Tag Archives: paffooney

November 23, 2015 · 8:45 pm

Juggling Girlfriends (a horror story)

I do not know if you know this about me or not (I’m guessing you probably don’t because most people in the world couldn’t care less about my personal life) but I once had two girlfriends at the same time.

The Chase

It is the kind of thing that Tony Curtis can make look cool.  But Mickey can’t.  You see, the whole nasty, sordid matter happened completely by accident, and I did not do any of the terrible things I did… well, intentionally.

To understand how this all happened, you have to understand that I was about as awkward a hobbledehoy (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hobbledehoy) as it is possible to find in a modern world no longer considered Victorian in nature.  I had been molested as a child, and had my share of issues.  I made the character of Sheldon Cooper on Big Bang Theory look like Don Juan by comparison.

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I truthfully did not understand why young women would be interested in befriending me.  I had a pronounced tendency to address my need for female companionship that was not of the sister-variety by chasing after women I knew for certainly would only respond by running away from me screaming bloody murder.  There are mutant women out there so mousey that you can’t even look at them without making them flee.  That was the type I set my sights on.  I needed to try… but I also needed not to succeed.

Ysandra was definitely not in that category when I first laid eyes upon her.  She was working at our school as an instructional aid, mostly helping translate Spanish into English and vice versa for the ESL students who didn’t understand more than ten or twelve words in the language I was hired to teach them.  For three years she was in and out of my classroom, translating and helping, and making my life generally easier, though she was in the other English teachers’ classrooms more than mine.  I don’t know why I automatically assumed that if I worked up the courage to actually ask her to go on a date with me, she would run away in terror.  But I could not have asked her that question without assuming it would be exactly like that.  I was not courageous in the face of success.  I had been on three dates before that point in my life, and they all proceeded from the fact the woman involved was afraid to commit to anything more than letting me pay for her movie ticket and sitting two seats away from me with an empty seat between in the movie theater.  I would not have been able to handle it otherwise.  But Ysandra, it turned out, was not like that.  She was an aggressive Hispanic woman with an agenda.  Divorced once already, and determined never to let a man make her do anything she didn’t want to do ever again.  But there were things she wanted to do that would make me nauseous and even faint.

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At the same time as Ysandra’s terrifying acceptance of me, I was busy mentoring the first-year Reading teacher across the hall.  Abigail MacNutly was a robust blond girl from Wisconsin who had gotten her first teaching job in deep South Texas, and was in for the same kind of slam-a-frying-pan-in-your-face sort of culture shock I had experienced three years before.  I discovered, to my chagrin, that this out-going, vivacious, and enthusiastic young lady not only had a lot in common with me and needed to rely on me to make her way in the world of teaching, but she also lived in the apartment next door to me.  And she had no compunction whatsoever about knocking on my door late at night and asking to borrow something for her apartment with no furniture in it, and then inviting herself to watch TV with me in my apartment.  You know what all the old ladies in the neighborhood that watched both of us constantly would say about that!  And when I tried to tell her that I was not comfortable with that arrangement, she would use her thousand watt smile on me and convince me that I was too nutty to be believed.  She even told me that her grandmother (whom I met when she moved into the apartment next door) had told her she needed to marry me so that she could settle down enough to make her life work out better than her mother’s had.

So, here is the set up for a horror story of monstrous proportions.  I was a child-man with serious issues about the concept of intimacy.  I suddenly, within the space of a week at the beginning of a new school year (1984-85) had acquired two girlfriends.  One I had thought I was chasing, and one who was obviously chasing me.  It has the makings of a long and totally unbelievable tale that I not only can’t complete in only one post, but can’t possible get away with not telling.  So be warned…

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November 22, 2015 · 8:09 pm

Just In Case You Haven’t Seen It…

My sisters and I as kids loved old movie musicals with dancing in them probably as much as any genre.  This video making the rounds on Facebook is something I have seen posted and re-posted and have personally watched at least five times already.  I have shared it twice on Facebook, and it continually gets re-shared, especially by friends my age or older.  Why does something like this go viral?  Well, Bruno Mars is a popular young Michael Jackson clone with an amazing musicality that appeals to all ages.  And the video is beautifully edited so that all the dancers from old movie musicals are actually in sync and appear to be dancing to the beat.  But the game-breaker for me is the fact that the dancers are all the old stars that used to fascinate me with their dance moves on PBS back in the 1970’s when old movie musicals got played on Friday, Saturday, and sometimes Sunday evenings.  I recognize Fred Astair, Gene Kelly, Buddy Ebsen, Donald O’Connor, Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland, Cyd Charisse, Mickey Rooney, Groucho Marx, the Ritz Brothers, and many more from the movies I loved like Anchors Away, Singing in the Rain, New York New York, and so many others I can’t even begin to name them all.  This mash-up brings back a whole lost world for me and gives me joy.  It connects the past with the energy of the present.  It gives me something to long for, to sigh for, and to fondly recall.  I want to see all those movies again.  But it wouldn’t be the same without my sisters there.

