In 1987, my dad decided the Lord had called him to the foreign mission field. In a round about, he was right. The day after Christmas in 1988, we moved to New Hampshire. The foreign mission field.
I was very nervous about starting in at a new school in the middle of the school year. I hid that fear behind being disgruntled that my Christmas vacation got cut short. In reality, I had no idea what I was getting into. It took one day to realize I had left the wonderful place called Tennessee and landed in some place that couldn’t have possibly been on the same planet.
I don’t think we had reached lunch before Bruno, the class troublemaker from some good Italian New England family (whom I would later learned lived just up the street from me and had an older brother named Luigi…very goodItalian family), did something. I can’t even remember what, but what I do clearly remember is my new teacher Mrs. Cassidy (who was all of barely over five feet which made her the same height as Bruno) told him not to do it. Now where I came from, that would have been the end of that. Or the kid would have ended up in the corner. And if that didn’t work, there was always the coat room with a paddle. But not in New Hampshire. When Bruno got in her face and basically said “you’re-not-the-boss-of-me” she couldn’t put him in the corner. She most definitely couldn’t paddle him. She might have sent him to the principal’s office, but Bruno was a regular there and the principal couldn’t do much either. Basically all she could do was take him by the arm and force him back to his seat. Which was a stand off unless Bruno decided to move since he was certainly heavier than she was. I sat at my desk across the room watching this play out and wondering where on earth my parents had decided to move me.
Before the day was out, my next drama would be on the playground. A wonderful little girl named Summer had been putting her classwork in her cubby the same time I had and invited me to play with her during recess. I thought she was an angel from Heaven and happily agreed. Only to find myself stepping into a soap opera. Summer and I hadn’t played long before a couple of other little girls from class asked if they could speak to me: privately. They then told me what an awful person Summer was and that I shouldn’t play with her. And so it went the entire recess until I was very confused. I honestly liked Summer and thought her one of the nicest people in the class. We wouldn’t become fast friends, but I never did understand why those two other girls didn’t like her. They weren’t bullies or ever mean to me and one could be really nice when she wanted to be. Talk about third grade drama.
To be honest, the last half of third grade is somewhat of a blur. It was a very confusing time. I didn’t live far from the school and had to walk if mom or the neighbor next door whose kids went there didn’t drive me. Our relationship with our neighbors was precarious at best and those kids were often bullies if they felt I had stepped over some invisible line. I felt the kids in my new classroom were mostly unfriendly, not realizing they were just New Englanders. I spent those five or six months being on my very best behavior because I honestly felt sorry for Mrs. Cassidy who could nothing whenever Bruno stepped out of line (which was almost daily) or Timothy, the class clown, did something stupid. I didn’t want to be trouble, too, so I mostly kept my head down, didn’t ask questions, and tried to be helpful.
It was very hard not to ask questions…simply because there were so many things I didn’t understand. Mrs. Cassidy was my first introduction to the foreign language called the “Bawston Drawl”. It’s a language I now speak fluently, but I didn’t then. I could not understand why she introduced me to the class as “Melissar” and continued to call me by that name for the next five months. As she wrote my name correctly on the tag on my desk, she obviously knew it did not have a “R” at the end of it. And yet she never said it without the “R”. I didn’t have the courage to correct her. I didn’t know why she would say she had an “idear” or why she said “cah” or “pahk”. We didn’t have to provide our own ruled paper as I had in the last school. She had “drawring” paper which was a weird brownish colored paper which was glossy smooth on one side and not quite so glossy on the other. It was hard to write on and even harder to erase on, but all of our work was to be done on it and I just assumed that “drawring” was an adjective like “construction” or “note”. It would be months before my dad finally asked someone in church about all the random R’s and Ah’s tossed into words. Once this man explained it, I could finally interpret Mrs. Cassidy…not that it made being called “Melissar” any easier.
I think I was a foreign to Mrs. Cassidy as she was to me. I remember the first time I ever approached her desk. I had finished all my homework and when I had done that back in Tennessee, I could always approach Mrs. Edwards’s desk and ask if there was anything I could do to help her. She always had little things I could do. When I asked Mrs. Cassidy the same thing, she looked surprised and speechless. I don’t think a student had ever asked her that, for most of her students didn’t finish their homework in class. I didn’t always, but when I did she started to find little things I could do. Thankfully I wasn’t there long enough to become “teacher’s pet”. I have a feeling in Mrs. Cassidy’s world, simply having a student that didn’t get in trouble was a relief. Aside from Mrs. Steely, I think she was the oldest teacher I had ever had. I would have pegged her closer to my grandparents’ age than my parents’. But I was only nine and not a good judge of an adult’s age. Still, I do remember thinking if I was her, I would quit. Before being in her class, I had wanted to be a teacher. Watching her try to teach when Bruno decided to give her a hard time…before third grade was over I was seriously re-thinking my future career choice. Mrs. Cassidy probably was too.
No comments:
Post a Comment