Well, this afternoon Amy Gangsta and I attended our former teacher Mrs. North's retirement party, where we got to see a virtual red-carpet walk of our former teachers, ranging from football coaches to math teachers to keyboarding teachers. It was a good time for me to clear up "the other Rachel Farris" snafu with my former science teacher Sonia, who apparently always held it against me that I didn't talk to her ever when I was in her class because she thought I was her daughter Brittany's former friend who happened to also be called "Rachel Farris." Yep. I also got to inform my former American History teacher, Mrs. Parsons, about the Cyclorama in Atlanta, since she was always really into the Civil War, and what better place to go hash out the Civil War than in the Deep South at the Cyclorama. She told me that she was actually going to the A in the fall with her husband and that she would be sure to check it out. I hope she actually takes my word on it and does go see it since that was hands down the coolest thing I've seen since the invention of the Coca-Cola product "Beverly" that tasted like vomit. But I digress.
Natch...
Anyway, I'm trying to stay on the topic of teachers and have a somewhat-blurry photograph to show Mrs. North. We all look related which is strange. I look thoroughly crappy and tired,
which has been status quo for the past few days/weeks/months/six years.
Let's see. Well, I got a little upset during this emotional day about Ms. Heard, who some will remember as my former Texas History teacher. She is the only reason I know anything about Texas history (as well as the state song, flower, bird, etc.).
Anyway, I am going to go ahead and post my essay about Ms. Heard here, for those who are interested to read. It is too bad I was never able to tell her any of this.
You can ignore my 18 year old writing...try to see the forest for the trees (no pun intended).
Trees
As much as I despised school, I always managed to find a few teachers here and there that almost made my time spent in their classrooms enjoyable. To me, this has to be the greatest accomplishment any teacher can achieve, ranking right up there with pigs flying and moving mountains.
Ms. Heard was exactly the person I would love to be at her age—a stubborn woman who had touched lives and yet changed them as well. I met her during a miserable year of seventh grade, and can honestly say that she was the highlight of the year.
To understand my relationship with Ms. Heard, you must understand the kind of student I had been coming into her class the first day of seventh grade. I had always managed to be the quiet, rule-abiding pupil that aimed to please. I enjoyed the fact that school was so blatantly simple and easy, and was proud that I could make A’s by doing my homework and listening with one ear in class. Most of my time was spent doodling horses and writing my name in cursive on my college-ruled loose leaf paper.
I ducked into Ms. Heard’s classroom a minute before the final bell on that first day almost five years ago. Looking around, I first saw a pasty chalkboard, with perfect, scrawling cursive along the far right side, detailing the week’s activities. I saw a wall with black and white photographs of trees, laminated and mounted on what had once been grass-green construction paper that had faded through the years to the color sage. Then, sitting in a plastic chair at her desk, was the lanky frame of Ms. Heard.
She was wrinkled with age, but this came as no surprise to me, as I had heard rumors of this dinosaur of a teacher. Her halo of corn silk curls framed her face; her pale cheeks flushed with careful strokes of blush. Her shoulders and spine were slightly rounded, perhaps due to early osteoporosis, but when she stood up, she unfolded into a tall woman draped in peach-colored fabric. Her eyes sparkled like pools of water reflecting a hot Texas sun, with what I came to know as her never tiring zest for teaching.
I then spotted an acquaintance of mine named Jenny, a girl who had a penchant for chattering, but nevertheless, a good person to sit next to on that questionable first day of school when everyone clings to familiar faces. Jenny immediately began small talk, asking me what I had done over the summer, telling me a rumor that someone told her Ms. Heard made you sit in the corner if you misbehaved. She showed me her shoes she had bought on sale, and talked about boys she had met at summer camp. When the bell rang, we obediently grew silent, Ms. Heard introducing herself as she paced around the room from table to table. Suddenly, Jenny leaned over and whispered, “What class do you have next?”
