I Loved To Teach

This picture brought a couple of memories.  The first was in 1964 when I was a minister.  It was the occurrence that made me decide trying to teach school and pastor a small church was too much stress.  My barber, Roy Trowbridge had his shop about two blocks down Main Street from this clock, on the other (south) side of the street.  When I walked into the shop, I was told by the owner that I had arrived too late.  I blamed Margaret for making me late, and walked back to the car where Margaret was waiting.  When I said I had blamed her for making me late, she expressed disappointment in my judgment,  We were sitting at the stoplight just beyond the old theater, and I just got out of the car and walked away.  I wandered around downtown Greenfield until it dawned on me that I was about ten miles from Charlottesville and had no way to get there unless I walked.

I walked back to the corner where Margaret had driven across Main Street and parked to wait for me to return in a calmer state of mind—what a patient woman I had married.  I drove back to the parsonage and wrote my final sermon in which I did not mention this incident.

The second incident was a number of years later when we were living in this downtown area within easy walking distance of the Methodist Church on the corner there.  Tammy was taking ballet classes at Debbie Wilkerson’s Dance Studio, which was upstairs in the old Odd Fellows Building, now long gone, and I had gone there to walk her the two blocks to our house.  When the light turned green, I dashed across Main Street and pretended to hide unseen behind the church’s large sign; then when Tammy crossed the street, I jumped out, pretending to frighten her.  In her journal the next week, one of my Freshman students wrote that she and her mother had sat at that stoplight that night and observed my antics.  When her mother had said, “There goes a happy man,” the girl reported, “Mother, that man is my English teacher.  And here is Tammy’s daughter, Debby, posing many years later at that downtown landmark.