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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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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