Perhaps if I hadn’t responded, perhaps if I had just ignored her, I would never have gotten to know Ms. Heard as I did over the next year. But I broke the rules, responding in a hushed, “Keyboarding.”
As I said these three syllables, I simultaneously noticed that Ms. Heard had stopped talking. I swallowed hard, hoping that surely I wouldn’t get in trouble on the first day of school. I had never been reprimanded in class before, surprising as it may sound, and I feared the repercussions.
“Are you two done?” Ms. Heard asked. I nodded, shaking with fear.
“When I am talking, no one else talks…however, when you are talking, I will never talk. Understood?” Jenny and I nodded again, as I breathed a sigh of relief to see Ms. Heard continue her lap around the room, discussing the syllabus.
That’s it? I thought. All the rumors and all of the years of fearing what would happen were I to break a rule had come to this, a simple respectful statement, and the world had kept turning.
From that moment on, not only did I respect Ms. Heard, I wanted to see how much respect I could get from her. Instead of turning into my usual complacenct self, quietly going about my work, I became a loud-mouthed, borderline-obnoxious pest always testing the extent of Ms. Heard’s patience. I remember a girl in the class room that over the year became my good friend. One day I had asked her why she had never talked to me before and she responded “You had always been so quiet and shy before! I never knew you were this fun!”
Texas History, as a class, has to be the biggest pile of bunk I have ever heard of. The school system had managed to splice hundreds of years of sparring Mexican revolutionaries, cowboys and Indians, and some nine odd rivers that run parallel throughout the enormous state into a two-semester course. For Texas history, one needs a Texas-sized class, which meant longer than fifty minutes a day.
I like to think Ms. Heard knew this, realized this cold hard fact, and set out not to teach solely by-the-book Texas History, but instead, a sort of finishing school with a Texas theme. From day one, Ms. Heard made it strikingly clear that we were to literally dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t.’ To this day, I cannot write a quick note to my parents or compose a grocery list without making sure that the dot above the ‘i’ is clearly visible. Ms. Heard was a stickler for neat handwriting and correct grammar.
Somehow, we still had fun in that class. It was a small class size for some reason, and we ended up with only 11 students by the end of the year. I flourished in this environment, enjoying being the class clown but at the same time the pet. I recall one morning I saw Ms. Heard in the halls before school had started. As usual, I bounded up to her to say hello, and told her that I hadn’t eaten breakfast. Ms. Heard always had Cheez-It’s and Skittles on a tray in her class room, and she had become my cafeteria whenever I was hungry at any point in the day. The bell for class rang, and I waved goodbye, not getting the chance to go with her to her room to get sustenance. Twenty minutes later, I was sitting bored and hungry in my Spanish class when she entered the room and whispered something to my teacher. She walked over to my desk and without a word set down a hot dog bun, slathered in peanut butter, wrapped in a paper towel. Winking, she walked out as silently and as abruptly as she had come in and I stared at my odd makeshift breakfast in utter delight and amazement. If you had seen me, you would have thought she had set down a block of gold in front of me.
Near the end of the year, the school somehow managed to break the automatic bell system that chimed at the beginning and end of every class period, so they imposed an honor system upon the students and teachers of Hill Country Middle School, one which we went solely by clocks and watches. I remember how for two weeks, we watched the clocks like hawks, making sure Ms. Heard didn’t get too carried away when discussing Santana and the Alamo and run over time. One day, one of the boys got smart and while she was out of the class room, set the clock ahead a mere three minutes. All eleven of us skipped giddily down the hallway that day, proud of our three extra minutes of freedom. The next day, we tried for another minute extra, and again, Ms. Heard managed to fall for it. We eventually were leaving ten minutes early every day as we got braver, setting the clock forward while sharpening our pencils at the pencil sharpener below the clock. There was no way Ms. Heard didn’t notice the shortened class period, for after teaching a fifty minute class for fifteen years, you know exactly how long it takes. However, she didn’t ever make a fight over it, and within two weeks, the bells were fixed. She handled the situation with grace and good nature, and again, gained my respect.
