The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, Part II: 6

Three 

“What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.

Gil screamed.

His reaction was so unexpected—so totally unexpected—and his scream so high-pitched and, well, girlish—that, in spite of my anger, I started laughing. I heard Mrs. Bishop’s footsteps hurrying our way, and I tried to control my loud laughter, but I just couldn’t. The more I thought about Gil’s startled scream, the more I looked at him—now he was blushing a deep red—and the more I found myself convulsed with laughter.

“Is anything wrong?” Mrs. Bishop asked as she stepped into the room. “I thought I heard a scream.”

“You did, you did!” I choked through my laughs. “There … was … definitely … a scream in here!” And off I went on another round of laughter.  I was nearly squealing by the time I began winding down.  I slumped into a chair, trying to catch my breath, perspiring now.

Gil, head down, was stuffing things into his backpack, putting on his jacket, rewinding his microfilm. He did not look happy. And I can’t say I blamed him: Who likes being laughed at?  Especially by a member of the opposite sex … and in front of an adult.

“I guess everything is all right,” said Mrs. Bishop, a little confused. “It’s just that both of you are such quiet young people … I didn’t really expect to have to hush you two!”

Gil hadn’t said a word, and now he was moving through the doorway, past Mrs. Bishop.  And then I remembered what had started all this.

“Wait!” I cried.  “Wait a minute, uh …” I’d forgotten his name.

“Gil,” said Mrs. Bishop, smiling.

“Yeah, Gil!” I said. “Wait up!” I trotted after him, passed him, and turned to face him in the foyer of the library. Another few steps and he would have been outside.

“I’m not letting you out,” I declared. I spread my arms out, as if I could keep him there with pure force.

He just stood there and stared at me. And then it was his turn to smile. “You think you could really stop me,” he said, “if I wanted to leave?”

I looked at him. He was a little bigger than I … but not that much. It would have been an interesting struggle. But I figured I’d embarrassed him enough for one night. And so I backed down.  “Probably not,” I said. “You could probably run right over me, if you wanted to.”

Gil smiled, revealing the whitest, most perfect teeth I’d ever seen on a human being.  “Right over you,” he confirmed. “No problem. Like a runaway buffalo.”

“You don’t look much like a buffalo,” I teased. “And, you know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a buffalo scream. Certainly not in a public library!”

He blushed again, and I found that some part of my brain—some part of my brain that I had not even known was there—was telling me that when he blushed like that, well, it looked kind of … attractive. Firmly telling that part of my brain to shut up, I remained determined to discover why this stranger was looking at a picture of my house, taking notes on my house, on the night of the biggest football game in the history of Franconia, Ohio.

“Look,” I began, “I didn’t mean to startle you—”

“Startle me!” he said with some energy. “You scared the hell out of me!”

And then I laughed again—but not as hysterically as the last time.

“What’s so funny this time?” he asked.

“I’ve never heard anyone swear in the public library.”

“That’s not swearing, he said. “I can do some swearing, if you really want to hear some.”

“I’ll pass on that,” I said.  Swearing never bothered me—but I never did it myself, I had lots better ways of saying what I felt.

For a long moment we just looked at each other.

I broke the silence. “Look,” I said, “would you mind if I asked you something?”

“Okay,” he said, “but let’s not stand here in the doorway like this.”

“Yeah, I’m sure there will be a big crowd of people trying to get into the library during the football game. We’re really blocking the entrance. So rude.”

He was moving toward one of the tables in the main room. “You have an ironic sense of humor, don’t you?”

Ironic sense of humor! I’d never heard a classmate use the word ironic before. I wondered if he knew what it meant. He probably did, because he was right about my sense of humor.

He was sitting at one of the tables. “Please sit down,” he said.

“You sound like a receptionist in a dentist’s office,” I complained, sitting.

“That’s what my mother does,” he said.

“Really?”

“No.”

I smiled. “You’re a bit ironic yourself, aren’t you?” I said.

“Whatever. Now, first of all, what’s your name?”

“Vickie Stone.”

“I’ve seen you around. In school.”

“And you’re the new kid,” I said.

“Cha-ching.”

“Yuk,” I said. “I hate people who say ‘cha-ching.’”

“Cha-ching! Cha-ching! Cha-ching!”

“You’re starting to annoy me,” I said. “A lot.”

“So what did you want to ask me?”

“Back there, in the microform room?”

“Yes?”

“You were looking at a picture of an old house in town?”

“Yes?”

“And taking notes about it?”

