After three summers of day camp and six years of teaching, I decided to take off during the summer of ’79. Alicia was going to work that summer with her parents at a camp out west; she gave me a bicycle for my birthday before she left. I had an upright piano and was taking lessons. I made a chart to keep my days full of useful things. In June I went to see my mother and made a side trip to my college. I ran into an English prof I’d had who was also theologically savvy. After we talked for a while, he gave me a reading list of Christian thinkers and took me to the bookstore, using his discount to get some of them for me. I stopped in at the library where I had worked; my reference buddy from student days had become director. It was good to touch base with him, to be in a place that felt like home. A friend from college and I went to Stratford Canada’s Shakespeare Festival. Then it was back to West Palm to read, ride my bike, abuse the piano, walk the beach. I finally had time. What I didn’t have was money; I ate a lot of ramen noodles, too proud to ask my mother for some cash. Near the end of the summer, I borrowed a dollar from one of my students so I could buy a head of lettuce. I think I was courting scurvy. But I woke up that lazy summer, reading deeply, thinking alone. I’d put my brain in mothballs; no one seemed interested in theology to the extent I was, and I didn’t need my brain for the sermons I heard. I was teaching on autopilot, having taught each English course at least once, and some of them six times. Between growing concern over my mother (she was fine, but shouldn't I be closer, now that she was a widow?), a general homesickness for the Eastern Woodland landscape of Ohio, and all the reading I was doing, by the time school started that fall, I wondered, What am I doing here?
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Life got better for us all when Berean decided it needed a special ed teacher and hired Sandi, a dynamo. Sandi was divorced, but she and her young son came to Florida to live with her ex-husband’s cousin, Lou, who worked for the phone company. Lou, in our world of paycheck to paycheck, was rich. She owned a camper; one day Sandi invited Alicia and me to go to the beach with her, in the camper. We packed necessities—food and books. It was raining when we got to Jonathan Dickinson State Park, and Sandi parked under some pine trees. We heard the rain and the waves crashing on the nearby shore. We each found a spot to claim in the trailer and opened our books and were silent. Later, Sandi cooked hot dogs for us, but not ordinary dogs. No, these were split, stuffed with sauerkraut, and wrapped in bacon before being grilled. Sandi also did upscale. She still had connections in Maine, and one year for Christmas Preacher sprang for lobsters for all of us at the staff party. Live lobsters, being boiled to death in the kitchen, trying to escape the large pots, was amusing. We ate them fresh, the butter sliding down our chins, without a qualm over the pain we inflicted on another creature. We were so happy. We were usually broke, Alicia and I, and Sandi claimed to be as well. But then she’d root around in her purse and come up with a twenty-dollar bill, and it was hard in that moment to like her. When we said we had no money, we meant we had no money. This did not seem to be a concept Sandi grasped. She was wonderful with the special needs kids, as I was not. The school at some point decided to mainstream the kids into a couple of classes. I’d had zero training, and I handled things poorly in my ignorance. One of the boys, a lanky, brown-haired teen, rocked in his desk. I'd take him by the shoulders and hold him still. He’d giggle, and I’d let go, and he’d soon begin rocking again. I only hope I did no lasting damage to those students. Once I learned not to dip into the bag of chocolate chips my roommate intended for cookies, our shared home life was never bad. But when we were three—two Midwesterners teaching second grade and English, and a history teacher from Maine—we had even more fun, mostly at the expense of the self-described “Mainiac.” While I don’t think we were mean, the two of us had been together long enough to “get” each other. The school claimed at least six days a week, because church offered no escape. We were required to attend the church that owned the school (the pastor of the church was the president of the school, though he had no training in education). So, Miss Johnson, and all the rest of the faculty, were available twice on Sundays, should any parents want to confer, as did happen. And if there was a sports event, a concert, a play, or a fundraiser, Saturday could also belong to the school. The additional responsibilities of lesson plans and grading left little time over for just being who we were outside of work. We did try to have a life of our own. Alicia was more craft-oriented than I was; she embroidered, did quilling, painted on fabric, took a class in folk art painting. I read and wrote and also tried the painting on fabric craze; most of the time, however, I was on the couch with a book, reading silently but laughing out loud sometimes. Jennie read Time magazine and obsessively watched the news, even on vacation. The books she read concerned her subject area, not P.G. Wodehouse or Dorothy Sayers. Although she was funny, she didn’t have a frivolous mind. One day, in that self-absorbed and careless twenty-something way, I asked her, “Jennie, what do you do to be a person?” I think I hurt her feelings, though I was just obliquely suggesting she develop some hobbies and not be so wrapped up in teaching and her future plans for mission work. That question came back to me this morning, still early in my retirement. What am I doing to be a person? Example of tole painting: Artisan unknown. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9983187 |
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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