December 7, 2008
Sunday

This piece was named a “Best of Holidailies 2008.” Thank you!

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
                          — Henry Adams, 1838-1918
                              American novelist and historian

This morning in church I sat behind a young family whom I don’t know except to see them. The little girl’s Lands’ End jacket was folded so I could see her name inked into the label — Chloe A. She was sitting on the aisle end of the pew beside her mother, who was beside the father, who then had their son, maybe a year older than the girl, beside him. They looked like a family in a Norman Rockwell painting of a Sunday church service, except the mother wasn’t wearing a hat and although the boy had on a dress shirt and tailored slacks, they didn’t make him wear a tie.

Chloe, about seven, had on an A-line knit dress over tights such as those Lynn wore when she was that age. When I took my seat she was working with a pencil on a tablet lined for elementary students. She was composing a letter to her former teacher: “Dear Mrs. ______ How are you? I am fine. I am in second grade now . . .” She put the tablet aside to go up for the children’s sermon with her brother, but then took up her task again. She worked quietly throughout the service except when she sang along with the parts of the liturgy she knew because we repeat them every week. Whenever we stood I would sneak a peek at the progress of the letter. By the time of the second part of the service, the Eucharist (when her mother asked her to put the tablet away and give her attention to her preparation for communion), she was on the fourth page, having told her teacher about her Christmas shopping, her new best friend, and her new teacher, whom she likes, but nevertheless still misses and loves the woman she is writing to.

I was a teacher for thirty years. I taught senior high youngsters, so most of the letters I received after they left my classroom were from their lives as college students. I have a thick folder of material from a young Marine who saw action in the First Gulf War and later as part of the peacekeeping effort in Somalia. From recent times I have e-mails and Facebook messages, and just last week a young woman I never expected to see again came to lunch. Usually, after the first few years, contact becomes more sporadic, and can even cease entirely. (The Marine has been silent almost fifteen years.) I’ve been to some weddings, some baby showers, and, yes, a few funerals. Each message is cherished. Each message reminds me of the truth of Henry Adams’s observation.

I come to this appreciation of an ongoing relationship with one’s teachers late. I can’t recall that I wrote such cheery notes to my teachers from my life beyond their care, and I wish now that I had. I have said from time to time that school saved my life. I got the encouragement and support for my developing sense of who I was and how I could move in this world at school that I believed was missing at home from parents who meant well but who did not understand me. And I am absolutely convinced that I owe my mother’s reluctant willingness to let me pursue higher education to my tenth grade English teacher, Sister Mary Kilian.

I never told Sister Kilian how much she meant to me, possibly because it took me a few years to understand how much of her philosophy shaped mine as a teacher. She died three years after I graduated from high school, and I honor her by taking flowers to her grave every Mother’s Day and sending a contribution at Christmas to her community’s retirement facility, the place where she’d have lived out her life, where I could maybe visit her today, had breast cancer not claimed her before she was fifty.

The last bit of Chloe’s letter I saw said, “Do you like your retirement? I miss you like crazy.”

I miss you, Sister Kilian. Know that I made good on the confidence you had in my abilities, and that part of you lives through the work I’ve done.

*********

A year ago, I had some comfort food at the Piney Creek General Store and Restrunt in Story, Wyoming.

Two years ago, I’d had enough of fal-la-la and took a day to feel like a lump.

Three years ago, I had to choose which of two holiday events to attend. The one where I didn’t have to don any gay apparel won.

Four years ago, I posted for the first time my essay about why the Christmas Eve 1953 episode of Dragnet means so much to me. (You don’t have to click on over — rest assured, I’ll post it again this year!)

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