Happy Birthday, Miss Sawyer

Today is Miss Sawyer's birthday. Although she died at least 20 years ago, I think of her every year on January 3rd. You see, Miss Sawyer was my first teacher and she was not someone that one could easily forget.
People I grew up with in Upstate New York, who are 20 years older than I, were taught by Miss Sawyer. And they thought she was "ancient" when they had her. I was in her last class before she finally retired. She was ageless. One would have to be to teach grades 1-4 in a two room schoolhouse for 30 years in a little town with few social outlets for a single woman.

Anna Sawyer came from a family in rural Maine and had a bit of a twangy "Nah-easten" accent. She grew up on a farm with a horse named Old Nell, who, she reported on more than one occasion, could run a mile a minute. We all wished we'd grown up on a farm and had such a swell old horse and buggy.

Miss Sawyer never married. She was a bit awkward and standoffish, and definitely a no-nonsense woman, but I looked forward to seeing her every day. When I got the mumps in October, she came to the house to bring me my homework and I cried when I saw her. I think I made a scene in front of my mother because I wanted to be allowed to go back to school to be with Miss Sawyer and all my friends. There is no substitute in all of life for that trusting, unabashed admiration a child feels for her teacher.

Our school was really a remodeled two-story house. Grades 1-4 were upstairs in the room with the slanted ceilings and the coatroom that was like a dark little cave. We had wooden floors that creaked, so we couldn't sneak to the bathroom when Miss Sawyer's back was to us. Besides, the bathroom was right in the front of the classroom, even though it had a little partition in front of the door for privacy. We never cared about that. When we could watch Jodie or Berniece pee their pants right in their seats, privacy did not carry a high premium.

We had a huge lawn to play on. It was an entire city block. On one side of the schoolhouse it was all grass where we played Dodgeball. On the other side of the schoolhouse was where we played baseball and two-hand touch football--at least, that's what the older students played. We played on the grassy slope.
Miss Sawyer used to become quite upset when the town doctor's boxer dog got loose and chased us around the playground. He was a randy sort, humping on any child's leg who stood still enough for him to get ahold of. Within seconds, Miss Sawyer would fly out of the schoolhouse brandishing a carton of ground black pepper. Her theory was that if she could just shake some of it on his nose, he'd receive enough negative reinforcement that he'd stop harrassing us. Instead, Boxer would go loping off in circles around a red-faced Miss Sawyer running in high speed behind him, her dress rippling in the wind against her long spindly legs as she ran. We would laugh and imitate her expression of righteous indignation and her ridiculous appearnce charging across the lawn. Boxer thought there never was such a fine game as being chased by Miss Sawyer. I don't think the pepper ever connected with his nose.

She was, I suppose, what some would call a classic old maid. She was abrupt sometimes, and a little off, socially, and she kept to herself a lot of the time. Miss Sawyer wasn't good with students who were out of the mainstream: she taunted my brother, who has a learning disability, and with her yardstick she often threatened a thin, sickly boy who always fell asleep in class. She slapped my face one time when I couldn't recite the colors in the rainbow, even though I was probably one of her favorite students. By today's standards, she would have been fired. I know my parents had words with her about my brother. But in those days, given the values and expectations for teachers, she was still considered a good teacher, and there was something about her that made me love being in school.
I remember hearing women in our church comment on her hair. She had hair--that was all that mattered to me as a child. Apparently though, she had a perm but never combed it out or styled it. So her head was a collection of discrete grey corkscrew curls with no sense of organization, plan, or collaboration. She wore long filmy light-colored dresses with nude colored stockings, and in her bosom she always kept a handkerchief with which to blow her nose.