“Yes. Is there something wrong with that? It’s for my local history project.”

“Well, Gil,” I said, “your local history projects happens to be my house!”

I don’t know why it bothered me so much that someone was studying my house. Maybe I was just annoyed that I hadn’t thought of it myself. I mean, it was one of the oldest houses in town—maybe the oldest. I’d learned over the last few years that a lot of people used to think it was haunted. And the last couple of months there had been lots of interest in the house because of the carpenters and roofers crawling all over it, rebuilding in weeks what the tornado had taken away in seconds. Lots of people would walk up in our driveway—or park right out at the front curb—and stare at it.

But probably what I found most disturbing was that I felt this kid, this Gil, was invading my privacy. Without my permission. And so I told him just that.

“Your privacy,” he replied. “That makes no sense. All I’m doing is sitting here, reading about an old house. What does that have to do with your privacy?”

“It’s my house!” It’s the only response I could come up with. And I felt myself getting angry—very angry, and all at once, too.

“Well, I’m not stealing it, Vickie. I’m not peeping through the windows at you and your parents, I’m not—”

“My mother’s dead!” I shrieked at him.

I ran from the library, out into the dusk.

As I raced for home—my home!—tears streaking down my face, I could hear the music of the marching band, the cheers of the crowd, floating in the soft air of the autumn evening.

But I was so angry I wanted to grab the edge of the sky and rip it away like a page from Gil’s notebook.

ADVENTURES IN READING (1958-1959): PART III

Last time I gave you a few lists--songs, TV show, movies--that were popular in 1958 when I began ninth grade at Hiram High School.  I also reminded you that we had a new teacher that year--Mrs. Ruth Browning, a young teacher (a graduate of Hiram College) whose ... attributes ... particularly interested many of the young men in her classes.

I was pretty much afraid of her.  She was no-nonsense most of the time, so, as I've written elsewhere, she shocked me that fall when she allowed one of my classmates (who?) to listen to the World Series (Yanks v. Braves) on his transistor radio (with earplug) and announce any changes in score.  That impressed me.  Mrs. Browning likes baseball!  Thing are getting better and better!

We did a lot of things in her classes--grammar exercises, book reports (oral and written), speeches, essays--and she was the first teacher I'd had who taught us prosody. We learned all about iambs and trochees and dimeter and trimeter and the like.  For some reason, a lot of that stuck with me through the years, and I still find uses for it (example: the doggerel I write and post on Facebook).

We also had a literature book (duh), Adventures in Reading (1958), a copy of which I went to some lengths to acquire a few years ago for another project I was working on.  As I paged through it, I was surprised to see how ... contemporary ... it is in some ways. There are all sorts of illustrations (see examples below): photographs, line drawings. The editors (more about them in a bit) have also made an effort, it seems, to include pieces from both genders--definitely not a given in the 1950s.  To be honest, I've not heard of all of those writers, but there are some important names, too: Dorothy Canfield, Selma Lagerlöf (who won a Nobel Prize), Jessamyn West, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Lowell. Amelia Earhart has a piece. Still, the contents are dominated by white men, many of them dead. So ... multicultural? Not yet.  Not in 1958.

There is also a surprising mixture of genres. Many literature anthologies favored fiction and poetry and drama. But this one includes a heavy dose of non-fiction, a genre that only recently has begun to slug its way into the curriculum.

As I page through Adventures in Reading this morning, I see all sorts of things that resonate. Some are pieces I remember reading in 1958-1959 (not a lot--I confess--perhaps because I, uh, didn't read all those assignments?); some are pieces I taught during my own 45-year career; some I came across elsewhere--or are poems I have, for one reason or another, memorized.  And some are things I hated then and hate now.  Or hated then and love now.

A few quick examples before I consign this to the evanescence of cyberspace.  I taught O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief" quite often--and here it is, early in the book, with numerous glosses on words not too many ninth graders know--then or now: undeleterious, Philoprogenitiveness, bas-relief, and the like. The little biography of Wm. Sidney Porter (O. Henry) does neglect to mention his three years in prison for embezzlement!

I remember only one thing about Robert W. Krepps' story "Pride of Seven": It was the first time I learned that pride meant a group of lions.  Not long afterward (editing!) comes "The Lady or the Tiger?"  And I also remember reading Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace" for the first time here.  There's a selection from Lassie Come-Home, which I do not remember, even though the TV show Lassie had been a favorite of mine.

There are some sports stories. I don't recall that Mrs. Browning assigned any of them--or that I read any of them. As I look at them today, I whiff no familiar aroma, see no friendly glimmer.  I do remember Heywood Broun's "The Fifty-first Dragon," though.

