I Loved To Teach

Having taught speech classes for so many years of my life gives me a different slant on the lives of others when our lives touch. You see, every day was a kind of “show and tell” experience. My class was a place of mingling in which, in order to eliminate speaker’s trauma, I tried to break them in with “easy-win” assignments with simple goals. At first we read—with eye contact and vocal variety. If you do this and this, you will earn an ‘A’, and many of them had not earned many ‘A’s’ before.

Because the class members spanned all four years of the high school age, and that increased the level of trauma, ice breakers were essential, but we had to get to the place where each student felt he could share almost anything. In an early assignment, the first speech not read, we changed the format to be seated in a circle. Each speaker was timed, and to get that ‘A’ he/she must simply share spontaneously for three minutes. I timed them, and if they spoke briefly the first time, they could be triggered in again and again until they reached the minimum. If someone’s ‘bullet’ struck a bold note on my memory board, I also shared. I needed to be included, and they had to get to know me in this special way.

So it was that I learned that one girl was in a car with her family when a tornado lifted them high into the air and set them down in a dangerous place upon a smashed gas pump in a filling station and they were able to drive away over roads made dangerous by fallen power lines. One tall young man (another year, another school) bared his left foot to show us that he had lost his two small toes to a lawn mower when he was trying to help. Another handsome “tough nut to crack” shed his veneer and told us how he got the long scar across his face when he was cutting lumber in a small woods close to his home and the chain saw caught and struck. As he ran for help, he said, his bloody lip kept hitting him in the eye.

The frequent sharing of tripe or humor or tragedy was inspiring in a rare way, and strangers became solid friends by the time I assigned group experiences in carefully assigned groups that overcame their differences. It was a delight to watch and share in these ‘adventures’. I watched a group, several of them male athletes, don wigs and foolish dresses to do an Oprah-like talk show with mikes and cameras. Hence, I do not see the people in a group in the same way that others do. When I saw a surgeon talking to my son his same age at a wedding recently, I had to ask him if he remembered that the two of them had slid down the nineteen steps in our twenty-four-foot-high entryway with their legs and feet in pillowcases while he waited for his piano lesson after his mom had dropped him off. I had coached Jon Gabrielsen in some delightful moments on the stage, had seen him win valedictorian honors, seen him grow to 6’5” and play college basketball, and I might have remembered many things, but there was that ‘snapshot’ in my mind that just ‘googled’ up at that moment.

When I wrote of Carol Belt in yesterday’s blog, I hoped that just maybe someone who knew her—I haven’t seen her since 1958—might tell her what I wrote and I could stop regretting that indignity.

I also find it hard to imagine that many men would find joyous memories in having lived in a historic home that he was constantly restoring and renovating and redecorating for twenty-some years, calling to Margaret from a walkboard over the above-mentioned staircase to “bring me my scissors quick” because the board sagged too much for me to move another step and I needed to cut the pasted wallpaper strip and hang it in shorter stretches. No one visiting that place could have imagined the patience and persistence it took to get it from a run-down state to what the banker called “a gold mine.” I will probably never live in another house that is paid off because I couldn’t bear to sell it to that lawyer and chose, instead, to keep it in the family.

Danny now owns that home, called Rhoades Apartments.  He was nine months old when we moved there, and he learned to use the back, very steep staircase as a substitute hill which he could slide down on his stomach at an incredible speed that startled and frightened ninety-year old Stella Pratt who rented a small apartment at the top of those stairs in a space that had once been the maid’s quarters.  When we removed the rubber treads and carpeted the front stairs, he stopped sliding down the bannister—that marvelous structure Margaret had returned to its original luster.  It wrapped around the steps on three sides in a huge, out-of-shape ‘C’.  The oak banister was held in place by cherry posts, and the newel post was cherry with eight burl panels, ornately shaped. The stairway lead down to the front door which, with its transum and eleven-inch–wide casings, was ten and a half feet tall.

Anyway, Danny discovered that it was fun to slide down in a pillowcase if there was someone to share the fun.  I decided, as an afterthought, to include this poem I wrote when Danny was four and still sliding down the bannister.  I’m sure it was this that broke the kidney-shaped velvet upholstered bench from a theater in eastern Indiana. I always thought I’d restore that bench when I retired, so it is still in the attic space that might have become a ballroom if Danny had finished what he began in his late teens.

                    DANNY AND JOHN

Danny is four.
Fast-action toys
Are anything within his reach–
And hardly anything is not!
Coke-bottle bowling pins,
Spray-bottle guns
Box-car rides and banisters
Are fun to him.

Tears and anger
Accompany paper airplanes
If daddy flies them better
And meet the mention of Pizza Hut
If Daddy says no.

When he gets tired,
He cuddles–
He spots a place beside me on the couch,
Dashes, dives, and, with great accuracy,
Fits.

If you’d like to borrow him
To add some noisy joy
To the end of your day,
He’ll return your love freely.
But let me warn,
He’s like a doll
That’s somewhat predictable–
He drinks; he wets.

Ask John,
Whose bed he scrambles into
Almost every night.
John knows his regularity!
John is thirteen
And likes to sleep
In warm, dry comfort,
But even he forgets
When love comes
In blond locks
And tattered socks
And fits into whatever space is left.

What comfort to be four
And Cuddly
And always welcome–
Or thirteen and loved so much.
                                    1976