{"id":3020,"date":"2017-05-11T13:57:56","date_gmt":"2017-05-11T13:57:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/?p=3020"},"modified":"2017-05-11T13:57:56","modified_gmt":"2017-05-11T13:57:56","slug":"the-promise-of-a-silent-hour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/2017\/05\/11\/the-promise-of-a-silent-hour\/","title":{"rendered":"The Promise of a Silent Hour"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Paige<\/em> — The pause lasted 12 seconds, so I knew the answer was meaningful.<\/p>\n

During a recent visit to Phoenix, where Stephen Batchelder \u201915 teaches eighth-grade science, I asked him about his favorite Wabash memory, and he took that long pause before responding.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of favorite memories,\u201d he starts slowly, \u201cbut the one coming to mind right now, I think because its April now and the Springtime\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

He went on to describe \u201cPoetry Hour,\u201d a time during the spring semester his senior year that he and classmate Ryan Horner would carve a free hour out of a week and meet at the Senior Bench to \"\"<\/a>share things of interest, whether it was a piece they had discovered or something one of them had created.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would kind of sit there and be quiet with each other and do some writing of our own,\u201d Stephen remembers.<\/p>\n

Ryan fondly remembers that shared time well, including the text message that started it all.<\/p>\n

\u201cStephen sent me a text completely out of the blue, saying that he would be at the bench at so and so time, probably reading or writing a little bit of poetry, and that I’d be welcome to join him,\u201d he says via e-mail from UC Davis, where he is finishing a master\u2019s in creative writing.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long for these Poetry Hours to become a regularity, even a necessity. Nearly everything about the get-togethers were malleable. Sometimes they read (Horner started reading David Foster Wallace\u2019s \u201cInfinite Jest\u201d during one of these sessions), other times, they wrote. They even took it on the road to places like Sugar Creek or Shades State Park. The only constant was friendship.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe hardly ever talked,\u201d Ryan shares. \u201cOccasionally we would read aloud from whatever we held in our hands, no intro, no context, just conjuring poetry out of silence and then returning to silence afterward. Stephen is one of my best friends, someone who I look up to and who I know I can trust with anything, and the bench was our kind of shared space.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anyone\u2019s senior year can rush by, and for Stephen and Ryan, those moments on the Senior Bench were much-needed respites of calm as a new chapter of life was dawning.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen various responsibilities had piled up and the real world was calling out from beyond the gate of graduation, that’s when the promise of a silent hour, spent in mutual appreciation of something beautiful, at a special place with a dear friend, was enough to keep holding the world together for another week.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Paige — The pause lasted 12 seconds, so I knew the answer was meaningful. During a recent visit to Phoenix, where Stephen Batchelder \u201915 teaches eighth-grade science, I asked him about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/05\/Senior-Bench_1864.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3020"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3029,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3020\/revisions\/3029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}