While the tricks we could play were fun, the learning was as well. She had invented a board game that played like a game of football that we would use to review for tests. The day before every test, we would all play Review Football and it was in those games that not only did I learn about the order of the Trinity and Colorado rivers but I also learned how yards and downs work.
Texas Our Texas, the anthem of Texas, was required singing in class, as was the Texas Pledge of Allegiance. She had a small keyboard she kept in one corner of her class room. By the end of the year, the lyrics to Texas Our Texas were engrained in our brains. Whenever I hear that song, played at a baseball game or for some patriotic reason, I always have the slight ache of nostalgia, mixed with utter pride that while those around me mumble the tune, I can clearly belt out each and every word.
Perhaps what I most remember about Ms. Heard, out of all the history and grammar, games and rules, Cheez-Its and Skittles, are the trees. The wall of photographs of trees was simply there for extra credit. We could go and study a photograph, read the biography on the tree, and then write about the tree for more points on a quiz or test. Each tree had its own story, its own turbulent life. I remember one day, when I bothered Ms. Heard as to what the meaning of the trees were, and how they related to Texas History, her eyes grew far away. I could see the memories revolving in the back of her mind. “Trees, Rachel,” she said to me, “are about life. All of history is simply life. You are creating history with every day you live. Sometimes I will be driving down the highway, and I’ll see a tree that catches my eye. It may not be a big tree, and often times it’s a very small tree, but I have to pull over, get out of my car, and hug the tree. Have you ever done that? Hugged a tree? It is amazing. Some trees…they just look like they need a hug.” She turned back to the small stack of papers on her desk that she was grading as I sat there, picturing this elderly woman teetering up to a tree and giving it a hug.
I like to think that, to her, I was a tree. We are all trees, scattered across a desolate teenage landscape, rooted deeply in our opinions and beliefs. Sometimes other trees grow up close to us, brush us with their branches when the wind blows them our way. Sometimes there are years that go by when only the wind touches us, where we would love to be able to pull up from our roots and run forever. Then, there are those few and far between, those people who are so amazing, so unlike us that we can’t even imagine being them, that come along and grace us with their momentary presence.
The day I learned of Ms. Heard’s death, by total coincidence, I was reading in the local paper when I saw a small editor’s note at the bottom of the page. For some reason, I read the small type, where it stated a correction to the past week’s obituary on Mary Lou Custer Heard. I was standing in a public place, and the world literally spun momentarily, as I wondered if it was really her. I went home, searched the Internet to find her obituary, and read that just three days before my eighteenth birthday, she had passed away.
I hadn’t talked to her since I left middle school, four years ago, but I knew that she had retired a few years back. My sister told me that she had called my house once, just to see how I was doing, but she never left a phone number or any way of getting in touch with her. I will always regret not having tracked her down, something I cannot change now. I found my seventh grade yearbook, and in the back was the autographs section. On one page, I had drawn a huge heart and written “For Ms. Heard” with an arrow pointing to where she was supposed to write. At the bottom I had written “I love you too, Ms. Heard!” in my scrawling—yet much improved—print. For some reason, I had never gotten her to sign it, and now it remains an important reminder—like my empty heart, these regrets will go unanswered. I can only hope to keep in touch with the other people who have changed my life over the years.
Driving back from Dallas where I had been out of town visiting the past weekend, I was roaring along at seventy miles an hour when my eye caught sight of a tree. It wasn’t the most beautiful tree—curved, slightly stooping in the late evening sunlight. The otherwise sunny skies had broke loose a soft mist just minutes before, and the drops of rain glistened on the waxy leaves. I had seen that sparkle before. I put on my warning lights and pulled over next to the tree, and stepped out of the car. Trucks and sports cars whipping by, I walked slowly up to the tree and wrapped my arms around its stately trunk.
It just looked like it needed a hug.