There were two parts of Miss Sawyer's body that I admired like few other things in my young life at that time: her nose and her upper arms. With one smooth movement, she could reach into her dress for her handkerchief and blow her nose with one hand. As she blew into the handkerchief, she would twist her nose first to one side and then to the other, as if it had no cartilage in it whatsoever. Paul and I tried to do it once at recess and he got a bloody nose.
Miss Sawyer's upper arms had a most arresting swing to them when she wrote longhand on the board during penmanship. They fairly danced to and fro, happily jiggling with every loop of cursive writing she produced. Nancy, Olive and I had contests to see whose upper arm could jiggle like Miss Sawyer's but we never could do it right. It's only now that I recognize that unfortunate quality in my own arms.

My favorite thing about Miss Sawyer was that she loved Jesus with all her heart. And I knew that because of the stories she used to tell us for our devotional first thing in the morning. When it was time for Bible class, she would teach us things about the Bible and God.
I have an indellible image of her in my mind's eye--one that I see whenever anyone mentions her name. She is standing there by my desk, holding the huge Webster's unabridged dictionary in her hands and telling us about how everything we do is written in the books in heaven. And how one day when Jesus comes, He will open the books and see if our sins have been blotted out. If they are, we will go into heaven for eternity (Daniel 7:10). And here is where Anna, the spinster teacher from Maine, became an actress without equal.

"And Satan will say, "She can't go into heaven. I got her to pull her brother's hair and disobey her mother. Look in the book--it's all there."
And Jesus will open up the book (she opens the dictionary and holds it aloft, her finger pointing to something on the page. We all strain our necks to see what she is pointing at) and He will say, "There's her name, right here. And it does say she did those mean things.""
We hold our breath, awaiting the fearful pronouncement that we had lost heaven forever.
"Jesus will turn to God and will show Him the book. And there, right over her name is a drop of blood from Jesus that shows that He died for her sins. Her sins have been blotted out! He'll show God the nailprints in His hands and say, "My blood, Father, My blood." And God says, "Your sacrifice is sufficient." And He turns to you, Barbara, and says, "Come ye blessed into the kingdom prepared for you.""
And Miss Sawyer's eyes would swim with tears and we could see that she meant what she was telling us more than anything else she had taught us in school--ever.

So today is really a special day, one that I never expected to remember for the rest of my life. But it is my teacher's birthday. Now that I'm a teacher myself, I know how it matters to be remembered.

Happy Birthday, Miss Sawyer.
His sacrifice is sufficient for you, and your gift of love and service for us was more than sufficient. Rest well until He comes for you. Then we shall both hear, "Come ye blessed into My Kingdom."
I'll be waiting for you.

Happy New Year

This morning at 12:10 a.m., the neighbor kids started shooting off Roman Candles about 30 feet from our bedroom. I realized quickly that I'm a lot older than I thought I was.
This morning, rolling my tired, middle aged body out of bed, I wondered what the most important thing might be to write about on this auspicious day. This entry will be brief--just one comment that I want to make. What came to mind was a statement by one of the founders of my church: "We have nothing to fear for the future except we forget how the Lord has lead us in the past." I hope that I, and anyone else reading this, will recognize and not forget God's goodness, leading and blessings they have already enjoyed. Many blessings to you on this new beginning of our New Year.

Sentence Nightmares

Today I came across a real monstrosity of a sentence:
"Given all that Americans read and hear today about the "increasingly serious" problem of family violence in newspapers and on television news broadcasts and newsmagazines, along with the frightening statistics publicized by some organizations devoted to addressing family violence, it is tempting to assume that the prevalence of family violence has reached an all-time high and is getting worse." (Family violence across the lifespan: An introduction, 2nd edition. 2005, O. Barnett, C.L. Miller-Perrin, & R.D. Perrin, p. 24).
Technically, this sentence has a lot of correct things about it. But it's just such a multi-jointed mouthful, jammed with information, that I had to read it several times.
Now I love a good run-on sentence as well as anyone, but this was such an awful sentence to find in a textbook of higher education that it deserves comment. (Sadly, there are numerous such word conglomerations in this text!)

