Not for the first time, or the last, I love you all.Annoyed as I am by all this crap at work, rest assured that I know that I know what my value is there. I am a person who is prone to tremendous self-doubt in most areas of life, but I have never doubted that I know what my work is and that I do it well. Yes, I am a quiet person who tends to blend into the background a lot, but you know, that's a pretty good description of a lot of library users, and my kids and even many staff members have no doubt of our value either. In fact, one particular face keeps coming back to me in the last 24 hours, so I will tell his story. He is one of my top favorite kids of all time. He graduated from the high school in 1988.
John was a very interesting boy. I knew that he was a tip-top athlete and that he was also taking Advanced and A.P. classes, but I didn't know him well at all. As he began his junior year, I became the junior class advisor. He was my first class president.
I was fairly impressed with him right away. A boy who was quiet and serious, but whose face broke into an all-over smile when he laughed. He wasn't interested in being in the limelight at all, but he knew in his heart that he was born to be a leader, and so he took the lead because that was his duty. People fell into line behind him, and he was so obviously bound by integrity and honor that you knew he was right and would lead people well and into the right place. He took charge at every class meeting, as he was supposed to.
I don't know when it was that I learned his family backstory, but I remember the morning of the junior prom. I had come into school to check on the decorations and make sure they were still sticking to the wall, but when I got there, John was already re-taping some things back into place. Afterwards, we went out to the parking lot to leave, and there was an elderly man leaning against the side of a battered pickup, waiting for him. John brought me over to him and said with a reverent glow and tremendous pride: "Mrs C ... this is my dad." The way he said it was simply overwhelming. I noticed that dad's right arm ended in a stump, there was no hand there. I shook his left hand and said "That's quite a boy you have here." With the same reverence and pride I had heard in his son's voice, he answered, "I know."
I learned at some point that John's parents had married after they had each raised other families in previous marriages, so that his siblings were all much older than he was, and that his mother had died when he was young. Due to his father's handicap, John had been granted special permission from the state to get his driver's license a year ahead of time. His older sister on his mother's side, it turned out, had gone to school with me, and had been .... what can I say, the first girl who was known to have "gone all the way." She was a tough cookie, a junior hoodlum in fifth grade. The brothers who were close to her in age were the same. And then, years later, John.
He was the captain of two varsity sports teams when he was a junior. He was recognized at the county and state level in football and wrestling. Unbelievably, he was defeated in the race for senior class president by a tricky ad campaign, but it seemed like a relief to him. He had done his duty and run. He was just as happy to be left alone.
He had no money for college and must have been offered scholarships, but he took the free ride and went to West Point. There was no war then, thank god, and he put in his required years of service and then left the Army. He had another career in mind.
He became a teacher.
Not long after that, he came back to visit the old school one day, and when he walked into the library, I know my face lit up, and I saw that smile of his. This was after my brain surgery, and I looked different; I think it shocked him a little. But he sat and we talked. I asked him who else he had come back to see and if he had gotten to them all. "No one else," he said.
The rewards of being a teacher are very few, and as they say, far between. But I have had them, and they cannot be taken away. Whatever happens, I will see John's face, and I will know that it worth it and that I am okay.
