Becoming a Real Girl

by Pam Munter

I was never much good at becoming a girl and I loathed every bit of the relentless indoctrination.

Early family photos either show me looking uncomfortable in frilly girl’s clothing or smiling broadly while wearing my preferred dirty jeans and tee shirt. My mother offered to teach me to cook, but I had no interest. Sewing was completely a non-starter. I wanted to be outside, hitting a tennis ball against the wall or riding my bike around the neighborhood. When my mother decided I had earned too many Girl Scout merit badges, she refused to sew anymore on the sash “because it might hurt the other girls’ feelings.” When I was in the first grade, I wanted to be called Phil. An outlier at an early age.

All this is coming up now because I’ve been having phone conversations with my junior high school Homemaking teacher. We first met over sixty years ago, a time when becoming a paragon of the socially acceptable female was a more urgent matter than it is today.

In the 1950s, girls were expected to learn the gender-based domestic arts to train for their foreordained positions of wife and mother. The only women I knew with a real job were my teachers and all of them were married. I felt as if I were living in a parallel universe. I didn’t want to sit around and gossip over coffee every morning, make fun of men’s foibles, or mold a rug rat into some better version of myself. So I went my own way, not an easy road in that unforgiving sex-role stereotyped era.

Contrary to conventional expectation, however, junior high provided a sense of freedom and worth, an oasis of achievement and recognition. I thrived in band and drama, excelled in English and social studies, and looked forward to PE every single day. Eighth grade would have been just about perfect if it hadn’t been for that dumb requirement all girls had to take Homemaking.

I walked into the Homemaking class that first day to a noisy room of eighth grade girls, spotless kitchen appliances adorning every wall, and a youthful-looking teacher smiling at us in optimistic expectation.

“Welcome to Homemaking class, girls. I’m Mrs. Potts.”

I laughed derisively.

“Is she kidding?” I asked my best friend Jacquie Weiss sitting next to me. Jacquie never took her eyes off the teacher. I could see she was transfixed.

“She’s so pretty,” Jacquie cooed. I hadn’t noticed, but I saw how perky and animated she seemed, her long dark brown ponytail bobbing around with every movement. She didn’t look that much older than we were.

Jacquie and I had been friends since the fourth grade when we met as we walked to school. We were an odd pair from the start. Jacquie was gawky with frizzy hair and a big nose. I was chunky, already a victim of persistent acne and my blonde hair always seem to go in its own malevolent direction. Mrs. Potts was perpetually pulled together, dauntingly so. I was not happy to be in there at all and, as the days wore on, I began to look at her as a daily reminder of the woman I could never be. I was both repulsed by the assigned meaningless tasks and yet fascinated by the teacher expecting me to do them. My way of dealing was passive-aggressive resistance. When we had projects like baking cookies, I leaned on my baking partner to make the decisions. I became the flamboyant official taster. As the students were entering the room each day, I wrote a mordant aphorism on the board or some sarcastic comment I had cadged from a joke book. I quoted H. L. Mencken: “A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.” Or, “If you can smile when everything is going wrong, you’ve found someone else to blame.” A thirteen-year-old wisecracking iconoclast is hard to stop.

Jacquie’s approach was more direct. She hung around after class as long as possible, asking her questions.

“I saw an E in your signature. What does that stand for?” This was a cheeky question in this era, a time when there was a strict wall between student and teacher. Knowing a teacher’s first name was pure gold even if moot, as we never would and never could use it.

“My first name is Elizabeth but my friends call me Liddy.”

This was a major coup for Jacquie. We had always been competitive, at least I was. But this was a contest I didn’t think I wanted to win. I let Jacquie do the reconnaissance and continued to hide behind sarcasm and trenchancy, my go-to demeanor in adolescence. And yet I wondered who this alien being might be. Liddy Potts? Really?