In one of the poetry sections appears Masefield's "Sea Fever," which I remember and which I recently memorized. And there's a song from Love's Labour's Lost that I have no memory of ("When Icicles Hang by the Wall"). But Emerson's "The Snow-Storm" is there (thank God--Whittier's Snow-Bound is not!).  On Poe's "Raven" some assiduous student from long ago has written: "alliteration, onomatopoeia, internal rhyme." This is a poem I memorized only about ten years ago. A poem by Longfellow I don't recognize ("A Dutch Picture"), but not far on is "Jesse James," which I surely read ... but Memory says "No."

There's a section of doggerel, too (Don Marquis, Burges Johnson), including some limericks (I knew some that were not in the book).

Then Dickinson and Millay arrive--"The Mountains Grow Unnoticed" and "I Took My Power in My Hand" for the former, "Winter Night" and "The Fawn" for the latter.  Frost's "Sand Dunes" and "AT Woodward's Gardens" are unexpected--no "The Road Not Taken"?

One nonfiction section focuses on flight--Earhart, Lindbergh, rocketry.  But there are some examples of memoir, too, including an excerpt from Jesse Stuart's The Thread That Runs So True, a standard work of the day (I remember my mother teaching the entire book to her classes).  And here comes a piece on George Washington Carver, also a standard during our days of discomfort about race--days long behind us, right?  And there are some other math-science kinds of pieces, too.

Next come some play scripts of various sorts--nothing that has endured, though.  "The Valiant" by Holworthy Hall & Robert Middlemass; Horton Foote's "The Dancers" (a TV script--Foote, of course,, has endured).

Next: some translations from The Odyssey, a work I taught in its entirety when I taught ninth grade years later (1979-1981).  Here, we have the Herbert Bates translation, and we get Lotus-Eaters, Cyclops, Circe's Warnings, the meeting of Odysseus and Telemachus, and, of course, the slaughter at the end.

At the end of the anthology--the work that zapped my grade during the marking period we (i.e., the others in the class) read it: Great Expectations (abridged!).  As I've written elsewhere, I just could not read it (Pip! No way!).  I disgraced myself on the reading quizzes, sat mute during class discussions, blushed profoundly when Mrs. Browning called on me anyway, forcing me to say "I don't know" or to fabricate some foolishness that she recognized before four phony phonemes had reached her ears.  Oh well, I read the book in college and loved it--and have read it several times since + all of Dickens' other novels.  So maybe Mrs. Browning would forgive me now?

One more thing.  One of the editors of the anthology is Evan Lodge, a name unknown to me then. But he taught at Kent State University, where I actually took a little seminar from him about teaching English in the secondary school.  He invited the (small) class out to his home in Hudson (on Prospect Street), where he showed us how he collected duck eggs from the marge of his pond.  And where he told us that he made a lot of money on Adventures in Reading.  He said he told publisher Harcourt Brace to give him just $10,000 a year so that his taxes wouldn't skyrocket. And he was still getting that amount every year (the rest held for later) twenty years after the original publication in 1958.

Do the math!

The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, Part II: 5

Two 

“So who else is here?” I asked Mrs. Bishop, the lone librarian on duty.[i] By the time I reached the main desk, the person I’d seen outside was no longer in sight.

“Why aren’t you at the game, Victoria?” she replied, looking at me over the tops of her glasses. “You’re going to miss all the excitement.”

“So are you.”

“I’m not really interested in football,” she said.

“Neither am I.”

“But aren’t all the other young people—?”

“Mrs. Bishop, I’m really happy to see you here,” I said.  And I meant it. She was an assistant librarian, and one of the oldest people I’d ever known—so old that I couldn’t even have guessed her age. She could’ve been anywhere between 60 and 100, for all I could tell.

Although Mrs. Bishop was ancient, she took no nonsense in the library. When there were rowdy kids in there, just hanging out so they wouldn’t have to go home, she would shut them up right away—or kick them out. I have to say I liked that—a lot.

But now she was thanking me for my compliment. “That’s so nice of you to say, Victoria. And I’m glad to see you here, too. Not surprised, mind you. But very glad.”

We just sort of smiled stupidly at each other for a moment. We knew each other pretty well, as you might expect. I came into the library a lot, and she always recommended books that I ended up loving though they looked, well, a bit intimidating. Thick books written by authors long dead—like Anthony Trollope and William Makepeace Thackeray and Jane Austen and others. Heavy books—in every way. But I ended up loving most of them, and Mrs. Bishop always had a sly smile on her face when she gave me one, another smile when I returned it. And she would always ask a single-word question: “Well?”