Blue Dawn

One has to wonder if all the time we spent on entertainment during our lifetime was a lost cause or not.  I have a rich tapestry of memories of other people’s lives, gained through movies, television, and books.  But has that enhanced my life?  Or has it taken away from my life’s work?  I know work puts food on the table and makes continued life possible.  But it also has to define the value of our lives.  I have never, though, lived a moment as a teacher when something I learned from movies or a book has actually interfered with delivering instruction.  And I can name innumerable times, looking back, when being able to recall entertainment experiences led to a unique teachable moment.  Those things can actually be the most important things we teach.  And what an entertainer in any medium manages to communicate to me validates their life’s work.

This flash mob concert makes me weep for joy every time I watch it.  It makes me realize what marvelous fulfillment there is in the act of committing a work of art.  How must poor demented and deaf Beethoven be soaring in spirit to have his work take so many people by surprise like this?  It gives me chills to think about that kind of immortality even though the composer is long since dead.  He is still giving astonishing gifts to little girls who put a coin in a hat.

You don’t even have to be Beethoven-levels of famous to create moments that will live forever in the memory of the universe.  I have watched this video of street performers across the world so many times I have it memorized and can sing along.  I have shared this video so many times that I expect others to tell me, “Just stop it already!”  But they never do.  We learn the value of art by being an audience… by being consumers of art.  And it gives me hope as well for my own artistic endeavors.  Making money is not the point.  Sharing my work with others… even long after my own personal time on earth is up… is the precious thing.  I am reminded of the culmination of the long and glorious career of Charlie Chaplin.  And the movie clip that gets circulated so often now after another tragedy like the one in Paris.  I dare you to listen to this speech and not be moved… to hear it out and not learn something important.

Thank you for letting me waste your time today.  I intended to commit no further evil in the world today, than to let you share a few of the things that everybody seems to be finding beautiful and worth the effort of sharing.

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November 21, 2015 · 8:48 pm

Fictional Family Portrait

the Clarkes

Here is a portrait of Valerie Clarke and her Daddy, Kyle Clarke.  They are important characters in the novel I am working on now, When the Captain Came Calling.  Valerie is also a main character in Snow Babies.  Here is what the double portrait looks like with a farmhouse background.

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A picture like this might prove useful in a number of ways.  For today it makes a good post when I don’t need to write so many words.

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November 20, 2015 · 8:20 pm

Fairy Tales and Dragons (with pointillism)

Going through my old drawing portfolio, I found my children’s book project from my undergrad college years.  I have no idea now looking at the illustrations what the story was even about.  I lost the actual story, and I never made a cover for it.  But here is a look at old hopes and dreams and a way of seeing the world that begins; Once Upon a Time…

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I have no earthly idea what the heck this story is even about, but I do like the pen and ink work, and probably couldn’t repeat it if I had to.

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November 18, 2015 · 8:40 pm

Wally

Wally

I spent some considerable time working on the Naked Hearts trilogy in my blog, writing about nothing but girl students who fell in love with me.  That was a sort of Narcissistic writing experience that convinced me that I was somehow worthy of the love those young ladies felt in their little pink hearts.  I was not.  At least, not more deeply than the teacher-student level… the appreciation level.  Because there is love and then there is LOVE.  I have never really felt any sort of desire for a student.  Dread, yes, desire, no.  It is not only something illegal, but it is really downright icky.  The students that fill your classroom are all incomplete works of art.  The paint is not dry and can easily be smeared.  I am never the artist involved, so it is not my place to ever touch the oil paint of their lives, not even with skilled touches of the paintbrush.  But the one time I really regretted not having the ability to do touch-ups and help others to see what I can clearly see in a brilliant work of monkey-house art, it was with an incomplete little oil painting known as Wally.