My students have a difficult time writing sentences properly, often resorting to catch-all sentences of shocking proportions. Here is a sentence written in a theoretical analysis of the movie, Tortilla Soup:

"The death of Gomez at the end of the video contributes to the transformation of Martin’s context represented by his openness and acceptance of his daughter's choices to move out of the family house symbolized by offering the house for sale, and the regain of his taste and smell that explains the alternative context he developed that helped him resolve his complexity also symbolized by him proposing to Yolanda after choosing to remain single for long time after his ex-wife passed away."
That string of gobbledygook takes my breath away.

Here's another beauty:
"Her grandfather was a victim of financial abuse and with family members not being close to him and still in relatively good health when he died no one was aware that his savings had been cleared out and his home and land was signed over to a neighbor who he had also written checks that were supposedly gifts."
Phew!

My private fantasy about people who write these sentences is that they are excited writers who are frantically putting down facts without regard to structure. They are caught up in the moment and just don't want to leave out anything so everything gets said willy-nilly. I believe that these people are not boring, but rather, they are quite interesting people. They have so much content that it fairly bulges out of their sentences.
These are not the individuals who write uninspiring narratives such as, "That dog laying by the cat was lame. I don't know why. He couldn't walk away from the barn. The cat didn't seem to like him, either."

No. The "loaded bullet," full-of-facts writer enthuses, "There was this dog near a cat and the dog just couldn't move away from the cat even though the cat scratched him and the dog rolled off to one side to try to get away from him while he pushed with his feet against the wall where the horse harnesses were hanging by the haymow. The dog never did walk away, even though the cat hissed, scratched, and yowled at him, as he laid in a ball on the old blanket in the entryway of the barn that my grandfather built before the Spanish-American War. A person can't see any nails in the beams of that barn because it was made with pegs and grooves like all the old buildings were made back in the days when Teddy Roosevelt and his "rough riders" were in the news because of the men he surrounded himself with, but also because he had to be a rough rider to travel through all the national parks that he set up in those years. Anyway, the dog is probably lame because he couldn't get away from that cantankerous cat--the one who has a blue eye and a green eye, and who has seven toes on all four feet, so he can really scratch his enemies if he gets mad enough, and he scratched the dog who didn't move. So yeah, the dog is probably lame, poor thing that had to be put out in the old drafty barn with that idiot, hyperthyroid fleabag who is half-crazed with cat hallucinations and delusions of grandeur most of the time, even though he's as ugly as a dung heap."

Well, dog my cats! I'll take the run-on sentence writer's stories any day if they're this interesting and full of amazing facts.

Perhaps those textbook authors are smarter than I originally gave them credit for...

Prayerful literacy

I don't know how the prayer started, but it was a long one. My mind had begun to drift, kneeling in the eighth row with my friend, Shelly. This was the morning to go to a new church and have a different worship experience.
The woman in the bright caftan and large African head wrap prayed on and on in thick, ecclesiastical tones, clearly moved by her own prayer. She was praying for patients in the hospital and a number of other issues that went on for some minutes.
I was aware of the hard floor under my knees, and of the smoothness of the wood pew ahead of me, upon which I leaned.
"And Lord, may we have the patience, that's I-E-N-C-E, because that's what we need."
Hearing the woman spelling something brought me back from my internal distractions. I raised an eyebrow and shot a questioning look at Shelly. Her expression was one of confusion.
"If we are with patients, I-E-N-T-S, we need thy patience, E-N-C-E."
Again, my mind had wandered and I rapidly came to only to hear this woman spelling something. Did the woman believe that the Lord wasn't sure which homonym she was using?
It was one of the funniest prayers I've ever heard, even though the supplicant was intent on communing with God. I've laughed about her literary precision many T-I-M-E-S.