And I would talk about what I liked and didn’t like, and she would smile and sometimes, when she wasn’t busy, invite me to the librarians’ workroom for tea and a sugary donut to talk more about books. She and Father would have made a good pair—though she was surely twice his age. Besides, Father was already spending lots of times with another librarian, the director of the library, Harriet’s mom. But we’ll get into that later on.[ii]

“Well, Victoria, what can I help you with?” Mrs. Bishop was asking me.

“I’ve got to get started on my local history project—”

“Oh, yes, that’s why the young man is here this evening, too.”

“The young man?” I’d almost forgotten about him already.

“Yes, I believe his name is Gil. He’s been here several nights already, reading microfilm of old newspapers.”

“Gil? I’m not sure I know anyone named Gil.”

“He just moved to Franconia last week, Victoria.”

The new kid. I’d noticed him in the halls at school, and he was in a couple of my classes, but I’d not learned his name. In fact, I was having a hard time remembering what he even looked like. He had not made much of an impression.

“Oh, I sort of know him,” I said absently. “What’s he working on?”

“I think that’s something that he ought to tell you, Victoria. Librarians really should not reveal private information like that.”

I looked at her quizzically. “Are you saying librarians are like priests … and lawyers? Privileged communications,’ that sort of thing.”

“Yes.”

The more I thought about it, the more sense that seemed to make, so I didn’t say anything more.

“So can I help you find anything?” Mrs. Bishop asked. She smiled. “Not that this library holds many surprises for you anymore. You know just about everything about it.”

“Just about?” I asked. “Are there things I don’t know?” I was joking. But when I looked at Mrs. Bishop, she was not smiling.

“You can never know everything, Victoria,” she said grimly. “Not about anything or anyone—and most certainly not this old library.”

The Franconia Public Library was an old building, one of the oldest in town. It was built with large sandstone blocks that looked as if they’d risen up out of the earth, then reassembled themselves into a building. It looked as if it belonged there—and nowhere else. Its size and presence seemed to say: I was here long before you; I will be here long after you. I found that both comforting and very troubling, all the same time. And when I’m troubled, I always have one response: try to learn more.

“Well, here’s my project, Mrs. Bishop,” I said, getting a brand-new idea all at once.

“Yes?”

“I’d planned to do a history of this building. The Franconia Public Library.”

“That’s very nice,” said Mrs. Bishop in a flat, unemotional tone—as if I’d just told her I was doing a report on beagles or fire trucks or something. “I’m sure you’ll find … plenty of information.”

“I thought I’d start in the clipping file,” I said, moving toward it.

“That’s as good a place as any,” she said.

Why did I lie to Mrs. Bishop? The report I’d planned to do was not about the library, not at all. I had intended to do research on the American Indians who had lived in the region. The Shawnee. I had thought that would be interesting to do—and then I’d write some dumb report for the class, saving whatever important information I found for my computer files.[iii]

To get to the clipping file—which held newspaper articles on all sorts of topics from years and years and years ago—I had to go past the little room that held the microfilm readers.  This little room, just off the hallway, was as small as a child’s bedroom. I couldn’t imagine what its original function had been, for the dimensions were really quite small. Still, I’d spent many hours in that room, researching.

I was curious to get a quick look at this Gil boy—and I hoped that he would be using the machine right inside the door, the one whose screen you could see from out in the hallway.

He was!.

There he was, hunched over, writing furiously on a yellow tablet that sat on the table part of the machine. Because he was bent over, I could see what he was looking at on the screen.

I was so surprised that I stepped inside the door for a closer look—just to be sure.

I was right. The picture was from an old newspaper article, and as Gil was writing, I moved right behind him—not a foot away—and stared.

The picture showed my house.

---

[i] Mary Shelley’s aunt Eliza married a man named Bishop.

[ii] Readers will recall that Vickie’s father and Harriet’s mother began as friends in the previous installment—then things began to … change.

[iii] This is the first mention of Vickie’s computer files.  She was apparently building a huge database of information on all sorts of subject.  Her reasons will become clear later.  Readers of Vickie’s first book will recall that she does not try her hardest in school; her usual pattern was to do just enough to earn a grade good enough to satisfy her father.

