The Impact a Great Teacher Has

So in my last post, I was talking about dedications for the upcoming Asphodel books and I mentioned that I would dedicate the second book to some of my high school teachers. These educators taught me the rudiments of what would eventually turn into a writing career. Without them, and the attention they paid to me, I would never have gotten as far as I have. Let me explain.

When I started high school in Clarksville, Tennessee, I was really excited about a particular elective I could take: Latin. I still remember my first day in class, when my best buddies Eddie and Jimmy (twin brothers who now have gravitated to the more mature 'Ed' and 'Jim') sat at our desks, opened our textbooks and looked expectantly at the teacher--Grady Warren. He started us in immediately on conjugations and declensions; our first translation work as I recollect was about a pulchra puella and her frog. Before too long, we were competeing in Junios Classical League events. At state, we garnered quite a few first places between us.

Then came summer. During the summer Grady and his wife Kaye (Dr. Warren, who taught at Clarksville High School) held open house for their students. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, hordes of adolescents descended upon the Warren's house, which was tiny and crammed with books and pets, to study willingly during the hot, humid Tennessee days. On Wednesdays, those of us who were chosen for the certamen (Latin for battle--it's Latin quiz bowl essentially) team that would represent Tennessee at Nationals, would gather to practice in some vicious games to hone our knowledge and our skill. My nickname was fauces, which is Latin for jaws. That should tell you all you need to know about my fledgling personality. We played against the certamen greats of the past: college students who, through love for the Warrens and the language and the game, gave up their summers to serve as our teachers. The Warrens provided the chips, cookies, and cola, the study guides, their home (which had a volleyball court where we played as well) and we, unthinking and completely ignorant of the financial cost of hosting a group of ravenous kids, happily spent our summer vacations learning. We went to Nationals, won numerous chapionships for TJCL, and came back to do it all over the next year.

The other teacher, Kitty Savage, is a bit different. She taught English in the hardcore, old-fashioned way. We thought she was older than dirt and meaner than a snake, with her chain-smoking of unfiltered Camels during breaks and her abrupt, brusque way of instruction. Most all of the kids hated her--except for me. She was our 10th grade teacher, and for some reason she saw something different in me. Mrs. Savage turned out to be a wonderful (if gruff) woman. While she hammered the basics of grammar into our heads, she softened the blow with good books and writing projects. It was when she saw my writing that she took me under her wing. For the rest of my high school education, I'd go over to her house quite often with my mother. As they sat there drinking tea, Mrs. Savage would tell me the most wonderful stories with the sole purpose of expanding a young mind to the great stories in real life that could be told. For example, as a young war bride, she had worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee on the Manhattan Project. She'd saved all the newspaper clipping in a big album, and I got a bird's eye look at how a young woman lived, worked, and dreamed in the biggest top secret city in the country. She told me a local tale of how a man named William Kelly had invented a cheap, easy process to turn pig iron into steel, and how his British employee stole the secret that eventually came to be called 'the Bessemer process.' She took a girl who spent a lot of time dreaming, and turned her into a hard core researcher who could write a term paper as an epic poem. She, too, sponsored a competition group. She tookd groups of students to state and national History Day competition every year I was in school. She came away with three state champions in Research Papers; twice it was me and both were done as epic poems. She couldn't quite rid herself of my artistic pretensions.

Mrs. Savage is dead now; she died at the age of 92. The Warrens are very much alive, still bringing the joys of the Classics to classes of eager students. One of the twins, actually, is teaching Latin in Clarksville too. Ed married Laura, who was my idol when I was a freshman and she was a senior, and they both teach Latin. When I went home for Christmas, the Warrens' students had a reunion to honor them. I saw people I hadn't seen in twenty years, including the teachers who had impacted me strongly, the older students whose footsteps I'd tried to follow, and the friends my own age who are now doctors and lawyers and teachers in their own right. It was bittersweet in a way, because it felt like we'd never left.

