I remember when I was a new teacher; I mean new new and I was sitting in a staff meeting that took place in not-exactly-an-annex. It did have a slight slope and the rooms had much smaller windows, slits really. Odd, how corporations can make seamless additions, but school’s always seem to have some sort of duct-taped structuring, like a make-shift lego tunnel for our children.
Anyway, the whole English department was there. I was new, as I mentioned, so that was fine by me. Rick Topper, the department head and kind man, introduced me warmly and kindly. He was also very tender when he welcomed back this delightful woman named Kathy. You felt delight in her presence. The way he said “sabbatical” hinted at something, and she knowingly nodded her head and the whole room slightly extended towards her.
She went out of her way to be kind to me, yet it was not out of her way of being. She was jovial with me; she and Sue Boland were an obvious team of veteran teachers and they really made room for me in the team. As did many others, but it was the twinkle in Kathy’s eye and the warmth she chose to share that marked me.
I have a trait, that I cultivated, that if a thing in someone’s life seems really big, and the vibe is privacy. I don’t ask. Personally, I am chatty and private simultaneously. In my client space, I probe with questions, because that is what the person in front of my wants: space to release. But if I am out and about, I don’t ask. I still love a bit of human decency and etiquette.
I also don’t know if you know anything about new teacher’s, but their first year is an absolutely blur as they try to acclimate to a host of things they have never had to consider before, like 28 opinions and curriculum planning over the weekend they desperately need to be sleeping through or doing anything but teaching, and then there is simply the confidence curation of being the one in the front of the room. So a bit overwhelming.
I honestly don’t know how long it took me to find out why Kathy was on sabbatical, but it was a few days. I do know it was months after that first day, when Kathy and I had become friends, “Fellow redheads,” she’d wink that we talked about Leidy. I apologized that I was so wrapped up in my new teaching that I didn’t even consider why she had returned from sabbatical — and my words hung sheepishly with my shoulders.
“Kate,” she put her hand on mine, “but that was a gift. With you I was a teacher that could help, not a mother who had lost a daughter. I didn’t have to talk about the trials, I could talk about Edith Wharton.”
There is so much we are carrying in life, and our opportunities to lift a burden may go unknown, but not unnoticed. I was recently talking with another author, Catherine Read, about writing and my love of New Thought authors, turn-of-the-century sages like Steiner (whose philosophy is at the heart of her homeschooling book), and Goddard, Schinn, Klint and even Hemingway (who with Fitzgerald and stories of Salons grabbed my attention as a twenty-something).
“I just must have a connection to that time, I keep finding them again and again. That is the table of authors I wanted to sit with,” I say on the corner of Main Street, in Yardley.
She nods in knowing.
Not coincidentally, after my book signing, Kathy’s book signing came to mind. It was at the Chemical Road Barnes and Noble, I remember her scrunching her nose up at me as she signed my book. I remember her gold hoops and shorts hair, and tenacity to squeeze every drop out of life. Her poems rip you with reality and take you on journey only a mother and an English teacher can.
Last night, I sat down and googled, Slamming the Door Open. Her meaning making of Leidy’s murder and her love as a mother was there - on Amazon, even though both Leidy and Kathy have walked on from this life. Yes, the ladybug on the cover is for her daughter.
There are emotions and events that take time and perhaps incarnations to unravel, but there are also imprints of love and craft that can live on in perpetuity, and today, I want to add a line in the universe for Kathy, and sit at the table with her.
Thanks for reading,
Kate
Lost in the Woods: A Blessing
by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno
When you are certainly lost,
when the wind blows acutely,
when the moon is unavailable,
when tragedy catches up
and walks,
like a companion, by your side,
when the snowflakes fall
severely;
then,
may you see a window and a pallid light,
may the light get bolder
as you get closer,
may the light be the sound
of vital laughing,
may the laugh be the laugh
of the one’s you’re missing,
may your feet find their way
to the oaken door,
may the door swing open, sure
and slow,
may each kind glad face
turn
to yours.