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.