Wally Nardling was a bright, talented, and gloriously goofy young boy with a zest for life that nothing, it seemed, could kill.  My Paffooney portrait above not only looks like him, it looks exactly like him.  And that is not because I am a gifted portrait artist.  I am not.  I am a cartoonist.  But Wally was a living, breathing cartoon character with a cartoon personality to go with it.  It was a golly-gee personality like he was the boy Sherman from Jay Ward’s Mr. Peabody and Sherman time-travelling cartoons.  He was always ready to try any new thing and experience any creative idea, without ever for a moment stopping to consider consequences, or thinking about how others might see him or think about him.  He was good at drawing Japanese manga-style cartoon people.  He drew in colored pencil just like me, cartooning all over his notebook and folder and, sometimes, even the margins of his homework.  He was very creative, and had numerous off-the-wall ideas that made other students cringe as he explained them to the class.  He was very proud of his accomplishments as a reader, and bragged about the books he had read, including every book of the Harry Potter series (which actually was three books shy of being finished at the time).  Other students, especially some of the non-reading Hispanic students, hated everything about him.  After all, his father, Dr. Nardling was the absent-minded professor type of teacher who taught them in fifth grade, and he could be downright mean to kids who tried to get away with monkey-nonsense in his classroom.  And his mother was a medical doctor from Mexico, but Wally had not learned any Spanish at all in his brief time on Earth.  He was the butt of every poo-poo joke the vatos could pool their limited monkey brains to think up.  Other boys, especially the vatos, were cruel to him at every opportunity.  (Vatos, if you are not aware, are the semi-criminal cool guys of Latino culture who lurk in the boys’ bathrooms with gold chains around their necks and the faint smell of mota, which they may have recently been smoking on their clothes.)

Well, his seventh grade year, in my Gifted and Talented Class, we got involved in the Odyssey of the Mind creativity contests. I intended to put a link here, but WordPress is giving me trouble, so here is the web address;  http://www.odysseyofthemind.com/

Wally was a natural.  We put together teams to handle different problems that the contest offered.  Wally always got chosen last for teams in real life, but nerd class was different.  The other two boys, H. G. Ruff and Jack Penny immediately recruited Wally for their team.  They chose the project where you had to design and build a balsa-wood structure to hold up as much weight as possible while you present a creative narration of the unfolding event.  H.G. and Jack cooked up the two-headed narrator idea, sewed the costume where they could both get into the same shirt and pair of pants to provide the two wise-cracking heads.  They left it entirely up to Wally to design the structure.  This he did brilliantly, a cone of balsa bits with numerous cross beams to hold up weight, and super-glue to hold it all together.

We went all the way to Del Rio for the regional contest.  The performance was supposed to build suspense  as the team (basically meaning Wally) piled up increasingly heavy weights on the structure, trying not to crush it.  The other competing teams went ahead of us, the first one crushing their rig almost immediately, and having to hope their song-and-dance routine would fill out the rest of the time limit.  The team that had the best reputation managed to pile on only two pounds ten ounces before their structure collapsed.  That was a full eight pounds less than they supposedly had piled on in practice.  We started our performance with H.G. and Jack already gloating over the win.

The two headed narrator cracked some of the best jokes H.G. had ever written.  (I had nixed all of the jokes Jack contributed.  He was a master of scatological humor, and we knew ahead of time that event judges were all female.)  Wally had two pounds already balanced on the structure.  And then, his enthusiasm failed him.  Instead of adding the five-ounce weights the way the other team had, he tried to put on a whole pound more with one weight.  Over-confidence killed it.  The balsa wood cracked and gave out.  H.G. forgot two thirds of his remaining lines, and we ended up short of the minimum time limit, too.  We lost by ten ounces, which when translated into the complex scoring system, meant we narrowly lost over all.  Second place and no trip to the State tournament.

The other boys blamed Wally for the loss, though they hadn’t really pulled off their part either.  The worst part was that Wally blamed himself.

“It’s my darn fault, Mr. B,” he told me with tears in his eyes.

“You got us this far, Wally.  You did a good job.  You built the actual structure.”

“Jack and H.G. are gonna keep on calling me Wally Weasley and making fun of me in front of the girls.”

“In many ways, you are more like Harry Potter,” I said.  “You have more magical ability in you than they will ever have.  You just have to keep believing in yourself.”

He grinned at me with that goofy grin of his.  “I know.  One day I will be able to turn H.G. into a frog.”

If I ever did anything to teach that boy something he didn’t already know, I don’t know what it could be.  One day he will create a cure for cancer, or explore the surface of Mars, and I will have not had any sort of hand in it in any way.  He was a diamond in the rough, and I simply wasn’t capable of polishing a diamond like that.

