Photo credit: Luiza Sayfullina on Unsplash That first Florida autumn, I went back to my college for Homecoming, perhaps just to be able to say I was employed, and not the total failure I’d felt in June. When I got on my connecting flight, I saw another woman I knew also going to Homecoming. Our college circles overlapped—I worked box office and occasionally got a bit part onstage, and she did costumes for plays. But she was science and I was English, so classes didn’t often coincide. On the flight I learned she was teaching in another Christian school about 100 miles north of mine. We chatted on the flight, and I thought that was that—except later that fall, our principal went to the school where she taught, ostensibly to buy desks. His real goal was to hire that science teacher. She was a package deal; he also got her roommate, an elementary teacher who smiled at him. The two of them came to look at the school. I decided it was my task to be welcoming, and so invited them for a spaghetti dinner before we went to a high school basketball game. One of the students had given me a kitten. She was at the climb-the-curtains stage. My guests were wearing then-popular maxi dresses. They looked to the kitten just like curtains, so she scrambled up the elementary teacher’s blue dress—a great start to our relationship. To complete the list, he hired yet another woman from our college, who taught history. So, yes, he lost half of his high school teaching staff my first year. Math and English remained covered, though. The history teacher became my roommate for most of a year. We lived in a trailer; in south Florida, there were very nice trailer parks, so it didn’t feel as if we were taking a step down the economic ladder. She was bright and funny, beautiful and a singer. Getting up on time was not her priority; she sometimes risked her life putting on her makeup as she drove to school. We got along very well; the cat, by then mature, remained on the floor.
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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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