Teachers I Never Married

Teachers I Never Married

You would think by now I would know better

than to read a piece about

Callista and Newt right before going

to sleep, her pearls and jewels from

Tiffany, his Robert the Bruce complex.

How else to explain the need

upon waking to recall, in order,

the names of my teachers at

Edgewood Elementary School, a task

many would consider not

to be essential in the least, no more

than the vestigial tail of

some bad dream.  Here goes nothing:  Miss Morton,

my kindergarten teacher,

notable for selecting me, after

much deliberation no

doubt, to lead the evacuation drill

one particularly warm

spring afternoon, my red helmet gleaming

under a hopeful yellow

sun.  Next up, Miss Trippler, eyes of a barn

owl, she caught the slight, furtive

movements I made trying to retrieve the

Pink Pearl eraser Linda

Mathon had hidden beneath her gingham

dress.  How could I forget Miss

Fuhrman, second and third grade, some kind of

administrative blunder

that, but credit where credit is due, she

correctly diagnosed the

early symptoms of my tendency to

daydream, a curious sort

of vagueness with dire academic

implications that followed

me to fourth grade and Miss McKinney, my

first black teacher, a woman

with a smile you never forget and the

creative audacity

to allow us boys to indulge our urge

to wage World War Two on a

table top, a wildly inaccurate,

bloodthirsty diorama

enlivened with handfuls of green plastic

soldiers.   Another first in

fifth grade, the balding, jovial Mister

Conti who read to us out

loud, an experience that resonates

today, as if I were in

a darkened theater listening to

Stanley Tucci, glasses perched

on the end of his nose, reading Charlottes

Web, his voice smooth as aged scotch.  

That brings us to Mister Ramella, a

bantam of a man, snarling

countenance only a quirk, a habit,

the repositioning of

his heavy, black horn rims hands-free, setting

those appendages loose to

wave wildly, emphatically fending off

clouds of unseen mosquitos. 

A decent group of people, they did their

best given what they had to

work with, but I was never tempted to

date one, let alone marry

any of them, as did Newt, one of his

bolder acts, the successful

propositioning of Miss Battley, his

geometry teacher, an

unfortunate woman damned forever

by the observation that,

according to his mother, “he was her

little boy.”  Somewhere in the

craggy highlands of Scotland the ghost of

Robert the Bruce is crying,

bereft beyond hope, plotting sweet revenge.