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November 16, 2015 · 2:35 pm

When Teachers Write About Students

Dion City JH

As a writer of fiction, my characters have to come from somewhere.   A writer always writes best when he writes what he knows.  So, I am in a unique position for writing the stories that my body and soul ache to push out into the wide, wide world.  Most of my characters have to be little people… students, kids, and other denizens of the monkey house where I spent the majority of my real life.  (It helps to be told that the monkey house I refer to is a composite of all the middle schools I ever taught in.)  Of course, the students I taught were, over time, dancing in front of me metaphorically naked most of their days in my classes.  They told me everything about themselves in both conversations and their writing.  I know even their most embarrassing secrets.  Their identities have to be protected (not because they were innocent, Joe Friday, they were certainly never that, but because they have a sacred right to privacy).  So I rename them in my writing with fake names.  I take some of the incidents and eccentricities of their lives and splice them together with those of other kids.  And I transport them to imaginary worlds.  Some of my former students, reading my novels and other writing, actually don’t recognize themselves.  The picture above from the planet Dionysus in the 36th Century contains three of my former students.  Do you suppose they will recognize themselves if the story ever gets told?  The sauroid boy, a native Dion from the jungle world in the story, is modeled after Sparky, a boy I taught in my fourth year of teaching.  His real name was not Clay Snarkley, but that’s how I refer to him in my writing (when I talk about the real boy, not the alien dinosaur-child).  Sparky was one of those kids who lives his entire life on center stage.  He was the class clown who was always making a wisecrack any time the lesson involved a question that I asked students to answer.  And his wisecracks were actually funny.  He didn’t read well, but he was highly intelligent and creative.  He’s the one who fed re-fried beans to his three best friends before school and organized the Great Fart-Gas Attack in the middle of Sustained Silent Reading Time.  (That terroristic attack failed, of course, because with my lifetime of clogged sinuses, I had no sense of smell to offend.  I was perfectly comfortable.  It was the girls in class that were so enraged that Sparky narrowly escaped having a serious behind-ectomy and being the subject of ritual sacrificial revenge after school…with knives and fingernails.)  Sparky was one of my favorite students… of course, you probably know by now they were all my favorites, and he not only makes a good sauroid-alien, but he is a character in my on-going series of home-town novels, where he has to be transformed into an Iowa boy rather than a Texan.  It all means then, that I am writing humorous fiction for middle-school kids that is full of real people, people who are mostly still walking around out there living their real lives.  And if I draw them and write about them and use the details of their lives in my stories, they don’t have to be embarrassed by any of it.  As an artist, I transform the world as I perceive it through my artifice.  Their monkey-house secrets are safe. 20150807_135157

 

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November 6, 2015 · 3:53 pm

Up and Down and All Around

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The day I am having today is not one of my best.  Ill health, bad traffic, doctor visits, headaches, unexpected expenses, all make a real Monster Mash our of the daily dance of life.  But I am happy with recent posts, even though my wife gave me a major eye-roll and huffing sound for posting about girls who fell in love with me.  Still, I can’t  figure out why my blog traffic is so up and down during times when I feel like my writing is really good.  Some of my best posts seem to get the fewest readers, and some of my most embarrassing messes are insanely popular.  Ah, life!  You are such a Scooby-Doo and the Haunted Roller-Coaster Mystery.  But I can write a short post and get away with it today because I have been writing thousand word posts and my 500-word average is in no danger.  So, I offer this silly Paffooney picture for you to look at and wonder about.  A picture is worth a thousand words, right?  And why is Frankenberry looking at Pinky Pie with an expression like that?

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November 5, 2015 · 3:22 pm

Naked Hearts III

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I have presented in the last two posts some of the perils of being a teacher and having students that have not yet fully formed their mature human brains.  There is a distinct danger that they are going to be a little confused about how they actually feel about you.  There is that possibility that they will confuse liking you for the kind of teacher you are, and loving you because they think you are attractive as a member of the opposite sex.  Their front-brains that help them make mature decisions and weigh the consequences of those decisions don’t reach fully-formed maturity until the age of twenty-two.  So, these children are capable of of falling in love with you for the wrong reasons even though you have become a middle-aged man with a pot belly and scruffy author’s beard.  Poor little birds with the half-formed brains, I weep for you.  I warned you at the outset that these particular stories would make me regret and make me cry.  But maybe I overlooked the fact that they also make me laugh and make me feel all warm inside.  Puppy love does not have to plague an old dog’s heart.

Part Three; “You could marry me, Mr. B!”