ADVENTURES IN READING (1958-1959), Part II

It's time to finish some things on DawnReader, I've decided.  I started several things in recent months, then sort of forgot about them when other things caught my interest.  Back on July 4 of this year, for example, I did an initial post about the old literature anthology we'd used at Hiram High School my freshman year, 1958-1959, when I studied ("studied" might be more accurate: quotation marks say a lot) with Mrs. Ruth Browning, a young new teacher whom quite a few of the freshman boys were, uh, interested in. Intellectually, of course.

(Here's a link to the initial post, if you'd like: Link.)

The cover you see in the image above is a scan of the copy I now have (I found one on a used-book site), but the cover is a "re-cover"--the one that replaced the original (when it had been lovingly read so many times by so many appreciative frosh), whose design I can't quite summon from memory. But the contents are the "old" contents--nothing's changed. Old pages, new cover--sort of like, oh, an Old Man who buys a new sweater-vest.  I want to take you on a swift journey through some of those pages to show you the kinds of things we read--or, better, were assigned to read--back when Dwight Eisenhower was president, and JFK was an ambitious young U. S. Senator from Massachusetts.  What did publishers and English teachers think 14-year-olds ought to be reading more than fifty years ago?

A tad more context.  Top ten songs of 1958:

1. "At The Hop" Danny & Juniors 2. "It's All In The Game" Tommy Edwards 3. "The Purple People Eater" Sheb Wooley 4. "Don't" Elvis Presley 5. "Tequila" Champs 6. "All I Have To Do Is Dream" Everly Brothers 7. "Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu (Volare)" Domenico Modungo 8. "Sugartime" McGuire Sisters 9. "He's Got The Whole World (In His Hands)" Laurie London 10. "The Chipmunk Song" David Seville & Chipmunks

Most popular movies of 1958:

1. South Pacific
2. Auntie Mame
3. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
4. No Time for Sergeants
5. Gigi
6. The Vikings
7. Vertigo
8. The Young Lions
9. Some Came Running
10. The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw

Most popular TV shows of 1958:

1.	Gunsmoke (CBS)
2.	Wagon Train (NBC)
3.	Have Gun Will Travel (CBS)
4.	The Rifleman (ABC)
5.	The Danny Thomas Show (CBS)
6.	Maverick (ABC)
7.	Tales of Wells Fargo (NBC)
8.	The Real McCoys (ABC)
9.	I've Got a Secret (CBS)
10.	The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (ABC)

Notice a pattern?  Seven of the top ten were Westerns.  (I was in heaven!)  Two were sitcoms, the other a quiz show.  Got a better idea of My World now?  A better idea about why the contents of Adventures in Reading did not exactly get me singing "The Chipmunk Song" whenever I had an assignment?  Let's take a look ...

TO BE CONTINUED!

The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, Part II: 4

That fall, the Franconia High School football team was winning all its games. And the entire town was going crazy. When the team played in another town, there were huge caravans of cars that assembled at the high school, then drove in a miles-long single file, lights flashing, horns blaring. Hours before the home games, the streets of all the neighborhoods would be jammed with cars, too. High school kids hanging out the windows, packed in the back of pick-up trucks, honking horns, playing loud music, screaming through the streets, streamers of green and white (Franconia’s colors) trailing behind them.

And every week, even at the junior high, there were required pep rallies in the afternoon. We missed classes so we could go down in the gym, pound our way up into the bleachers, and then scream and yell like idiots about our high school football team. The band played, coaches made speeches, the cheerleaders tried to see which grade could shriek the loudest.

Not that I ever screamed or yelled. I usually took a book along and sat in the top row in the corner and read. Yes, it was hard to concentrate with all the shouting and chanting and pounding of feet, but I never had any problems with concentration. Never. And other kids had long ago quit wondering about me. In their eyes, I was just plain weird. Insane. That’s all. And they pretty much just left me alone. To them, I was some creature from some other dimension, or time, who had somehow materialized among them.

The only minor annoyance about it all was this: Harriet was a middle school cheerleader, and she lectured me continually about school spirit. “Gosh, Vickie,” she would say, flipping her blond hair back with a saucy toss of her head, “you’ve just got to support the team!”

I hoped Harriet would come to her senses one day. In the meantime, I would treat this “cheerleader” thing as a phase of her life. A very unpleasant phase for me. For during the sports seasons, I no longer had a best friend.

The weekend of Homecoming in late October brought complete hysteria to Franconia—to the town, to the schools. We were playing our arch-rivals, Ingol City High School, also having a perfect season. The winner of this game would surely move on to the state playoffs, whatever they were.[i]

Not that I cared.

