Long ago when I was a little thing I had a very bad day at school. I do not really remember the incident so I create legends about teachers about those incidents when the teacher had us squeeze behind desks to teach us to hold our tummies in. In these legends I always have troubles, for talking out, making the desk leap out from my girth or disrespecting authority. (Which in a Catholic School was especially grievous as when one disrespected authority one apparently disrespected God.) As it goes in legend’s there are helpers, I do remember from my school days the wonderful janitor Mr. Bobson who lived in this cavernous sort of room where a monolithic furnace. He was kind. He gave me candy. And he made the school warmer than heat.
But as it goes one day was worse than all. Maybe it was the day I did not know my catechism facts or the day I was publically scolded for my sloppy uniform. It was just a bad day. Bad, bad, bad. On that day I quit school. No more. But being a cantankerous sort I could not let them win. That was the day school began in the dank basement of Fairfield. Street I collected my younger sibs and I became the teacher. And that is how I think it began, me as a teacher. That and the movie King and I where the ever-lovely teacher (Deborah Kerr) in her ever-lovely blue ball gown dances about with the half naked king.
My first teaching job was in the State Hospital for the Mentally Impaired. I drew the lucky card with my student’s. Memorable, delightful souls. But the setting in what was called the chapel as it once served as church for the Native Americans when they were herded into the same land for their institionalization. The chapel was like a setting for a horror movie set in a school.
Being cranky and disrespectful by nature I disregarded the decision not to paint the room. I went in with a friend and painted a rainbow on the wall. It was the only time in my thirty-five year career that I was officially reprimanded for defacing state property.
No more of that or I could get expelled from teaching.
So through the years I became adaptive, trying on my own to enhance generally ragged settings, even going so far as once buying the paint and painting the walls during my summer holiday.
I did not become inured to the nasty settings. It troubled me always that kids were expected to learn in places that made prisons seem attractive. My last year of teaching in River Rouge was the worst. The steel factory spewed its stench and noise all through the town. The view from the window was the belching flame of the smokestacks and never once did I see a bird except for those garbage bird seagulls squawking overhead taunting us with their ability to take to the heavens.
Lovely schools and chivalrous custodians seemed like fantasy. And as for the king, well even in the movie he dies right?
And then comes Georgia.
This night I went for a walk about. I just wanted to see how the Black Sea pushed the clouds about the mountain. As the sunset. I wanted to see the moaning cows head for home. I wanted to see how the village settled itself into the evening.
I walked by the school, which sits on top of the hill. I could see all directions and the way the sun glimmered on the red roof of the church bell tower. All was golden as I looked past the iron fence into the schoolyard where I will teach in Sept.
I see the custodian and shout Garmajobat/hello. H hurries to the gate, unlocks it understand that I ma the new English teacher. He kisses my hand, and leads me on the tour of the school. It is lovely, up higher where my classroom is all. Just out my window I see the church steeple. He crosses himself.
He proudly takes me about the building, showing all, stopping to pray again at a little make shift shrine to a student who died by car last year. (Car accidents are common here, crazy drivers, and mountain roads.)
The tour continue with me going to the basement of the building where with not one word of English or Georgian he makes clear to me that he has a very advanced heating soloing system and illustrates to me how it works. We see the European style plumbing, which really just means that we do go out the building but do not have to voids in a hole as typical Georgian.
He is beaming with pride. And I am thinking of my dad the heating and cooling plumber and Mr. Bobson. I am thinking that all dreams come. It is the timing that fools us. I am in a land with a school in a magic setting and a mythic janitor. I am thinking about the auditorium and how it might be time to do a staged version of The King and I.
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