The War on Ignorance, 1994  campaign, saw me trying hard to cope with burgeoning class sizes.  Technically the Chapter Two entitlements law limited a teacher like me to classes of no more than 15 students.  My sixth hour afternoon class was almost twice the legal limit.  I would probably have died of exhaustion on the battlefield if they had given me the usual three or more hyperactive boys with attention deficit during that period.  Thankfully, they gave me mostly girls.  Extra-talkative, loud, and somewhat foul-mouthed girls certainly, but still girls.  Oh, and only two ADHD boys.

I would’ve been doomed to die alone and depressed that year if not for the good girls of sixth hour.  Abigail Littleton liked me before the 7th grade year ever started because her older brother Luke was one of my RPG players, and infected her with a serious love for my teaching style and charm.  Sasha Garcia, who was even more critical to my success in that classroom, was a fatherless girl who knew me through her older cousin Lionel, a previous year’s star pupil.  Both of those girls showed serious leadership capability that year.  They showed the others how to take teacher directions and turn them into fun and learning.  When Claudia the mouth-girl smarted off, or Lisa the nail-polisher wasted class time, one of the two classroom leaders would admonish them and bring them under control even before I could react to their misdeeds.  Sasha apparently had fists of fury off campus, and they did not cross her.  Whenever we did group activities, which tends to be the most effective way to teach a bunch of female socializers reading and writing skills, I could always count on Abby and Sasha to be effective group leaders.  They also organized their own secret group activity from which I was destined to benefit, but knew absolutely nothing about.

There was a new Math teacher that year in the 7th grade, a single Filipino teacher who came to Texas as part of a special overseas recruitment program.  Abby and Sasha conspired to play “Match-maker, match-maker, make me a match!” in my name.  I don’t know what went on in the Math classroom, but I know they pressured her to get to know me almost as much as they worked on me about it.  When I first took the risk of giving that new teacher a Valentine’s gift (actually Sasha’s idea rather than mine), it turned out that the secret plan worked.  We began dating, and in a little over a year, we married.

Now, you would think that would be the happy ending to the fairy tale.  But, it turned out that, even though Sasha was very mature for her age, her frontal lobe was still not fully formed.  As the school year drew to a close, Sasha was busy getting all her friends to sign the faded old pair of blue jeans she wore on the last day of school.  They all did it.  What they didn’t all do was ask the teacher to sign it.  Especially not the way Sasha wanted me to sign it.

“I want you to sign it right here on the crotch,” she said, indicating the flap that covered the blue jean’s zipper.

“I can’t sign it there,” I said.

“Why not?  I want you to know that everything under there belongs to you.”

I am not sure what color my face was turning at that moment, because I was on the inside of it looking out.  But I imagine it was either a bright shade of reddish-purple, or possibly pea-soup green… or both.

“That would not look right, Sasha.  It might get both of us in trouble.”

“Okay, sign it on this space on the thigh then.”

“Um, no…”

She gave me that don’t-cross-me-old-man look that I had seen her control others with.  “Okay, here on the leg part.”  Thankfully she was pointing at a space down closer to her right shoe, so I dutifully signed it “Good luck, Mr. B”.  I was actually wishing myself good luck, but I didn’t dare tell Sasha that.

So, that was awkward.  And I had to have Sasha in my class again the next year.  She was taller and more intimidating… and more beautiful then.  And we got along well.  It was a good year.  My wife-to-be had not signed a contract for the second year in Cotulla, so I was making trips to Dallas to see her on many weekends.  And Sasha found out about it because my wife-to-be was a Jehovah’s Witness and Sasha had a number of relatives who were in the Cotulla Congregation.  You can’t keep secrets from people dedicated to the Truth of God’s Word the Bible.

“She’ a Jehovah’s Witness, you know… and you aren’t,” Sasha told me.  “They don’t approve.”

“I can learn, can’t I?”  I said.

“You don’t know what they are like,” she said.  “They disapprove of everything.”

“I believe in God, and I love Ms. M.”

“But you love me, too, don’t you?”

“Yes, Sasha.  You are like a daughter to me.  I love you like a teacher loves a student.”

“You could marry me, Mr. B.   You could forget about her and marry me.”

“I am old enough to be your father,” I said.

“That doesn’t matter if we’re in love.”

“It does, my girl.  It is illegal for someone my age to marry someone as young as you.”

“Wait for me.  Three more years and I will be eighteen.”

“In three more years you will find someone more your own age that you want to be with more than you want to be with some fat old guy.”

Sasha didn’t cry.  She didn’t hate me.  She continued in her quest to organize my life for me, and would later offer to babysit for my first-born son.  But I had told my wife all about Sasha, and she didn’t want to risk it.

