Counting a Blessing – Part Two

 

Storm Home

Earlier today, I wrote about my teaching mentor, Pat, who got her name because she was born on St. Patrick’s Day.  Last night I read a slice by Alice Nine,  in which she shared her own limericks and two Irish blessings.  They made me think of a different kind of blessing, the kind that takes the form of a human being.  So here’s part two of my tribute to a person who helped shape me.

Sometimes people enter your life, and you feel like it was simply the moment the script told them to enter, stage left.  It was this way with Pat.  I arrived at school on my first teacher day, and was greeted by a tall, slightly stooped woman with pure white hair framing a rounded bespectacled face.  She looked a bit like a female Orville Redenbacher.  I soon found that the similarities ended right there.  Pat had tangible sincerity and a compelling soft voice.  In fact, I later found, to my amazement, that when she wanted to get her class’s attention, she had reverse superpowers.  She could lower her voice to a whisper, and an entire room of fourth graders would stop talking and lean in, like the old commercials for E.F. Hutton.

On the first day that I met Pat she offered to help me set up my classroom.  I had a few ideas, but student teaching had not really prepared me for how to begin a school year.  Pat had the ability to be both practical and imaginative.  She shared this piece of practical wisdom:  “Start with the pledge every morning.  It’s good to have a group speaking as one to begin a day.”  At first I thought that a bit hokey.  I later learned the wisdom.  Then she produced her collection of obscure  household gadgets: cherry pit removers, apple peelers, egg separators, and olive retrievers.  “Set these out on a table and let the kids try to figure out their uses,” she suggested. It was amazing how much thinking the kids did, how much they wanted to research.  They sketched, acted out the uses, wrote commercials, and debated.

Here’s where fate struck me.  On day two of preparing the classroom, Pat was helping me create my job wheel.  She was talking to her colleague, Jane.  The two of them had gone to college together and were discussing some of their old friends.  At one point they mentioned “the twins,” and for some odd reason, this sounded a familiar note.  My ears perked up.  It reminded me of something.  When Jane actually used the name Phyllis, I had to ask.  “Was Phyllis’s sister named Joann?”  This led to what I later learned was a signature gesture.  Pat’s jaw dropped.  Her shoulders hunched, and she rubbed her forearms with her hands.  “I’ve got goosebumps,” she said.  “How did you know that?”

I explained that my mom had gone to school with twins named Joann and Phyllis from first grade to twelfth grade at Lincoln School in New York.  Joann came to our house regularly when I was a kid.  Pat and Jane had gone to a small college in Ohio, many miles from New York City, but it turned out that their best college friends were my mom’s best childhood friends.  Could I have fallen into a more natural place?

That fall, Pat brought in a tape that she said I had to hear.  She wondered if I listened to A Prairie Home Companion.  I had to admit that I didn’t, though I knew of Garrison Keillor.  She made me listen to an episode she referred to as The “Booger” episode, in which Garrison explains the origins of his writing career, when he learned the key to fifth grade comedy. It only required one well-place word.

[Note:  I couldn’t find the exact episode on line, but I found another that covers some of the same nasal territory.  It’s worth a listen, unless you are boycotting Mr. Keillor, which I respect.]

That episode, it turned out, was the prelude, the set up, so Pat could deliver the real message.  She proceeded to share another episode, where Keillor describes the winters in Lake Wobegone.  For the folks in his hometown, snow was inevitable but not so easily predicted.  They didn’t really believe in early dismissals in Minnesota, but they did appreciate children’s safety.  So, at his school, every child was given the name of a family who lived near the school.  That family would provide the child with shelter from any blizzard that happened to blow in before the child could get home.  Young Garrison spoke of how much he loved the sound of the name for that family.  The school referred to them as the child’s “Storm Home.”  It made him feel safe, warm, loved.

When the tape was over, Pat looked at me, a 24-year-old who she’d known for a month-and-a-half, and said,  “Peter, you live all the way in Trumbull.  I live about a mile from the school.  I’m a mother.  I worry.  Alan and I would like our home to be your storm home.”  I saw her eyes well up when she said this, and my throat tightened.

I don’t think I ever took Pat and Alan up on the blizzard refuge, but for the next 20 years, they surely  stood for our storm home.  They came to our wedding that summer.  They hosted a  baby shower for our first.  They found us a house right down the street from them.  They showed one of our daughters how to sew and quilt and the other how to bake, and both of them how to love gardens and the natural world.  They were parents and grandparents and friends.  They made us feel blessed by fate.

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