“In all this work, if it has hopes of being any good,
there is no choice but to move through it with respect.
With a listening ear and heart.”
friend, I run into Ms. Clark. We talk about the Chamber Singers and theatre and my new life in Brooklyn. She pulls over Mr.
Morales who remembers that he knows me but can’t quite place the name. “Robertshaw,” I say, and his face curls with friendly
skepticism, a look well known to me and my younger brothers Fred and Frank. “One of you guys,” he says, and we laugh.
We stand there for a moment before parting, while boys strapped to red backpacks weave around us, and the same man as
always thwacks out Italian ices under a white and green umbrella. I shake his hand and notice grey in his beard and wrinkles
between his eyes. “You’re so old!” he says to me, smiling.
I walk up the street against that rushing current of boys bound for afterschool snacks, for homework, for family dinners.
I wonder what parts of today they’ll remember in 10, 15, 20 years. And, of course, I think of those bobbing among them
who are struggling in the silent confusion and shame of feeling different. It’ll be alright, I want to tell them. Hang in there.
In all their faces, I catch flashes of my old friends and of myself and of our sunny, complicated origins. And when I turn
left at the Guggenheim I know that I am grateful for the memories of the little boy who I was, and for all those 89th Street
voices forever in my head, still sounding out the way of the good man I am trying always to become. M
Tommy Robertshaw ’10 is a recent graduate of Williams College where he studied Theatre and English Literature. He lives
in Brooklyn now, where he writes and tutors.
Slim in Sam Shepard’s “Cowboy Mouth”
Winter 2020 • 31