Jackie
Part I
One of the many things I like about flyfishing is that, often, there are surprises. And most are pleasant. This coming from a flyfisherman who has inadvertently sat in several streams and endured not-so-pleasant surprises. It was late afternoon, and Mike and I had already made fifty or so casts apiece into the Church Pool on Resica Falls Creek. The rain had stopped, and the sun was dodging between puffy light gray clouds. Tired of fruitlessly flailing line, we took a break and sat down on a fallen oak along the bank.
“See a rise?” Mike shifted the weight on his vest as he settled into the log.
I shook my head. Despite the rain, the water was relatively clear. Neither of us saw any trout. “Are you sure they are in here?”
Mike nodded. “They should be. Every year I come here they are in this pool.”
The Church Pool on Resica was called the Church Pool because the boy scouts often camped here, and they erected a small wooden structure for Sunday worship. But there were no scouts this day. Just Mike and I and the lovely spring woods, light green saplings on the opposite bank and behind us, and a pool in front of us that apparently held no trout.
Mike and I sat there in silence, enjoying the woods and the stream and, as often happens when one is silent in the woods, surprises occur. Mike lightly touched my left arm. I looked where he was looking. A mink sporting a dark, glisteningly reddish-brown coat, worked its way along the opposite bank, occasionally dipping into the water and then back up on the bank. If the mink was here, fish would also be here.
We watched the mink until it realized we were there, and then it scampered up the bank and disappeared behind a pine tree.
Still the stream looked devoid of any life.
My third period that year was full of life. They burst into my classroom, jabbering and jostling as if to get the best seats at a rock concert. I was no rock concert and the seats were assigned. Period 3 was my favorite level three class of the five level threes I taught that year. A level 3 student was supposedly assigned to a level 3 class because they had level 3 reading ability, whatever the hell that meant. I asked repeatedly to see the written criteria for level 3 (and level 2 and level 1 for that matter), and was repeatedly told there were no written descriptions of levels, but former teachers and counselors decided on the grouping. Later in my career, when I had achieved some gravitas and attempted to eliminate tracking, I asked teachers and administrators if they would mind being paid on a pay scale labeled level 1, level 2, level 3, level 3 being the lowest salary. Invariably someone in the audience would ask, “What are the requirements for those levels?” My response would be a shrug. “It is kind of fuzzy. Wherever your superiors feel you belong.” Much consternation and huffing and puffing, but I made my point.
And the problem was compounded by the fact that Henry Bouquet High School wanted it both ways. The policy makers wanted tracking, arguing that level 3’s were the lowest on the totem pole because they had “reading difficulties,” which they did, but the curriculum for every student, including level 3’s was still classical and high brow. Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Willa Cather, Chaucer, Hardy, Dreiser. Henry Bouquet School District wanted the community to believe that all students were reading and studying the dead old white men….and white women.
This included my Period 3 class of 11th graders, most of whom, I learned in the first week of school, were reading on the third grade level…..some were lower. So we struggled. We read Macbeth aloud with our fingers dragging across the page, the words dripping from the mouths slowly like a slowly leaking faucet.
“Life…..is…..life is…but……a…….walk—-ing……walking…..shad…..dow…….”
“Mr. M., I don’t know what I just read.” Caleb was a very short, thin young man who was the worst reader, and thus needed the most practice. But listening to him read was an agonizing enterprise. Even his classmates, who were only slightly better readers, mentally dropped out when Caleb read. They studied the water splotches that marred the acoustical ceiling tile or read the bulletin board for the thousandth time.
Caleb was always seen in the company of Jackie. If Caleb was small in frame and skinny, Jackie was his feminine counterpart—exceptionally large in frame, and it could easily be imagined that she daily ate Caleb’s weight in food. Every day Jackie wore the same fading-yellow raincoat with several missing brown buttons. Every day, rain or shine. And Jackie’s entrance was always a sweeping motion. As she negotiated her way down a row of desks, her billowing yellow raincoat with missing brown buttons swept pencils, papers, books and the occasional eye as it cycloned the path to her desk……a Tasmanian devil in slow motion.
Caleb and Jackie were friends. Nothing more than that, no appearances of romantic involvement, no wooing eyes or fingertip touching. Probably because of her size, Jackie seemed to be his protectorate, beaconing the warning that if anyone touched her diminutive friend she would break the miscreant’s head.
I had to teach the Metaphysical Poets. John Donne’s poetry was a curriculum requirement. I sifted through the selections of Donne’s work that were included in the textbook. “Bait” is a short poem. None of my students would like it, and once the general theme was realized, there was not much else to explore.
“Meditation #17” had the famous line, “No man is an island, entire unto itself.” This had promise. We could explore our separateness and our connectedness, and if I used Simon and Garfunkel’s song, “I Am a Rock,” we could also explore the rhetorical device of irony.
