new PERSON in their lives. This school is your new PLACE. And the most important THING? You will show up early. You will not get “sick.” You will answer every question and fulfill every promise. You will do things right or remove yourself, becoming the total opposite of every biased horror story ever written about City schools.

The initial step is to attend a job fair in Brooklyn. You’re not actually invited, but there is await and see area for gatecrashers. The line is long and hectic, snaking around corners, winding down staircases. Rumblings go up from some women behind you, Long Island substitutes, the forgotten bridesmaids of the pedagogy biz, passed over once more for permanent work back home.

See?” One of them says. “See what I mean? This is the City. Wha’d I tell ya?”

Invitations to the main ballroom are doled out slowly like c-rations. You shamelessly attach some published work to the back of your resume and head on in. Your name tag looks a bit crooked. You peel it off, then smoothen back down across your heart.

“Don’t even bother with Staten Island,” a disembodied voice calls out to the herd. “No one ever retires. Place is like a country club.”

You’re pretty sure you’ve never heard this comparison made before in your life. Everything is completely new to you. You place a resume down at the first table that needs an English teacher. They call you the next day.

The school is certainly no Staten Island country club, but it is large, old and quite beautiful. You ramble and sweat your way through an interview and somehow manage to get hired.

So you’re teaching again.

On your first day of real school you arrive early and have some time to explore. The auditorium looks spacious and historic behind thick windows, an elegant time capsule waiting to be discovered.

You’d like to wander its aisles, but the door is locked. In fact, every inch of the school not in use has been bolted shut. You need to wash your hands, but don’t have a key yet. A branch of the NYPD meets you in the lobby, two slabs of blue escorting you to the restroom. Once upstairs, another teacher eyes something tucked under your left arm. “You weren’t actually wandering the neighborhood with that big map in your hands, were you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, you poor thing.”

You head up to the top floor to do some last minute roaming, thinking of all the city kids you are about to meet. You twist your face up against the mesh cage of a fourth floor window, trying to glimpse that skyline you’re so crazy about when you see it, this frenetic wave of youth rolling toward the school grounds, flooding the campus like a tsunami of expectation.

Whoa.

Somewhere in this city, on the mean streets of wherever, I am teaching again. No more YOU. It’s just me now- and them, the many, the overlooked, holding true to the belief that wonder and genius have a defiant way of striking out of nowhere, of rising up where you least expect it. The watchful eyes of Fitzgerald’s Eckleburg were blue and gigantic and so are mine.

There’s this postcard I keep in my classroom that reminds me of the Expressway. It’s a somewhat well known photo taken by a famous New York photographer named Weegee, and I just can’t seem to get over it. The picture is teeming with humanity, an entire stretch of beach filled with writhing bodies. Squinting at the camera as if it were the sun, they wave to the sky like they can see their own future. It’s a tremendous miracle stew, really, stretching not only miles, but years. Could I possibly have had a relative or two in this unstoppable swarm, a friend of a friend of a friend?

The expressions on many faces indicate that they’ve just arrived to this beach, and that they’re never planning to leave. Coney Island. Brooklyn, New York. It’s 1938. They have no idea of the trouble heading their way, but I just know they’ll make it.

The campus begins to change in the late afternoons. The transformation is dramatic, like watching the seasons change before your eyes. There’s this patch of woods outside my window. Earlier in the day I had counted shiny heads there, taking attendance during a high school fire drill. Now, however, it becomes a place of worship. I can see them from a window, two men preparing for class much differently than I do. They drop to their shins and bow reflexively, meditating, facing east as the Long Island sun dissolves into a western tree line.

Traffic continues to hum as I watch them rise momentarily then bow again, the sky taking on that orange hue that artists have described as Paris. I’ll never view that patch of woods the same way again. I’m somewhere else yet completely at home, and where else in the world could this happen but here?

Even the classroom itself undergoes a change at night. I might find newly formed European republics conferring with the smallest of Latin American nations, while Asia converses with the Middle East. Entire continents drift before me. There’s no need to lament over all the places I’ve never seen because they’re all right here, looking up, smiling into they’re future.

Two nights per week, I teach English as a second language to adults at a learning center in Dix Hills, Long Island, approximately thirty miles west of Manhattan. The class is free and there is usually a waiting list to get in. Because of the high demand, there is pressure on me not to fall short in any way. I want to do right by these new arrivals. I would also like to be remembered as a representative of something larger, something more important than the mere conjugation of verbs.

So I make sure my Long Island accent isn’t so thick, thinning it out, slowing it down until I become the friendly anchorman on their evening news. I finally learn the difference between lay and lie and who and whom, grammatical nightmares that have haunted me for years.

Many times, the students tell me how American I look to them, my hair, eyes and complexion at one end of an unimportant spectrum. Even they are confused about what an American should look like. I am simply a product of an earlier wave than theirs.

Sometimes they forget to use my name and simply call me what I am.

“Tee-chur?”

“Tee-chur, what this mean? How you say?”

The words are spoken with the same reverence one might use for the family doctor. It’s difficult to comprehend at first, the complete opposite of the My! Taxes! Pay! Your! Salary! attitude I’ve encountered in other teaching experiences.

Some of the men in the class have dirt under their fingernails or grease smudges on their arms from working in factories, fields and restaurants, performing tasks other Americans will no longer do. Railroads were built not long ago on the same principle, police forces made, buildings and bridges constructed that are now commemorated with name-plates.

I welcome each new arrival to class with the same question:

“So who will you be staying with?”

“My aunt.”

“My cousin.”

“My father.”

“My brother.”

Family, the strong protecting the weak. It has a familiar ring to it, something you might find etched in stone somewhere, perhaps overlooking a harbor near my Island home.

Each night we try to put something down in writing, an opinion on a current event. In the past month, however, there has been only one current event. Nowhere else existed but there. That night, the room was silent, frozen like the black and white faces on a postcard. You could almost hear the building breathe, its collective heart breaking, and I was the only one in the room born here.

During our class break, a student named Ali confided in me that his younger children tease him about his accent. Did I have any accent-ridding books, he wanted to know. I told him to just keep coming to class. When he handed me his written piece, it was about his oldest son escaping from the sixty-seventh floor of a building about an hour away, right after the second explosion. It occurs to me now that Ali was one of the men I has seen earlier, praying in front of that patch of woods. A friend of a friend of a friend.

When our break period is through, I must interrupt the easy Spanish most of the students fall into. This is when I become the outsider who wants to fit in. Class resumes, and I begin to pace the aisles, fragrances from the ladies’ perfumes filling the air like their exotic voices. A child might sit respectfully off to the side doing homework, no trace of her parents’ accent when she speaks. We begin our lesson.

“Okay, ready? Watch. I’m laying the pen down, but now it lies there on its own. See? Lay. Lie.”

Everyone says, “Ohhhhhhh,” then jots it down.

Later, I call on them to read just to hear the rhythm of sounds, the lilts and inflections of their voices that carry me around the world. In time, I stumble onto its magnitude and realize what that sound really is: American.