I've been walking through cemeteries a lot this past week or so. The puppy, who has tripled her size in the seven weeks we've had her (so much for that "little dog" we thought we were getting), knows that the prize for getting through the cemetery is the open fields beyond it. There, she can go off-leash, run her fool Tennessee Treeing Brindle Coon Hound (don't ask--she's a rescue from Kentucky) off, chasing the skittering brown leaves, shoving her nose into tufts of grass looking for voles and mice, barking at the crows that gather in the trees to watch us. She runs closer to me when the nesting pair of red-tailed hawks scream and take to the sky. For the first couple weeks, when she was five pounds or so, I'd get nervous, too, but now she's too big for them to carry her off.

Although there have been days of late when I've kind of wished that the flying monkeys would come for me. 

Novembers are rough months around here. The state of denial that one maintains all throughout vibrant, glowing October is drenched in the cold downpour and gusting winds that simultaneously strip the last leaves from the trees and turn everything else brown. Skies range in color from pewter to gunmetal, and the buffetting wind announces that seven months of winter lie before one.

Novembers have been tough in the past for their own reasons. In a few days, I'll mark the occasion of a lover's death, who collapsed of a brain aneurysm while I was with him. For some reason, all the peace I have made with that day gets all fucked up about this time, and I have flashbacks that make me shake, take me to some dark place inside myself I don't want to be. 

And yet. None of this is what I started out to write about. I suppose if this was an essay, I'd delete those first few paragraphs, begin again. But as this is a blog, well, if you're still reading, you might as well come along for this ride. 

I've been thinking -- a lot-- about whether the work I do means anything. I teach college. Specifically, I teach creative writing. I can say that good things consistently come out of my classes: I see improvement in student writing; I have students who find in themselves a talent they often didn't know they had; most important, for me, is the fact that I create, in my classroom, a zone of trust in which students can write about things they've never told anyone. 

For a long time, I assumed my students just didn't know much about the world. For a long time, I thought they only seemed to be concerned with  whatever the latest reality show was, or the movie they went to see. (And no, they never discussed books.) For a long time, I was a real grouch about students who wanted to write who didn't read. I still am. Now though, I dispense with the grouchy lecture on the first day of class, when I declare that you can't be a writer unless you read, and then mention that I've been using my budget every year to build up a library, which they are free to use. 

What I have found out about my students has enlightened me, enchanted me, but enraged me, too. Certain people on this earth should not be allowed to have children: when I read the stories of what some of my students have gone through, I weep for them. And then I correct their grammar, show them how to make their words more effective, offer to publish them in the school magazine. I have sat with students whose family members have come home from Iraq and Afghanistan as strangers. I have sat with students who have lost best friends in car crashes. I have sat with students who have lost mothers to cancer, who have found out friends their age have terminal diseases, who are watching someone they love self-destruct from drugs or alcohol or mental illness. 

They come to me to talk. And I, in turn, counsel them as best I can. Sometimes, I encourage them to write about what's going on. And sometimes, I get them the professional help on campus that is better able to evaluate when a student is on the edge of the cliff. 

Is this enough? Is what I do enough? 

For months now, I've been haunted by the idea that I'm not doing enough. I feel the need to be somewhere else--the Congo, for example--working with women and children who have experienced war trauma. Or I feel the need to be working with an organization that is bringing direct aid to the starving or victims of war or some other catastrophe. 

When I was a kid, I wanted to be Gandhi. That was childhood narcissism, to think that I could do that. But I wonder sometimes whether what I am doing now is simply meaningless. 

How many people do we have to lend a hand to before we feel it is enough? At what point will I feel that what I do matters? 

I can already hear a voice telling me that there are millions of me, teaching, every day, and dealing with the same things I'm dealing with. And, if I were to quit tomorrow, somebody else would take my place. 

So, if it would be that easy to replace me, does that mean that I'm meant to be doing something else? It's the question that eats at me, a lot. Sometimes, it's a mean fucking voice that tells me to just shut up and go to work and do my job. But sometimes, it's a gentle voice that tells me that somewhere, out there, is a job that is meant for me.