Photo by Ayo Ogunseinde on Unsplash Life in south Florida provided an endless opportunity for learning. Cockroaches will come. My tiny apartment had a front entrance from a main street, but also an alley, where a storage building nestled. The first night I pulled in and saw the entire side of that building crawling with cockroaches was dreadful. As one new acquaintance told me, “Everyone here has bugs. No shame. Hire Nozzle Nolen to come once a month.” The company advertised with a large, white plastic elephant (hence the nozzle in the name) affixed to the top of the vans that carried poison to spray. Another unavoidable drain on my small salary. It can get cold even in the semi-tropics. We had a rare cold snap that first fall. I had no idea that space heaters existed, even if I’d had money for one. I tried to power through, teaching with the mother of all head colds. This was not entirely due to my devotion. At the beginning of the year, we were told in a teachers’ meeting that each of us had $500.00 reserved in an escrow account. If we had perfect attendance, it was ours in June. For each day we missed, $100.00 would be deducted (maybe to pay a sub?). The prevailing slogan was Don’t call in, crawl in. Never mind the spread of disease to others or the disregard to your own well-being. One day I did crawl in with my cold. I asked my eighth-grade class to pray for me, telling them I didn’t care if they prayed I’d get well or that I’d be too sick to get out of bed the next day. The following morning, I couldn’t get out of bed. One of the boys took credit for his prayer’s effect. Procrastination and fear will become your besetting sins. I hated grading papers and was jealous of the math and science teachers, whose grading was simple. I had multiple subjects to cover—grammar, spelling, vocabulary, writing, and literature—in each grade. Each had homework and each needed to be tested. And there were essays and research papers, always a battle with myself over how seriously to regard spelling and punctuation errors. I was always late getting work back to the students, sometimes pulling all-nighters to grade at the end of the six-week grading periods. One night when I was at the kitchen table working—the chairs were hard, and thus preferable to the sofa, where I might fall asleep—I was sure I heard a baby crying in the alley. I was too frightened to investigate. I’d felt safe living alone, with the fire station nearby, but that night, my mind full of plots of novels in which nothing good happened to bold young women, I had no courage. I called the fire department, and soon I heard men in the alley, swinging flashlights and looking for a distressed infant who wasn’t there. I suspect they figured out before I did, a long time later, that what I’d heard was a cat in heat.
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[photo from Church of Bethesda-by-the-sea website] I was often overwhelmed during the seven years I worked in Forida . It was so far from everyone and everything I loved, and the teaching took a lot out of me. I’m an introvert who can project like an extrovert, then go home and collapse. I loved many of the students I taught—in ways I now think were probably not healthy—but their adolescent energy and dramas were exhausting. Two places of refuge existed for me. The ocean, only a bridge away to another world, was big enough to absorb my grief when my father died. Many nights after I returned from his funeral, my roommate would drive us to the ocean and I would sit on the seawall and cry. The ocean also cast up daily delights of shells and stones I collected in Mason jars. The second place, also across the bridge, was (of all the foreshadowing places!) the historic Episcopal Church on that island, Bethesda-by-the-Sea, a Spanish Gothic structure built in 1925. To enter its sanctuary, which was open during the day, was to enter a blue darkness. The magnificent stained glass depicted scenes from the Bible featuring water—the flood, Jonah and the whale, Jesus walking on water—all in glorious shades of blue. It was cool within the stone walls, the day’s almost inevitable sunny glare absent. A short walk outside the sanctuary through the courtyard led to a garden with a reflecting pool, complete with large orange koi and water lilies. In the lower part of the garden hung a della Robbia image of the Virgin. At the far end were two wooden gazebos, their tops conical like a dunce cap to offer shade; a lantern hung in the ceiling of each, festooned with spider webs. The stone walls enclosing the garden were lined with bougainvillea, crown of thorns and ixoria bushes. A demure fountain fed water to the pool; I could hear it splashing as I sat in one of the gazebos with my journal. Writing is the only way I can begin to make sense of the world; this has been true since at least sixth grade. During those seven years of teaching, I did write, though just short pieces, sometimes doing the assignments I gave