Multiple Personalities

I understood something anew about multiple personalities last night. As a professor in the mental health field, it is incumbent upon me to pass along what I learned.
Bilingual people have more than one personality. Now perhaps I am slow, but it dawned on me in a new way last night that people can portray themselves one way in one language, and another way in a different language. My husband's first language is English. I know him as someone who speaks to me without an accent and who responds to me in English. But when he speaks Spanish--which he learned in another country at his parents' insistence--people howl with laughter and respond to him in a completely different way.
I watched this metamorphosis last night. His more serious English-speaking personality was out grilling salmon on the patio when our Spanish-speaking guests arrived. The man of the family quickly joined Sam on the patio and they immediately began chuckling about something or another. It continued until they came in carrying platters of steaming salmon.
Meanwhile, my sister and I conversed in broken Spanish-English with the women in the family. I was a bit distracted, as I had a mishap with the drink out in the garage, then again in the kitchen (we have been finding sticky pink patches in cutlery drawers, under the edge of the dishwasher, and frozen patches of it in the garage--what a mess!)
As Sam began interacting with our guests, I watched and listened carefully. He became someone else, and I loved being able to see this.
It is clear from hearing Sam speak Spanish that his phrasing is rather halting and imperfect. But his pronounciation is excellent and he doesn't let the choppiness of his speech bother him. He listened carefully to the women speak and responded with comments that made them all laugh. They all looked at him with unveiled admiration. He challenged the four-year old to finish her meal so she could have dessert and then followed up with admonishment that sent the family into gales of laughter. Even the serious father. As they left, his typical hugs and kisses were somehow different and warmer.
In English, Sam's humor is usually rather corny and based on literalism of speech. He gets a lot of sympathy laughs, the way I see it. But in Spanish, he is hilarious. I've observed his interactions with Hispanic people several times and come back to this hypothesis each time.
It reminds me of conversations I've struggled through with my spotty German language skills. My German friends have called me serious, ponderous, and associate my conversation contributions as being rather "Catholic" in quality. From what I can gather, that means melancholy, conservative, fixated on right and wrong, and somehow pious. Although I am somewhat melancholy at times, the other qualities don't ring true to me. Yet there they are, as soon as I start to articulate myself in German.
Italian is quite another story. Catholic or no, I come across as extremely sensuous and suggestive in that language. There is something about that language and the way I use the little of it that I know, that creates some sort of languid reclining personality in me. (It is a time when I wish more of an Italian dolorosa-type quality could be part of the mix).
So I began to think about these things last night, watching my husband's body language, hearing his voice, and seeing him make facial expressions--all that look somewhat familiar but not at all what I am used to. Who is this that I married? Whom did he marry? I guess it all depends on what language we are speaking at the time.

Light Hearted

Two days ago my doctor called me to say that the cat scan I had last week showed that I have a mass in my colon. It could be cancer, he intoned. I should get a colonoscopy right away and see a GI doctor. He told me I would have an appointment in two weeks with this specialist.
Is it anything serious?
Circuitous obfuscation.

Yesterday, I sat cold and exposed on the specialist's table--two weeks earlier than my appointment and very shaky. This doctor had a kind face and I remember thinking that if anyone had to tell me that I have a life-threatening illness, none could deliver such news with greater warmth or understanding.
His first words were, "I'm unimpressed by your CT scan. I don't see anything to be alarmed about on it."
But what about the other doctor's comments to me?
"I don't think you have anything like cancer, so don't even consider that."
Why would the other doctor even say such a thing then?
"Let's focus on getting this irritating twinge in your guts taken care of and don't go down that road."

At this Christmas season, I'm imminently grateful that I don't have a cancer diagnosis to deal with. Perhaps I'm even more grateful that for a day or two I had the opportunity to look at death in the face. As sobering as it was to linger over issues of how Sam would manage to lose me, what I should do with myself before I die, I experienced something very helpful: Waking up at 3:30 and listening to Sam's breathing and wondering how he would sleep if I were dying--wondering what would become of my students, friends, and family. Thinking about how I should move ahead with this illness--whether or not I would have an operation and even be able to teach this next quarter, etc.

