The Good Ones

Too late, I remembered I was chewing gum. I’d already taken my seat in Ms. Spinney’s classroom when I realized the gum was there. I looked at her, she looked at me. She never said a word, but I knew I’d be served a detention slip the next morning. It didn’t matter that I was a good kid and a good student. The rules were the rules, and in Ms. Spinney’s class gum-chewing was not allowed.

This sophomore-year incident popped into my mind this week when I heard that Ms. Spinney had died. And from that one memory, my thoughts wandered to other teachers I remember from my years of schooling, long ago as they sometimes seem. I couldn’t tell you the name of every grade school or high school teacher or college professor I ever had – or every specific lesson I learned from them – but I remember many of them. Mostly the Good Ones.

I remember Mrs. Forsythe from first grade and that I was happy my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Petersen, moved on with me to teach my third-grade class, too. I remember being nervous to start at a new school in sixth grade, when my Hastings School class would merge with the Fales School kids.

I remember Mrs. Cowles teaching us The Preposition Song in English class that year. Three decades later, I can bust out all the prepositions – alphabetically and to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy – whenever I feel in danger of ending a sentence with a preposition. We also learned to diagram sentences with Mrs. Cowles – do kids even do that anymore? – and, when we really caught onto something, she’d tell us, “Now you’re cooking with gas!”

In high school, in a classroom with an impressive collection of wind-up toys, Mr. Sharpe lit the writing fire in me during creative writing class. In Mr. Kasierski’s biology class I learned to dissect once-living beings (ick), but also to look closely at the natural world, to notice the details there among still-alive things.

Mr. Mullen introduced us to classic American literature. I couldn’t tell you every book we were assigned to read that year, but I still have the journals we had to keep as part of our classwork. And I can picture Mr. Mullen acting out the scene in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” when Stanley leans back, full of angst, and hollers, “Stellllaaaaaa!”

Ms. Spinney walked us through contemporary history. By the time our class arrived, she’d already been teaching for more than 30 years. History, of course, had shifted in those decades – although I imagine the challenges of engaging a group of teenagers in what they likely considered ancient history remained similar through the years.

I don’t remember, all these years later, which exact periods or topics we covered. I do remember Ms. Spinney using Billy Joel’s newly (in 1989) released song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” as a lesson. If you don’t remember the lyrics – or have never heard it – look it up. It offered a timeline outside of, but related to, our stagnant textbooks. I’ve always thought that was an ingenious bit of teaching.

Miss Spinney retired many years ago, but in the town where she grew up and lived her whole life, she remained involved in mentoring young people through some of the challenges of school and adolescence. She was one of the Good Ones – even if she did give me one of the two detentions I earned in four years of high school. (I never flubbed and chewed gum in her class again.)

I think teaching is probably harder work than anyone who has never been a teacher realizes. It’s a big responsibility to have a hand in shaping young minds. But what a tradeoff, to know that if you do it right – if you’re one of the Good Ones – a few of the lessons you’ve shared along the way might just come happily to some former student’s mind many years down the road, many miles from the classroom. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the July 26, 2019 issue of the Littleton Record.

Memory Lane

I attended my 25^th high school reunion last weekend. Because my parents moved away about 20 years ago, I rarely have a reason to visit my first hometown. And because I wasn’t in any particular rush when I first arrived in town, I spent a bit of time driving around to once-familiar haunts.

As I cruised the streets where I spent my first 18 years, I found memories around every corner.

Although my first scheduled stop was the elementary school where I attended kindergarten through 5^th grades, I drove past the Route 9 exit that would have brought me most directly there, continuing instead for another mile or two so I could drive past the house where I grew up, a pretty 1720 Cape with dormered windows and enough memories to fill an entire book case.

There was the bedroom window where I spent many a contemplative moment looking out at the world. There was the garage whose doors I kicked the soccer ball against as I waited for winter to give up and the green grass of spring to arrive. There was the turn into the driveway where I came in too sharply one day on the way home from my paper route and crashed my Huffy bike and tore a hole in my new corduroys. There were the gardens, now reconfigured, my mother cultivated carefully for more than two decades.

Onward I drove, turning right onto Maynard Street, following my old jogging route. I’d forgotten how many beautiful old houses are tucked away there, carefully tended historic gems set among much newer houses. I let my whims guide where I turned the wheel, and my meanderings led me past the bank where I opened my first savings account, the library where I checked out my first borrowed books, and around the corner to the YWCA where I went to preschool. Tucked under a tree was a fenced-in area containing an assortment of colorful toys scattered around a plastic slide where the latest generation of preschoolers plays.

I drove past my old schools and the church where I attended mass the Sunday mornings of my childhood, the house where one of my first best friends lived, the sidewalks where we rode our bikes together to get penny candy and bubblegum downtown. I maneuvered my way around the center-of-town traffic rotary, which seems more perplexing after so many years away, and traveled along the narrow, winding road where I once got too close to the edge and took off the side mirror of my little pickup truck.

Along the way, I thought how strange it seems that a place I haven’t much visited in the past 20 years can still seem so familiar, despite the growth and changes, the new malls and altered storefronts, the high school that seems twice the size as it was when I last walked its hallways to make my way to physics class or senior English or the gymnasium where our rainy-day graduation was staged.

Despite being a self-proclaimed sap, I’m not generally sentimental for my first hometown. This trip I felt a bit of a tug on my heart, though. Maybe because I was traveling by myself, without the banter and many questions of children coming from the backseat – so, left to my own meandering thoughts.

Although I have been away from Westborough for longer now than the time I called it home, this is where I come from. We don’t get to choose where we live as children, but that place – and the people within it – certainly shapes us.

In that way, I am lucky to have spent my early formative years here, where I landed in a class of kids who were good and smart and funny. Because I lived in the same house in the same town from birth until college, and because lots of my classmates did, too, many of these people are kids I grew up with, from preschool through elementary school and on to middle school and high school, from kiddie soccer to varsity, from diapers to drivers’ licenses.

We knew each other when we were all still figuring out who we were, when we were people perhaps different from whom we have become many years later. I suppose, in essence, the spirit of the kids we were all those years ago is still there in our 40-something beings. It’s why we tell each other we look the same as we did then – because we can still see the 17-year-old within, still remember how we laughed and cried together, even if we no longer remember the cause of specific emotions. 

I was reminded of how good and smart and funny my classmates were during our few hours together Saturday. Like most people, I’d guess, I keep in touch with a few friends from high school, although we mainly see each other in glimpses on social media. Getting together Saturday felt a bit like when grownup siblings reassemble for occasional family dinners. Around the expected small talk, there was banter and good-natured bickering and – our sixth grade English teacher would be so proud – a spontaneous group sing of the Preposition Song.

There was no sorrow in the parting, just gladness in having seen each other. At least that’s how I felt as I bid goodbye to old friends and acquaintances, and as drove away the next morning, having spent the night with a friend and classmate who still lives in town. I passed my old house one more time, turned onto the road that is a shortcut to the highway, and headed north. Toward home.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the November 10, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record.