the English classes I taught. I kept a journal, though, and puzzled over people who confused me and issues that disturbed me. The garden offered me a much-needed sanctuary from the hot, extroverted world and the hurts and difficulties I fled. My first year of teaching, I had five classes to prepare for, five homework assignments, tests, and essays to grade. I was to teach using five textbooks I’d never read, though I had a fondness for them—they were the Harcourt series that I remembered from my own seventh-grade English class. Adventures for Readers, Book 1 was the first time I knew I was falling in love with language and poetry. One of the deficiencies in my teacher training program was a unit on classroom management. How was I supposed to control 43 seventh graders? The class size meant that we teachers changed rooms, because only one room was large enough to hold 43 desks. Thus, we teachers grabbed our books and raced down the open halls; in my case, I just hoped for enough time for a bathroom break if I needed one. Nothing prepared me for the energy and the mischief seventh graders could get into. Sitting in the back of the room, Lonny and Daisy had marker fights, making colorful dashes on each other’s forearms. God alone knew what their parents thought. But Lonny’s chief partner in crime was Johnny. Together they racked up multiple detentions and extra work, none of which deterred them. Finally, I sent them to the principal’s office. Grif called me in on the conference he’d already begun. Seated in front of his desk were two frightened boys, their faces tear-stained, their blue eyes wide and wary. “Miss Johnson, these boys have been a source of trouble for you from the beginning. They deserve to be expelled from this school. But I am leaving the decision up to you. What shall we do with these boys?” No syllabus had ever covered this sort of thing. I looked at the boys. I looked at Grif, who sat pokerfaced, giving me no clue. “No,” I said finally. “No, I think they will do better. Don’t expel them.” The boys shed a few more tears, in relief this time, and went back to class. Later I confronted Grif. “Don’t ever do anything like that to me again! How was I supposed to know what to do?” He just smiled. “I knew what you’d say. You now sit at the right hand of the Father. Those boys won’t disrupt class anymore.” And they never did. Here’s an illustration of where [selective] biblical literalism can take one. In Deuteronomy 22:5, the writer states in plain King James English, “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.” This text has been interpreted to mean that women cannot wear pants, even though men wore robes, not trousers, when this text was written. Thus, at my Christian school and the church that sponsored it, women wore dresses, skirts, even culottes, but not pants and certainly not shorts. We wore them with nylons and heels in the relentless heat of south Florida. I could perhaps have borne it better—after all, my Christian college let us wear pants only after five p.m., another bizarre rule—if all of Deuteronomy were evenly applied. For example, one chapter earlier, provisions were made for stoning a rebellious son. Any number of such sons sat in my classes, and no one was throwing rocks at them, least of all their frustrated or doting parents. The saga of women and pants at our church and school took place over several years and stages. First, wearing pants was clearly forbidden. Then it was decided that pants with an elastic waistband could be worn; they didn't pertain to a man. Next, pants with side zippers were acceptable; no man would wear those. One teacher, an excellent seamstress, moved all the zippers in the pants she still owned. Color was the next determiner of true manliness—no man would wear pastels, so sherbet-colored pants, even with a zipper in front, were acceptable for women. Never mind that Florida was and is littered with men playing golf in pink or mint green or yellow trousers. A manly man would always wear black, navy, brown, or gray. By the time that final ruling came down, the women in my circle were weary and cynical. We suspected that these changes had nothing to do with biblical interpretation but may have owed their origin to the fashion desires of the pastor’s wife. She was petite and cute; she looked darling in pants. [The photo is from an ad for Lilly Pulitzer, noted for the brilliant tropical colors of her fabric.] |
Baptist GirlI was a conservative Baptist girl who grew up to become a career Christian, working first in a Baptist school and then in a Baptist college. For about three decades, it was very good until it wasn’t, and I had to leave. But the Baptists formed me. This is my homage to the good times and good people of the world I left, finally, at forty-three, when I became an Episcopalian. These are my memories; others might disagree with my recollections. So be it. Archives
January 2024
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