To her credit, Mrs. Potts never stopped my blackboard protests. I knew I was pushing the limits of convention but she treated me as she did all the other girls, with warmth and friendliness. It was confusing.

I had already found two strong female role models among my teachers who were much more to my liking: my drama teacher, who good-naturedly challenged me at every turn, and my band teacher, whose warmth was exceeded only by her wry sense of humor. Mrs. Potts was running a distant third. I decided to cede her to Jacquie. While I made it eminently clear who I did not want to be, Jacquie had long ago decided her fondest dream was to be a wife and mother, a sort of Mrs. Potts without the professional career.

I had thought of Mrs. Potts from time to time—on my wedding day; when lecturing on the role of sex-role stereotypes while teaching a class on the Psychology of Women; and, oddly enough, as I walked to the podium to deliver my keynote address before 2000 people at an International Women’s Day conference in the 1970s. I didn’t understand the reasons for these flashbacks but they were surely there.

The years and decades passed. Jacquie and I reconnected on Facebook. She had, indeed, become a housewife and mother, living in a small town in Northwest Washington. I became a collector of college degrees on my way toward becoming a clinical psychologist and a writer, among other things. I did marry and have a son. A year after the divorce, I met a woman with whom I shared my life for three decades.

With the passage of time and a senescent sense of responsibility, I decided to contact those few teachers who had impacted me so I could thank them. The older I grew, the more aware I had become of their overarching influence. My band teacher had tragically died of diseases related to alcoholism and Alzheimer’s; my drama teacher and I exchanged a few emails, had dinner once, but she died soon afterwards. I Googled Mrs. Potts and found she was teaching ballet in Oregon. I emailed her and she answered almost immediately, asking me to call her.

Unexpectedly, I felt the flush of that familiar adolescent anxiety. Call my Homemaking teacher on the phone? The formality of the past clung like cobwebs inside my head. But I did make the call, and she sounded happy to hear from me.

“Mrs. Potts? Um. Liddie? It’s hard for me to call you that.”

She laughed. “It’s OK. Call me what you wish.”

“I am surprised you remembered me. It has been, what, well over five or six decades, right?”

“That long? Of course, I remembered you. Really, you’re the one I do remember from all my years of teaching.”

I paused to take that in and inhaled deeper than necessary. I was afraid to ask, but I did.

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know. There was something about you. I could tell you needed something from me, but I didn’t know what it was.”

Of course, she was right. I needed her acceptance, her reassurance that I was OK as I was, that it was perfectly fine if I didn’t fit the feminine stereotype. It was more important coming from her because, as a teacher of the “feminine arts,” she was the avatar of the cliché I was expected to approximate.

We chatted for a few more minutes, then she told me she was coming to stay with her cousin just a few miles from where I lived in Palm Desert, California. Would I be up for a visit?

“Absolutely,” I quickly responded. Still, I wasn’t sure I wanted that to happen. Did I want to be reminded of my obstreperous past? A time that was painful, poignant and uncertain? And yet, maybe I could learn more about myself and answer a few leftover questions I had about her.

Twenty years earlier, I had written an autobiography and more recently, recorded a CD at Capitol Records. I sent both of them to her with trepidation. She was not mentioned in the book in favor of the other two role models and I hoped her feelings wouldn’t be hurt. It turned out she didn’t read much of it. I wondered why.

I had quickly decided not to serve lunch because the mere thought of preparing something to eat for my former Homemaking teacher was too fraught with anxiety. It was bad enough that she would inspect my interior decorating. I could still remember the lecture about how to file one’s nails (in only one direction) but I knew I had missed other more relevant Homemaking tips. I had a fear of being graded again.