At the end of the eighth grade year, after graduation was over, Sasha came into my classroom to say goodbye.  She walked up to me and laid her pretty head on my shoulder, draping an arm around my neck.  “I’m going to miss you more than any other teacher I have ever had,” she said.  I suspect there was at least one tear involved, but Sasha would never let me see that.

“I’m going to miss you too, girl.  But neither of us is going anywhere for a while, so I’ll see you around.”

And I did, too.  She visited me frequently in my classroom because high school classes were in a different building on the same campus.  I probably owe her more and love her more than any other student I ever had.  She was special.  They were all special, in their way, but she was the special-est of them all.  (That’s a word, isn’t it?  It has to be.)

Epilogue;

Now that I have finished this weird trilogy of impossible love stories, I have to confess.  These were not the only times I could’ve crossed a line into darkness.  Feelings like these can be dangerous to a teacher’s career.  You see in the newspapers frequently what happens when a teacher, male or female, doesn’t have enough self control to handle things like this.  I am grateful that I always found the strength to deal with things the right way.  And I am not sorry these little love stories came to pass.  But don’t worry about the girls I have talked about here.  I have changed the names and fudged the timelines enough that if any of them read these stories, only they have enough of the private knowledge of this to recognize themselves.  And they all eventually had their happy endings.  When you reveal a person’s naked heart to the world, you have a responsibility to hurt no one in the telling.  That’s as true of my naked heart as it is theirs.  They may even have forgotten me long ago, and are now incapable of seeing themselves in these stories.  But I will always remember.  And I will always love them.

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November 4, 2015 · 2:55 pm

Naked Hearts II

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Writing about girls who were my students and fell in love with me is not mere bragging.  Yes, I mean it.  I am not bragging.  I was a skinny, nerdish white guy surrounded by Hispanic people and white crackers who looked sideways at me for being from the north.  I was not a love god in any sense of the term.  Young girls fell in love with me because they lived in a world that did not pay attention to them and wasn’t particularly kind to them in any recognizable way.  And as a teacher, I was nice to them.  I listened to them and tried to understand them.  They were not afraid to talk to me.  I used humor a lot in the classroom, and I made them feel like I cared about them more than the other teachers they had.  I am still not bragging.  It was the methods and best practices that I worked hard on to create a safe and caring classroom with, not any natural charm that I possessed.  It was those things that made little girls love me even when I got older and fatter and less good looking.  Although maybe I had the advantage of “pretty eyes”.  At least that seemed to be what they said to me the most, that I had “pretty blue eyes”.

Part Two : “Dance with me, Mr. B”

The Cotulla Junior High (sandwiched into the high school campus in the 80’s and 90’s) tried a number of baby-sitting tactics  to make schedules work out and keep teachers teaching most of the time.  In the very early 90’s we called the 30-minute baby-sitting class “Advisory”.  It was used as a study hall by the few who actually studied.  It was used as a social half-hour by most, and as recess by the immature few.  In 1990 it gave me the unique opportunity to get to know one of Mrs. Soulwhipple’s very energetic little “Bluebirds”.

There were two girls who were the very best of friends in my noon-time advisory class.  Olivia Angeles was in my English 8 class because, although she was super-smart and hard-working, she had a touch of Dyslexia.  Reading was tough for her.  But her very best friend, Shannon Moreno, was one of Mrs. Soulwhipple’s star kiddos who got stuck with the “Buzzards” for advisory.  But she didn’t mind it because she got to be with her best friend Olivia… and she got to exercise her evil genius on me.  I didn’t know it from the start of the year, but Shannon would quiz Olivia every day about my class, what jokes I told, what activities we did, and she read every one of Olivia’s journal entries because I wrote back to students in their journals and sometimes drew things in their notebooks.  (Journals were as much about communicating with the teacher as they were about practicing writing skills.  And I learned from Olivia’s journal about how vigorously Shannon had been stalking me.  Olivia told me.  And Shannon had even added her own saucy comments to that journal entry.  Two laughing jack-o-lanterns and a smiling skull got drawn on that page… probably not the clearest response I ever gave a student.)

So, we began a tease-war, the three of us.  Shannon became known as “Bean-body” in advisory, while I was “Owl-eyes” and Olivia was “Miss Nevertalk”.  So much for decorum and respect.  Nasty things were said with a smile, and I truly loved that twinkle in Shannon’s big brown eyes when she told me I was the worst teacher she had ever seen.