But everyone else in town did—except, of course, for my father. All the display windows in the stores were draped with green and white streamers. Every business with the capacity to do so had a sign in the window: “GO, BEARS!”[ii] Driving through the streets every evening were cars with loudspeakers attached to the roofs, blasting out loud music and sounds that I guess were supposed to be ferocious growling bears.

We had pep rallies every afternoon that week in school, a huge bonfire and rally on Thursday night, followed by a parade through the streets of Franconia.  The marching band marched; the players, cheerleaders, and coaches rode in convertibles and limousines; and thousands of people lined the streets, cheering, wearing green and white, waving green and white.

I saw none of this, but Father, who had to write about it for the paper, told me. But I truly was not interested. Not even curious.

On Friday—the day of the game—school-as-usual stopped. In English we wrote compositions about football; in math we did problems about football (“If Bill Lee”—he was one of the actual players on our team, I later learned—“averages 7.6 yards per carry and carries the ball 26 times, how many yards does he gain against Ingol?”). In art we had to draw pictures of a football field. In science we calculated the air pressure contained in a football. And so on.

It was a warm, Indian summer day, and as soon as school was out, the streets were once again alive with honking horns, blaring speakers, screaming and hysterical students. Two hours before the game, an endless river of cars and pedestrians began flowing toward the high school football field.

Now this part, I did see, because I was out on the streets, heading in the opposite direction, toward the public library. I felt like a tiny bug, crawling along the bank of a swollen river—upstream, against the current. While a vast force of nature was carrying everything else the other way.

Most of the time I looked down as I walked, but sometimes people would yell things at me—or at least loud enough for me to hear: “Hey! The game’s this way, stupid!” Or: “Look at that idiot going the wrong way!” Or: “Mommy, look at that dumb girl! What’s wrong with her?”

Why was I going to the library?  Well, I often went in the late afternoon, but this was no ordinary trip. Earlier in the week, our social studies teacher had assigned a local history project, so I was going to begin my research. I knew it would be a quiet time. Probably there would be only a single librarian there—some poor soul who lost when they flipped a coin or whatever they did to decide who would have to miss the game.

But as I turned a corner, and as the library came into view, I saw something surprising.  Cutting across the huge library lawn and heading straight for the front door was another figure. From a distance I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, but whoever it was had a backpack slung over one shoulder and was walking briskly, like me, away from the flow of the rest of the world.

---

[i] In Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein attends the university at Ingolstadt in Germany.  There is no high school in Ohio named Ingol.

[ii] In I Discover Who I Am, Vickie explains the history of the bear mascot in Franconia.

A Memorable Day: 2

Mary Ann Balbach, DD, Bob Luckay, John Smolko (L-R)
Halftime, AHS Homecoming, 11 October 2013

A final few words about the events this past Friday when the Aurora Alumni Association (AAA) inducted three colleagues and me into their Honored Educators Hall of Fame (just checked: the acronym doesn't spell anything alarming!).

I first heard of all of this on the night of 10 September when, reading in bed, I got a call from former Harmon student Brian Brookhart, who's now the assistant principal at Aurora High School. He told me the alumni had selected me--along with my former colleagues Mary Ann Balbach, Bob Luckay, and John Smolko--three educators I had admired for many years.

I was shocked. I had many great memories of Aurora--and of Harmon (Middle) School--but I also knew I'd had some great failures there, too, especially early in my career.  I'd even had periods when I was, uh, controversial. I'd had periods of intransigence, arrogance (not generally good policy to let everyone know that you are right, pretty much all the time)--and I'd also been very active in the teachers' strike in the spring of 1978, a strike that (no surprise) angered and divided the community.  So when I decided I wanted to return to Aurora in 1982 (I'd been away for four years), the School Board voted 3-2 to accept the superintendent's recommendation to hire.  3-2.  Not exactly acclamation!

And more ...  I had never won the Teacher-of-the-Year award in the district--an award that some of my colleagues (deserving, all) had won more than once.

So, as I said, Brian's call was a surprise--and a profoundly moving one, especially when he told me who the other three were.

The weeks passed.  And I became less and less sure that I could go through with it.  As I've aged, I've become more Cat, less Dog.  I tend to keep my head down most of the time, and when I socialize, it's almost always with family. My illness has also made me more reclusive. Although I feel all right most of the time, I am--now that I'm on hormone-suppression therapy--experiencing hourly suffusions of great heat. One minute I'm fine; a few minutes later I'm perspiring heavily.  And I know this, too: People feel awkward around others who are ill.  What do I say? How do I act?  These are questions I'd asked myself for years when I knew I was going to be around people like ... like the me of right now.  I don't like making others feel awkward.  So ... two days before the award ceremonies, I told Joyce I didn't think I could go.

