WRITER'S CHALLENGE: A TEACHER REMEMBERED

Lori from Family Trees May Contain Nuts is the hostess of a writer's challenge and our topic this time around is: A teacher who has made a difference in your life. In all my years of school, of every teacher I have ever had, there is one and only one and it didn't take but a minute to know who I would write about. The problem is of course, to pay proper tribute to her. But I am going to just cast my cares aside (as I frequently do) and just write from my heart.

She stood in front of my high school freshman class (first period, on top of it all) and announced, "My name is Mrs. Drown. As in 'can't swim"'. It grew quite a chuckle and eased the tension of our first class. I had the feeling she had this monologue down pat. She wasn't a comedian, she was actually rather quiet. Not shy, just not verbose. She'd meander about the art room and peer over our shoulders and mumble a bit. Give short bits and pieces of advice or critique. She was never one I had long, drawn out conversations with and I was too young to ever seek her out for more. But it might have been interesting. It would have.


Delores Drown was probably about thirty-five or forty years old (what does a fourteen year old know?) when I had her Freshman year. Tall and thin with wispy black hair and fair (read: pale) skin, I imagine she had a lot of Irish, English or Scottish blood. Again, never asked. It was later, much later, that I had the questions and I was too late to ask. I don't know what ever became of Mrs. Drown. I googled her to no end...


The smell of that art room. The mix of paint and turpentine and sawdust. The huge tables in the middle of the room piled high with all sort of objects for still life's; dolls, chairs, broken vases, cow skulls (of course), everything to entice your imagination in shape, size , form, texture. I grew to love that room, it became a sanctuary for me. Literally. I was a smart student, in more ways than one...


Oral Communications. Not one of Blondie's best subjects. Stand in front of a class and make a speech. Noooo Waaaaay. So I hid in the art room, just up the hall. It was my Sophomore year. All Mrs. Drown ever said while I worked on my first hour project during an empty fourth hour class was, "Turn off the lights when you are done, Jane." She knew my classes and she knew where I should have been. Did she identify with my fears? Those are the things I think of now.


An adjoining office connected the art room with the pottery room. I thought I would love pottery but I could not control that wheel!! The pottery wheel! My pots went all over the place and I literally cried. So I'd wander over to the art class and although I was clearly in my pottery smock smeared with clay, Mrs. Drown politely looked the other way. Mr Larson (the pottery instructor) would come lumbering in looking for me and Mrs. Drown would quickly involve me in conversation and then send me back off the the pottery room. And then I'd wander back over like a good blonde.


Four years. Four quarters each year. 16 courses. I never had it so good. Sophomore year, over Christmas vacation, I was in a horrific car accident. Riding in a van with a group of school friends, we went over a snowy embankment and rolled several times. I was in the hospital until March. I remember the day that Mrs. Drown walked in to visit me for the first time at the hospital. She carried a large, rolled up sheaf of paper and on it was the linoleum print I had been working on before our break. To think that she has rolled out the print for me...you had to be there. When I came back to school in the spring, healed but frail, art class is where I took refuge. I weighed 85 pounds and people stared. I was a phenomenon. I HAD to get away from it all. I always had to get away from it all and Mrs. Drown's class is where I went. She never looked twice at me.


My senior year I sat in the art class looking out the window at the apple blossom trees and the field beyond. I couldn't wait to leave high school behind and was just killing time in the art room as usual. My big drawer that has held my myriad of supplies of four years was cleaned out and my smock permanently retired. Mrs. Drown wasn't around for some reason. I had the room to myself. As I had so many times. I felt like I was leaving home. I felt like Mrs. Drown would never have another me. She wasn't there to say goodbye to. I was glad, I probably would have cried. Now I wish she had been.