This post originally appeared on Substack at https://open.substack.com/pub/pegatron/p/coming-soon?r=qmgpb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I was in the 3rd grade when we had to move. The house had been foreclosed. My father had drifted away, leaving behind a wife recovering from polio, three children and a huge debt to the IRS (Daddy called it “The Infernal Revenue Service”). Tax agents had arrived on his heels, taking rugs from the floor, drapes from the windows and most of our furniture. Infernal, indeed.
But they hadn’t managed to package up my mother’s determination. She divorced my father, who moved to Alaska. She found us a new home and somehow, we moved also to a house across town. It was 1959. I was 8 years old.
There’s so much I don’t remember from that time, but this I do: School was my safe place. In school, no adults asked when my daddy was coming home, or were we getting enough to eat, or how my mom managed to dress so well in our “circumstances.” No adult razzed me for being “smart,” or “too smart for my own good.” No adult asked why I read so much.
I also remember some hard moments. I was called a “bastard” by kids who were innocent of divorce. Fists clenched, holding back tears, I explained divorce. Next was religion, and what an Episcopalian was. It seems endless to me, encounters from school to eternity, but I bet it was really only one 10-minute episode. I was saved by a teacher.
She had curly red hair, and she started by saying the she was also A Child From A Broken Home. What an apt phrase! How perfectly it described our shambolic lives! Her next revelation was that she was available any time I needed to talk. About anything.
I don’t remember her name, and I don’t know if I ever took the offered counsel. I had learned to reject most such gifts, like a fish deftly flashing past the hidden hook. But I knew I could take the risk and maybe find a friend. A door opened, a possibility arose.
It wasn’t the last time a teacher saved the day for me. I have many stories I could tell: Mrs. T, who taught the names of all the bones in our bodies; the awkward “Stick,” a high school teacher who “… Grew so exceedingly thin / That when she essayed / To drink lemonade / She slipped through the straw and fell in!”; her colleague Tom, an intern who was improper in ways great and small in 1967. The journalism teacher, Mr. O, who tried to lead us onward, empowered to serve Truth, Accuracy, and starving for our art or craft.
But each of us has such stories, nostalgia-fueled memories of a time of life when doors were opened - by teachers; and possibilities arose, magically wafted into life - by teachers; when we were strong and untarnished and seen clearly by our teachers.
So why the Hell won’t we pay them? Why do we obstruct them in doing their jobs? Why, oh why, do we applaud when they use their own money to buy lunch for a hungry kid, but recoil as though faced by drooling pedophiles when they offer kids food for their expanding minds?
But they hadn’t managed to package up my mother’s determination. She divorced my father, who moved to Alaska. She found us a new home and somehow, we moved also to a house across town. It was 1959. I was 8 years old.
There’s so much I don’t remember from that time, but this I do: School was my safe place. In school, no adults asked when my daddy was coming home, or were we getting enough to eat, or how my mom managed to dress so well in our “circumstances.” No adult razzed me for being “smart,” or “too smart for my own good.” No adult asked why I read so much.
I also remember some hard moments. I was called a “bastard” by kids who were innocent of divorce. Fists clenched, holding back tears, I explained divorce. Next was religion, and what an Episcopalian was. It seems endless to me, encounters from school to eternity, but I bet it was really only one 10-minute episode. I was saved by a teacher.
She had curly red hair, and she started by saying the she was also A Child From A Broken Home. What an apt phrase! How perfectly it described our shambolic lives! Her next revelation was that she was available any time I needed to talk. About anything.
I don’t remember her name, and I don’t know if I ever took the offered counsel. I had learned to reject most such gifts, like a fish deftly flashing past the hidden hook. But I knew I could take the risk and maybe find a friend. A door opened, a possibility arose.
It wasn’t the last time a teacher saved the day for me. I have many stories I could tell: Mrs. T, who taught the names of all the bones in our bodies; the awkward “Stick,” a high school teacher who “… Grew so exceedingly thin / That when she essayed / To drink lemonade / She slipped through the straw and fell in!”; her colleague Tom, an intern who was improper in ways great and small in 1967. The journalism teacher, Mr. O, who tried to lead us onward, empowered to serve Truth, Accuracy, and starving for our art or craft.
But each of us has such stories, nostalgia-fueled memories of a time of life when doors were opened - by teachers; and possibilities arose, magically wafted into life - by teachers; when we were strong and untarnished and seen clearly by our teachers.
So why the Hell won’t we pay them? Why do we obstruct them in doing their jobs? Why, oh why, do we applaud when they use their own money to buy lunch for a hungry kid, but recoil as though faced by drooling pedophiles when they offer kids food for their expanding minds?
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