So when someone asks me which profession is the greatest for mankind, I instantly say teachers. I know how mine impacted me, I know how one miserable year of teaching Latin brought me to my knees as a colossal failure, and I know how twenty some odd years later, what they taught me has brought me to my professional destination. Without them, Asphodel (and Darkshifters and Terella and so forth) would not exist. And that's why book two is dedicated to them. Who else, in a book called "The Gift of Redemption" could it be?

Thanks, Grady. Thanks, Kaye. Thanks, Kitty.

It's all YOUR fault!

Residual Anger

Confession time: I am a hot-tempered woman. When I get angry (which is a lot) I get very quiet and icy and that's usually the hint for trespassers to back off before I explode. There have been times in my life where I allowed that anger to overtake my good sense; more times, in fact, than I care to think about. Each of those explosions caused dire consequences, some of which I've had to deal with for fifteen or twenty years.

For example, when my mother passed away I hadn't spoken to her in over five years. This wasn't a one-sided situation, oh no. She didn't talk to me either. It all stemmed from a single incident.

I was catering a large event--about five hundred people for a crawfish boil in Tennessee. After the gorgefest was easing into the 'straggler' time, I sat down to play a game of euchre with some friends and drink a beer or two. In the middle of the game, my mother and brother showed up out of the blue. She started screaming at me in a mixture of English and French which was my mother at her worst. As I stared at her in complete silence, I stewed over my two options: I could stand up and knock her on her ass, or I could just walk away. I chose the latter. Deliberately, I stood up, turned my back on her, and walked out of the pavilion to a mosquito-infested pool. While I cried like a baby, my brother tried to start a fight with my friends. Bad decision: they were all in the military. By the time I got back, my mother and brother were gone and I had made the decision that in order to keep my sanity, I needed to amputate that portion of my life. The anger, the hatred, the sorely troubled love, the desire to please--all of those emotions were jettisoned from my personal baggage so that I could go on living.

And, so I did. I moved back up to Ohio and away from my mother's reach. The next thing I heard about her, she was dead. My anger had prevented me from being there in time to say,"I'm sorry." or "I love you." Any chance of reconcilation was buried, eternally, six feet from my grasp.

This is not a pleasant place to live. Although I've spent much of the last few years trying to tie up all those loose emotional ends, it will still never justify my mother breathing her last without me there at her side. Some of you remember when she died from our association on another website. What none of you know is that every day, at some point, something reminds me of her. In that moment, I'm right back in that self-accustory state.

Today is one of those days for me. I spent much of the afternoon on the cardiac ward with my father-in-law. As my husband and I struggled to find a way to entertain a man who is absolutely miserable and in pain, I wondered what could have changed in my life if I had tried to reconcile with my mother before she died. I realized something very important: it wouldn't really have made a difference. I would have tried to forgive her, but she never would have forgiven me. The last look I gave her was one of disgust, the last thing she saw of me was my back as I walked away from her for the final time. Even then, in the back of my mind, I knew it was the final time anyway. Even if I had been there, I couldn't have found the closure that so viciously eludes me now.

And then, another picture enters my mind: my mom, driving me to competitions, chaperoning our History Day group to the national convention and the look on her face when I won the research paper award, the way she so casually brought up my successes to farmers at the store. I realize how proud she would be of me now that I'm published, and I'd like to think that if she were still alive, she would know that a lot of what I have accomplished is due to her unerring belief in my ability to succeed.

Just that quickly: mother became Mom. For some reason, that one little linguistic change put a whole lot of things about this residual anger squarely into place. So tonight, as I type this long, boring story out into my blog, I no longer think about the mother who humiliated me in public, but about the Mom who drove me all over the countryside in an effort to help me succeed at what I wanted to do most.

So. Asphodel isn't dedicated to anyone. Reckoning will be dedicated to my Latin teachers Grady and Kaye Warren and my English teacher/mentor the late Kitty Savage. I'll tell you more about them tomorrow. Temptation will be dedicated to my husband, of course.

But Apostolate? That dedication will go to my mom. Finally, I think I have found the peace I've craved for nearly a decade.