Catastrophizing? Maybe. But it was frightening to think of Sam going through my death after he had lost his mother to colon cancer; wondering what it would feel like to be "full of cancer" and dying; living with questions of whether or not, or when it would come back.

In all of this, I feel that I learned something about what is important in life and how to see life differently.
What is important is how I love my family, friends and neighbors. What is important is that I live every single day saying, thinking, and doing all that I would do if it were my last day alive. And to live with the understanding that life on this planet is only a tiny jot on the radar screen. The rest takes place for eternity in heaven.
These are not original ideas, nor have I put them down in any particularly creative or gripping manner. But this is where I've been in my head for the last week. I have much to be thankful for this Christmas season.

What would you do?

I know that my last blog entry was a bit intense. It was driven by how struck I was that I could have been victimized as badly as other people I know.
Today, I have the same intensity but about something quite different. My question is this: If you were told you had advanced cancer and had only six months to live, what would you choose to do?

I've been thinking about this question today. Would I travel, and go see all the lovely things of the world? Would it make sense to climb mountains or paddle rivers--especially if it would take me out of contact with those who would miss me the most? Would I continue teaching, applying myself as never before? Would I take a medical leave and spend my time writing all that I could to as many as would listen? Would I spend my last days giving my husband and family all the attention that I could muster, so they would have good memories after my death? Would I start speaking at every event I could--about how cancer can be prevented? Or would I speak about the beauty of God's love and grace? Or, would I merely continue on in life hoping against hope that nothing would change and that I could beat the odds?

Some life events--near misses, or those interminable waits for test results--bring these questions to the fore. They also prompt us to think about what really matters in life. The events of the last week have reminded me that as Corrie ten Boom said, life is like a piece of embroidery. We can only see the underside with knots and incomprehensible stitches, in all directions. But God sees the top of the embroidery and can see the pattern and beauty that is being worked out. We can only look up and try to guess, from our vantage point, what is being created by God.

What happens on this earth is important, but it is very small in comparison to the greatness of God's overall picture. Heaven and God's view of life is the true reality, not what we see and do here. And thus, even having a shortened life takes on a different face and meaning. Choices and life becomes a bit less complicated. Oh, to see as God sees.

Why Me?

I usually ask the why me? question when something unfortunate has happened or somehow affects me. But I asked this question for quite a different reason last night. Here's what happened.
My neighbor, who is an immigrant from Eastern Europe, told me more pieces of her life story. I dropped by around 5:30 to take her something for her dinner, she being alone for the holidays. My knock on the door interrupted her time with God, but she was delighted to have me visit and offered me the padded kitchen chair. She sat at the edge of the wooden chair, thrilled to have someone to talk with. We sat in her stark little kitchen with two space heaters aimed at us. One small light fixture hung over the kitchen table where she had been listening to a recorded sermon in her language. Her Bible was spread out in front of her and she had several devotional books opened on the table.
Every time we talk she tells me more of her life story. I think I have a pretty clear sketch of most of it now, and this is why today I ask, why me?

Why was I born into an intact family where I was wanted and in which there was enough to eat? Why was I born in a part of the world where there was no war, where I was not a refugee, never went hungry and always had a warm bed? I have never had to move to another country to avoid religious persecution, losing all my meaningful personal effects. I have never been demoted from a well-paying, respected job to beg for work given to people who cannot speak English and who are considered unintelligent because they can't express themselves. I have not been made fun of because I had no money and my clothes were ragged. My life has not been a ceaseless grind just to survive.

I have not been abandoned by a spouse who took all my belongings and left me with nothing and a young child to find a way to feed. How did I ever get so fortunate to marry a wonderful Christian man who is faithful to me? I have never had children, but there may even be blessing in that. As my neighbor told me the excruciating story of the death of her young son, her hands shook and she fought back tears. I marveled that I have been spared this pain.