Advisory was used for UIL practice.  University Interscholastic League is the Texas educational organization that administers not only all high school and junior high sports in Texas, but scholastic subject-based competitions as well.  I was a successful Ready Writing coach, a contest where student-contestants are given a topic that they haven’t seen before, and are asked to create a contest essay in a two-hour time limit.  Olivia entered that, not because she was better at writing than she was at other things (she actually placed in the Math contest), but because she liked me as a teacher and wanted to be in my event.  Shannon was a better talker than a writer, so she was in Mrs. Delgado’s Impromptu Speaking event where, given a topic and five minutes to gather your thoughts, the student had to deliver a fully supported position speech totally out of their head on a prompt they had never seen before the contest began.  Shannon practiced on me constantly.

“Here’s why teachers should never tell jokes in class,” was one practice speech she laid into me with.  “This is why teachers with pretty blue eyes are an unnecessary distraction for female students,” was another.  I laughed at all the right places and let her actually convince me.

“You are just too good at this,” I said to Shannon.  “You have convinced me to leave teaching.”

“Don’t you dare!” insisted Olivia, even though I’m pretty sure she knew we were joking.

And then came the Junior High Dance around the middle of November.  It was student council sponsored and both Mrs. Delgado and Mrs. Soulwhipple recruited me to be an adult chaperon at the dance.  Well, you know how junior high dances go.  They play the principal-and-parent-approved music way too loudly.  The girls bunch up on one side of the gym.  The boys bunch up on the opposite side.  Nobody dances.  They just shout over top of the music at each other in single-sex conversations.  But Shannon was on the student council and determined to have none of that nonsense.  A half hour into the single-sex shouting and loud music, Shannon walked up to me.

“Dance with me, Mr. B!” she shouted.

“I can’t dance.  I have arthritis in my knees,” I responded.  (It was basically true, but also convenient.)

“But no one is dancing!” she whined.  She was actually close to tears, though I suspect that was about 75% her incredible acting ability.  “They will start dancing if you and I show them how.”

I relented, silly goof that I am.  I wandered out onto the dance floor/ basketball court and started to do the best twisty-two-step-dancing wiggle I could manage.  She did her own very graceful watusi-sort of rock-and-roll dance opposite me with a grin that melted my heart.  Low and behold, everybody started dancing.  Mostly girls at first.  But when one of the more dangerous greasers tried to make fun of me for dancing, I called his own manhood into question and shamed him into getting out on the floor to bust his own moves with his sweetie-kins.  After that they were all more embarrassed NOT to be dancing.  My efforts that evening earned me a hug and a thank you from Shannon.  The real thing.  No jokes.

And not just one hug, either.  She hugged me again after winning a third place ribbon at the UIL Impromptu Speaking competition.  And the hug she gave me at the 8th grade graduation ceremony was complete with tears.  And Shannon cried too.  Teachers are only allowed to love a student with teacher-love.  But my teacher-love for Shannon ran about as deep as any river of emotion ever could.

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November 3, 2015 · 3:24 pm

Naked Hearts

sweet thing

Being a teacher leads to things you never expect.  I need to write the stories of some of those things.  And some of those things will make me blush, and make me regret, and maybe even make me cry.  You see, when a teacher sees a student naked, there is usually jail time involved.  The self-righteous child protectors will read this sentence and start heating up the tar and ripping apart feather pillows.  But I should say at this point that I have never actually seen a student naked.  Not actually naked.  Only metaphorically naked.  Realistically, they are still children even though they are suddenly stuck in weirdly morphing bodies that are becoming an adult.  They are all metaphorically naked all the time.

Part One ; “I hate you and I love you, Mr. B!”

Her name was not really Rihanna Baumgartner because I don’t use student’s real names, but she was a Hispanic girl with a German-American father.  She had a cute little face like a cartoon animal.  I had her brother in my class the year before teaching him English as a seventh grader.  He had the same chipmunk cheeks and deer eyes that she did when she came in and sat down in my classroom on the first day of school.  I could’ve sworn it was just Joe again wearing a skirt and earrings… and breasts (I am happy you can’t see me blushing at the moment).  When he came into my eighth grade class later in the day, I almost asked him what he had done with his skirt.  He would’ve laughed at that.  He was a goofy, skinny kid who laughed at all my jokes, and I fell in love with him the year before (teacher love, child protectors!  Put those torches out!)  She was painfully shy.  It took two months just to get her to talk to me in class.  She didn’t have many friends, so she didn’t talk to others either.  But she had a five-thousand megawatt cartoon grin.  And she laughed at my jokes without opening her mouth.  She was sweet and quiet and the perfect student.

