She was young and beautiful. It was her first year of teaching, and the 9th grade English class she ended up with made it a bad one. There were many incidents, one involving a paper airplane (one of many thrown while her back was turned, never revealing the culprit). She heard the release and turned right as it floated lazy and slow, and we all watched, transfixed, as it wandered across the room and poinked her breast and fell to the floor.
A big inrush of air from around 20 students sucked the oxygen out of the room. She burst into tears and vanished out the door. We waited perhaps ten minutes until the school principal arrived and gave use a huge lecture about rudeness, civility, and other things that droned on so long that it nearly drained our guilt.
She never faltered in her mission, though, to bring culture and knowledge to the Philistines in her class, and it was during one of those episodes that she won my heart.
We were struggling through poetry. Well, I wasn’t struggling—I loved poetry but was too embarrassed to admit it to anyone, let alone a roomful of my peers. I had, however, begun to tire of the rigid structure: I loved Whitman, but one more reading of “O’ Captain My Captain” would have pushed me over the edge.
The day that changed was her reading a poem by e.e. cummings. It was titled only by the first line.
“Buffalo Bill ’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death”
Total silence. Then laughter. “That’s a poem?” “Stupid.” She tried to get a discussion going but gave up and went to the next selection. I stared at it and read it over and over. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen: the spacing of the words, the punctuation, the making up of words to get across the point. I got what he meant. It also hit me hard: my father had just died, and I felt cummings was speaking just to me.
I waited after class until everyone was gone and walked to her desk. She looked at me, head tilted (I can see it like a movie), eyebrows up, saying nothing. I told her I really liked the poem and wanted to know more about cummings. She wrote down some titles for me on a piece of paper and pointed me toward the library. She looked happy, pleased that I took the time, and knew not to say anything to anyone.
I bought the book in this picture that year, and it’s one that’s followed me for over 50 years. It’s beat up outside, been through a house fire, but quite lovely inside.