My health has not suffered like another friend who was reduced to gnawing on the frozen legs of dead horses that stuck up through the Siberian snow. I have not been forced to watch my daughters raped by drunken soldiers who were marauding my village. My eardrums have not been punctured by bombs that exploded only feet away from me. I do not have scars from flying shrapnel, or internal scars from having to keep my eyes open day and night just to survive. Yet as my neighbor finished telling her story, she clasped her hands together and raised them upward. "Prrrrase da Lort!" she said loudly. "I have everah-ting now."

Maybe the question is really, why not me? I am not growing old alone. I have a home that is warm, clean, well supplied, with full cupboards, and clothes to spare. There is love and life here, when in so many parts of the world people are dying from lack of clean water or lack of shelter.

"From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." Luke 12:47-49.
I am so fortunate, so blessed. Why me?

Anglo Incognito

I am in a panic. I was asked to sing for a large Hispanic convocation in January at our church and I agreed to do it. I wanted to make my husband proud that I can fit into his world. And now I'm wishing I never said I'd do this.
There are few songs in Spanish that I can find, that are in the classics category required by the minister of music. I can't figure out how to search for Spanish titles that I don't even know, or where to do that.

My father in-law has sung for years at his Spanish church. Just this year he gave all of his music to someone else--all that richness and history--in several boxes. So all he could send me was "O Sole Mio" in Spanish. He said I'd need to change the words a little bit to give them sacred meaning, but he didn't give me any idea of how to do that.

I turned to my minister of music friend, Bobby. He reassured me that yes, he had music in Spanish, and in fact, had just received a number of pieces that he thought would be good for Cinco de Mayo weekend. Bobby graduated from Princeton, and has excellent musical taste. Knowing that he was working on this for me was very comforting.
Yesterday the music came in the mail. I proudly carried it to the piano and started playing and singing through it. Sam sat nearby at his computer browsing for something or another. The introduction to the first song sounded like the accompaniament for "La Cucaracha." Sam turned toward me in his chair as I began to sing loudly en Espanol. As the last note of the first verse ended, Sam cleared his throat. "What is that?"
"Beats me. But it's in Spanish. Did you understand what I was saying?"
Sam looked dubious. "Kind of. But the words are really wierd. I hope you aren't planning to sing that."
Deflated, I sang through a couple more of Bobby's choice songs. Another one had a mariachi-type sound and I sang with gusto. It made me feel like Carmen Miranda. Sam turned back to the computer shaking his head. "You're going to have to find something else. These songs are awful." I am now the owner of six awful songs in Spanish.

I think I have finally found something. I took my Spanish hymnal and found words with the right meter to superimpose on the English tune, "O Waly Waly." It's a beautiful tune, and the lyrics are majestic and wonderful ("O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing My Great Redeemer's Praise").
Sam informed me that there will be lots of evangelistic "big guns" in the Hispanic community who will attend the January convocation. I'm singing through my song every day now, so I don't sound like an Italian wetback up there. Just call me the Anglo Incognito.

Never Lost

Life can be a complicated maze of adult anxieties, missed opportunities, and the drudge of everyday imperatives. For years I have kept my nose to the grindstone, putting myself through private high school and college, and later, grad school and university. Work-study-sleep. Work-study-sleep. It was a pattern I lived for many years.
Somewhere in that seemingly endless, but predictable round of activities, I felt that I lost a sense of who I was. Sleep-deprived, lonely, and anxious that I wouldn't be able to get the grades or meet my life goals, I lost sight of that primal, inner me. When I realized that I felt disconnected and ungrounded, it was too late.
One day, as I idly leafed through a photo album, I came across this picture. I remember posing for my mother as she took it, out in the road in front of our Mississippi home. A neighbor lady had dropped off some old clothes for me to play dress up in, and I wasted no time donning her hat and gloves, scarf, and those wonderful blue high heels. I recall throwing my head back and looking over my shoulder at my mother, who was laughing at my antics from behind the camera.
Studying the picture, I had to laugh aloud--both because it is a funny picture, but also from the instant recognition that this was what I had been missing. I keep a copy of it over my desk. It is who I am through and through.