I learned most of what I knew about her by talking to two of the Science teachers and the Reading teacher (who was my second girlfriend, the stalker, during the time when I had two girlfriends at once).  They told me Rihanna’s older sister Melody had run away from home as a teenager and was later found dead in Las Vegas.  It wasn’t clear at the time whether the death had been a murder or a suicide.  Rihanna lived in a family of five in the trailer park/junkyard that was Fowlerton, Texas at the time.  They were desperately poor and apparently the father was well known as a drunkard and suspected of being a wife-beater.  Rural towns in South Texas have so many lovely family stories to tell.  I could only ache for the poor girl and wonder what her home life was like.  If I was guilty of staring at her during class time, it was because I wanted to make sure I saw no bruises on her.  But I fell hopelessly in love with a girl who chose to sit up front and always laughed at my jokes and funny stories.  (Teacher love again!  Come on, people!)

At that time, in the 1980’s, I was earning a reputation as the teacher who could reach and teach the “bad” kids.  I was given the title Chapter Two At-Risk teacher and given all the toughest discipline-case-type kids in my English class because… well, in Texas Education no good deed ever goes un-punished.  So, that meant that I had the Baumgartner kids for two years apiece.  It was an honor I wore well.  I was fool enough to like kids that most other teachers dreaded.

During the eighth grade campaign in the War on Ignorance, 1988 version, Rihanna transformed into something else entirely.  She started wearing her older sister’s leather jacket.  She became snippy and snappy about giving answers in class.  And one day she said something that caught me off guard and changed everything between us.

It was after class had ended and only her new best friend, Maria the non-reader, was still there in the classroom.   “Mr. B,” she said, “I love you.”

“Oh, girl,” I smirked, “you don’t have to butter me up.  You are making an “A” already.”

Rihanna glared at me and Maria stared at her.  Things grew suddenly uncomfortable.

“I love you, Mr. B.”  Her voice was flat and unemotional.

“Well, that’s nice.  You are one of my best students,” I said, squirming on the inside like earthworms on a hot sidewalk.

And that was the end of the conversation.

That was also the end of the sweet little girl I had fallen in love with.  After that point, she was surly Rihanna.  She was Rihanna the snarling one.  She was make-a-comment-and-slip-in-a-bad-word Rihanna.  One unfortunate exchange led to, “I think you need to go see the principal, Rihanna.”

“Fine!  I hate you, Mr. B!”

It was totally out of the blue.  And very upsetting.

Joe had become a Freshman by then, but he still came by to see me once in a while.  He was the one who told me Rihanna was heartbroken over me.  Maria the non-reader would later tell me Rihanna wanted to spend romantic weekends on the beach with me.  (That was a daydream, I’m sure, because we were about 300 miles from a beach… unless she meant the bank of the Nueces River which sometimes had no water at all in it.)

The principal came to my classroom during my conference period to talk to me.

“Mr. Beyer, Rihanna Baumgartner was in my office for the last two hours.  She is insisting she needs to be changed from your English class into Mrs. Soulwhipple’s class.”  (Mrs. Soulwhipple was the district superintendent’s wife, so she had all the A+ Bluebird-type students while the rest of got the Robins and Meadowlarks… also known as the Buzzards.)

“I hate to lose Rihanna as a student,” I said, “but she is definitely smart and hard-working enough to handle Mrs. Soulwhipple’s work.”

“Well, that’s good.  I am going to have to make that change.”

“She told you that she hates me now, did she?”

“Well, yes, but I think we both know that’s not what she really means.”

“Yes.  I have been through this before.  Sometimes they just love you so much it turns into hate.”

“Yes, something like that.   She is angry because she wants something more than you can give her.  And as a single teacher, I need to relieve you of that problem.”  (To this day I still believe he said problem, but I knew he meant temptation.)

So she actually became a star pupil among the Bluebirds.  And when she stopped by in later years with her brother Joe, she smiled again and laughed at my jokes again.  The old Rihanna with the cartoon animal grin was still alive and happy in the world.  A decade later, when I was trying to do the Jehovah’s Witness thing and knocking on doors to spread the Good News, I saw her again at her trailer in Fowlerton.  She was happy to show me her beautiful smile again, and she showed me her two smiling little ones.  They had her husband’s dark brown skin, but they had her cartoon animal smile.  The world was a better place to live in again.  And I think it was because I saw her naked heart… and I did not hurt it.  I let the butterfly land upon my hand, and I did not try to capture it.  I did not crush the butterfly.

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