I have the habit of listening to Joyce, and it took only a few swift but loving words from her (summary: Grow up!) to change my mind.

And so on Friday, the 11th, there I was, driving toward Aurora High School for the luncheon, the festivities commencing at 11 a.m. in the new AHS Library--a lovely space, by the way.  I had to press a buzzer to get through the locked doors outside (a sad, sad reminder of reality these days), then met Brian in the office, and he escorted me down the hallways to the library, where I found myself immediately embraced by the arms of the past.  I saw the other three right away--and other colleagues from yesteryear--and members of the AAA who'd obviously gone to great effort and expense to make this a memorable experience for all of us.  The image below lists the names of many of those involved--and there were others, I'm sure, behind the scenes, not on the list, who burnished our moments for us.  I've also pasted in the program schedule so you can see others who were involved.  It was not just the AAA, I discovered, but also the City of Aurora and the Aurora Education Association (AEA), and each of us received from them some humbling proclamations with lots of Whereases.

And did I say that the food was great?  And that Joyce was there?  And Melissa, my daughter-in-law?

The most moving parts for me were the actual presentations; for each, a former student delivered an introduction. Two were via video (those involved were far away), Evan McCarthy (who spoke from Latvia about Bob Luckay) and Jeff Champ (out in California, speaking for John Smolko), two were "live"--from Erica Eckert and Brian Brookhart.  Each of the inductees then got to say a little bit. The four former students--and the three teachers who preceded me--did a terrific job, and I was feeling really very ... strong ... until Brian, talking about me, began to ... hesitate .... a ... little ... as ... he ... spoke.  For some reason, my tear ducts--in sympathy with his?--began their own ... leakage.  And by the time I got up there to read the little speech I posted here the other day, I was pretty much in meltdown mode.

(BTW: I did not know that we inductees would have an opportunity to say anything, but I wrote out my remarks--just in case: I am not a very good extemporaneous speaker, and I did not want to forget anyone or anything--though I surely did, anyway.)

And then it was over, and people were saying farewells (some running off to classes or offices), and Joyce and I were on the way home to see if I could recover some maturity before the evening's events--another presentation at halftime of the Aurora HS Homecoming game.

I left home in time to arrive about 6:15, driving up the Harmon School driveway for one of the few times I've done so since I retired in January 1997.  I was happy to see the blue ribbons along the driveway, placed there because of Harmon's recently winning designation as a Blue Ribbon School. I felt proud, too, though I hadn't done a damn thing to help them win it.  Still ...

I found my way to the Alumni Tent and spent the early part of the evening shaking hands and hugging (and trying to remember names) and laughing (and some of the other stuff, too).  Steve, Melissa, Logan, and Carson arrived (son, daughter-in-law, grandsons); Joyce was there.  And about the time the band shows commenced, we moved with Russ Bennett, Aurora Superintendent (I taught him in seventh grade, was later a colleague at Harmon), and Brian, and the others out to the sideline--at the fifty-yard-line.  And as soon as the bands blew silent, the focus was on us for a few minutes. The PA announcer said a few words about each of us; we each received a plaque, applause.  And then it was over ...  Back to the tent, a few more shakes-and-hugs-and-laughs-and ... on a dark highway to home.

Later, Joyce and I talked a lot about it.  I realized that this was probably (certainly?) the final time in my life I would ever be honored for anything--well, the final time when I'm alive!  We go through our lives earning all sorts of recognitions now and then--awards at school, on the job, marriage, births, retirement.  And then they stop.  I think, for example, of my mom, 94, once an honored educator, who now, sadly, receives recognition only for being able to stand up, to make it to the dining hall.  Things fall apart, someone said.

And I also thought about this: Bob Luckay, Mary Ann Balbach, John Smolko, and I were very different kinds of teachers. I could not have taught like them--I don't think they could have taught like me.  Each of us affected kids in very different ways.  (Not everyone liked us; not everyone learned well from us.) But kids remember and even revere Bob and Mary Ann and all other good teachers in their lives not because they were like everyone else--but precisely because they weren't.  In Education World today, though, we have mounted our jackasses and have ridden off in search of uniformity, of standardization--a foolish, feckless, fruitless search that surely would have delighted Procrustes, a guy who knew a thing or two about the subject, a guy who knew some very effective ways to make everyone the same.