The next day, as a class, we read and discussed Donne’s essay, and, in one of those delightful rarities in a level 3 class, engaged in a productive conversation. Then, again, this was period 3, my best class that year.
“So, Mr. M., he saying that we all together?”
“What do you think he is saying?”
Caleb raised his hand, and I nodded.
“I think he be saying that somehow we all in this together. I means, we all live and we all die.”
“That’s sick.” This was a positive comment back then.
“Yes, I think Caleb is onto something here.”
Caleb was about to elaborate, but Jackie, who sat in the row next to Caleb, looked down at him and interrupted. “What you know? That’s bogus.”
“Go ahead, Jackie, tell us why you think Donne is wrong.” She often yelled out things, using non sequitors, but she rarely participated.
Jackie used both her big hands to pull her fading-yellow raincoat closed around her.
“I knows plenty of people that don’t want to be together with me…..and I certainly don’t wants to be together with them.”
“I understand. That is valid.”
And so the period went. With ten minutes to go before the bell rang, I plugged in the record player that I had borrowed from the school library and played “I Am a Rock.’
I actually, upon request from Caleb, played it twice. Students went to the blackboard and wrote their arguments for and against Donne.
Caleb looked down, his chin in his hand. “So irony is say one thing but mean the opposite? It’s like when you roll your eyes and say you’re sorry but you’re really not?” I said they were my favorite class.
“Caleb, I think you got it.” He smiled and the bell rang. Jackie said in her booming voice. “Hey, Mr. M., can I bring in a song tomorrow that is like what you played?”
“Sure, Jackie. Bring it in.”
I had to call the library and see if I could hang on to the record player for another day. My other classes that day were not so cooperative.
The next day Period 3 jammed and jostled their way through the classroom door as usual. Jackie filled the door frame as she filed in and swept her way down to her desk while carrying a record album.
I took attendance and remembered Jackie’s request. “Okay, people, yesterday we discussed Donne, his famous phrase, ‘No man is an island,’ and the idea that we are all connected…..or, as Jackie postulated, we are NOT connected. Jackie, you said you have a song that illustrates that point of view….the opposite of that Simon and Garfunkel song we played yesterday?”
“Uh huh. Can I play it?”
“Sure. I already setup the phonograph for you.”
Jackie, and, for some reason, Caleb walked to the front of the room. Jackie put the record on the player as Caleb stood next to her—the difference in size was hard not to notice.
As the record started, Jackie started to smile slyly and Caleb’s eyes grew wide. The song began.
“I WANT TO GET YOU IN MY QUEENIE, FUCK YOU ALL DAY, FUCK YOU ALL NIGHT, FUCK YOU TO MY HEART’S DELIGHT.”
So that was it. They just wanted to play a song for shock effect. Jackie was swooning and gyrating to the music and Caleb was laughing into his cupped hands. I made my way from the back of the room and lifted the needle off the record. Jackie reached out to stop me. “No. Let me finish my song.”
I fended off her attempt to keep it going. “Not funny. Caleb. I am very disappointed in you.”
Caleb looked down at his work boots and actually seemed contrite, but Jackie was incessant.
“We listened to your whole song. I wanna hear mine.”
“Sit down. Your song is not relevant to our conversation yesterday.”
“I don’t see why. You can’t get any more connected than fucking.”
“Sit down.”
They both took their seats.
A teacher’s truth is that one often has to think and work hard to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear……on the fly.
The class was dead silent. They were wondering what I was going to do. I was wondering what I was going to do. I disconnected the record player and closed it up ready to return it to the library. I did all this in slow motion, buying time to think.
“I want you all to think about a big family dinner….maybe Thanksgiving. Uncle Harry is there. Uncle Harry is about eighty years old, and he is sitting at the Thanksgiving table, dinner napkin wrapped around his neck. All your family is there…including your two year old cousin Joey. Joey is crawling around the floor under the Thanksgiving table with his toy hammer in his hand. Got the picture?”
I searched the faces in the room. They got the picture.
“So suddenly Uncle Harry jumps out from the table, his napkin falls off, and he begins hopping around the dining room. Someone yells, ‘Joey just hit Uncle Harry’s toe with the hammer!!!!!’ Everyone starts laughing. Everyone starts saying, ‘Oh, how cute….little Joey hit Uncle Harry on the foot with his toy hammer. How cute!’
Now, fast forward thirteen years. Your cousin Joey is fifteen, Uncle Harry is ninety-three. Joey does the same thing. He slams Uncle Harry on the foot with a hammer. How many people at the table think that is cute? What is the difference?”
I did not want a reply. I wanted them to think. (to be continued)