Wedding Day

University Place Christian Church
Enid, Okla., 12 Oct. 1939
My grandmother Alma Osborn is at the far left;
my maternal grandfather, the Rev. G. Edwin Osborn,
 performed the ceremony and stands behind my mother, to her right;
my uncle Ronald Osborn, stands beside my father

My parents celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary on 12 October 1999. On Sunday, the 10th, my two brothers and I--along with Steve and Melissa--celebrated the event with a little dinner in Melbourne Place, the Assisted Living place near Pittsfield, MA, where my parents were living. It was a facility my dad needed, and my mother didn't--and they had separate apartments. Dad, who had experienced the decline from cane to walker to wheel chair, now had a motorized chair whose operations he hadn't exactly mastered. (There may still be scars on the Melbourne walls to commemorate his collisions--and more than once he ran over a fellow resident's foot, or banged into a dining room chair.)

Melbourne Place, Pittsfield, MA

This was much different from their fiftieth anniversary in 1989, when both of them were in pretty good health, and we had a big dinner at a local inn in the Berkshires somewhere with much laughter and old stories (many reflecting ill on me). In 1999, Mom and Dad sat at the ends of a long table (memories of Citizen Kane?), and Dad was able to offer only little in the way of conversation. But he enjoyed the little gifts--and the toasts we proposed.  In my journal I recorded a bit about it ...

Dave [my younger brother] said he’d recently interviewed a 100-year-old man, and when he asked him the secret of a happy life, he’d replied, “Choose good parents.”  Then I managed a short one, something like this: “When I became a parent myself and did not know what on earth to do, I just tried to remember what you had done with me.”  That’s as far as I got before I dissolved.  Steve then said the best times in his life have been with family, and he thanked them for that.

The next day, I had a quick visit with Dad, and he told me he was sad he hadn't been able to see the video of Steve and Melissa's wedding (just two months earlier), at which we'd played a recording of Dad's singing "The Lord's Prayer," recorded years earlier in an Enid studio.  Dad had a wonderful tenor voice.  I drove back to Ohio, about 560 miles, regretting that oversight, thinking ...

Mom and Dad were married in 1939 at University Place Christian Church in Enid, Okla. right on the edge of the campus of Phillips University (now defunct), which my parents had attended, where my grandfather, the

Rev. G. Edwin Osborn,
my grandfather, who
died in 1965

Rev. G. Edwin Osborn taught at the Bible College (see postcard below) and served as minister at the church (all three Dyer sons were baptized there).  Dad was six years older than Mom, had arrived in Enid from Oregon, where he'd grown up.  They met, fell in love, married, and off they went on an adventure that included Dad's time abroad in WW II, their three sons (1941, 1944, 1948), his recall into the service during Korea (and consequent role as Chaplain at Amarillo Air Force base, Amarillo, Tex., in the early 1950s), his decision to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma (he did it),  their move to Hiram, Ohio, where Dad taught for ten years at Hiram College (1956-1966) and Mom at James A. Garfield HS in Garrettsville (English ... surprised?), Mom's decision to pursue a Ph.D. at the Univ. of Pittsburgh (she did it!), their decision to move to Des Moines, Iowa, where they would both teach until their retirements in the late 1970s, their happy years in Oregon, their decision, when Dad began his decline, to move to Pittsfield, Mass., where they would be much closer to two of their sons (not this one), the decision to move into Melbourne Place, where we would celebrate anniversary number 60.

University Place Christian Church

My drive back to Ohio was pretty much uneventful, I said in my journal, except, I wrote, "for a lovely flock of pheasants I saw along I-80 in Penn.  Half a dozen of them or so."  Dad, earlier, had sometimes hunted pheasants (and other birds); later, he just enjoyed looking at them, listening.

When I got home, there were two voice-mail messages from brother Dave, who was weeping. Dad had declined sharply in the previous hours, was in the hospital, was not expected to make it.

But he rallied.  And I drove out a couple of other times to see him in the final six weeks of his life.  Six weeks.  The fragment of his life remaining after his sixtieth wedding anniversary. He died on Nov. 30; he was 86.

As I write this, my two brothers are with Mom, 94, in Massachusetts. She was in the hospital herself this week--a scare (I was certain, Thursday night, that the end was near). But she rallied.  Is home.  And with my brothers today.  They should be calling soon.  And I'll wish my mom a happy seventy-fourth anniversary. And wish for all the world that she could pass the phone to my dad so I could tell him, too.