A few weeks later, the doorbell rang. I opened it and saw an older Mrs. Potts, but the same bubbly elfin woman I had observed so long ago—and still wearing the ponytail, now completely gray. We hugged and she sat down on the couch. I brought her up to date, briefly outlining the past fifty years or so, and she did the same. Her husband had died many years earlier, leaving her with three children. They had lived in a remodeled schoolhouse, where she was now teaching classes in bodywork and providing an occasional B&B retreat for groups wanting a bucolic place to meet. At a pause in the conversation, she looked down at her lap.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

Her big brown eyes met mine like a laser. “Why were you so angry back then?”
          It was the ghost of Jacob Marley coming back to haunt me for my misdeeds. But, needless to say, she had nailed it. I thought I was being funny and clever and hadn’t experienced it as anger.

I gave her a perfunctory, abbreviated answer but knew I’d have to think more about this. Whatever I told her was enough, apparently. We moved on to more casual conversation and she left, promising to write.

Over the next ten years or so she sent me her Xeroxed Christmas letter, adding a few personal sentences. I wrote back, telling her what I was doing. Then last December in her annual note, she said she wanted to call me and asked for my phone number.

Two months passed and I wondered if she had become ill or even had died. By now she would be eighty-seven or so, living alone in that big schoolhouse. Then the night of the Oscars, I was preparing for bed about ten o’clock when the phone rang. The caller ID told me it was E. Potts. Liddie.

“I’m so glad to hear from you. How are you?”

She told me she had been ill for more than a year, lacking energy and losing lots of weight. It didn’t sound good.

“I read your book finally and listened to the CD, trying to hear what you were trying to do with each song.”

This was a different Liddie than the one I had entertained in my living room years before. When she referred to my book, she didn’t seem to realize it had been over thirty years since it was published. She was confused. Her thoughts wandered.

“I was such a young teacher then. We aren’t so far apart in age, you know.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll be seventy-four next month.”

“That’s young!” we both laughed and then she added. “You’re the only student I’ve ever talked with outside of class. I have thought about you through the years.”

I was stunned. “Oh, yeah? Why is that?” I kept my tone of voice casual but steeled myself, afraid to hear what she might say.

Her voice grew louder. “You made it clear: ‘I don’t want to be here.’”

That made me laugh again. I guess an adolescent is no expert in subtlety. She continued, “I didn’t know what to do with you. I had taken classes in education and psychology, but I wasn’t prepared for that. Or for you.”

“Looking back on it now, I was intimidated, I think. You were pretty, effervescent, accomplished in the areas in which I had no interest or aptitude, and feminine—everything I wasn’t.”

She seemed surprised at this characterization. While I had sensed her openness to conversations like this, she didn’t seem a habitually reflective person. Then I realized she was seeking information about who she was then, just as I had been.

“You know, I told you I’m finishing up a degree in creative writing. In fact, I just had an essay published about that time in my life. I don’t mention you by name but it mentions what went on for me then. I’d be happy to send it to you, if you’d like.”

“Yeah, I would. I remember you saying when we met that you felt unattractive and fat back then but the photos in your book show you looking thin.”

“Well,” I chuckled, “Do you think I’d show the reader a photo that wasn’t flattering? But my body did change a lot, up and down. My weight was part of the power struggle between my parents. You’ll read about it when I send the essay. Maybe it’ll help answer the question you asked back then about my anger.”

Another pause, this one a little longer.

“I admire the fact you’ve found meaning in these years. I wish I could.” She went on to tell me that she never read a newspaper or watched TV and didn’t keep up with what was happening in the world because it was too distressing. I could hear the sadness in her voice.

Now we were entering the well-trod territory I had once occupied in my role as a clinical psychologist. The next comment I would make could launch me into a different type of relationship with her—helping to guide the last part of my junior high school Homemaking teacher’s life. Almost sixty years ago, she wanted so much to teach me how to be a real girl. Now, in one of life’s many ironies, I was capable of helping her learn the essential skills she would need in her final years. As I carefully chose my words, I thought of it as paying it backwards.

Pam Munter has authored several books including When Teens Were Keen: Freddie Stewart and The Teen Agers of Monogram (Nicholas Lawrence Press, 2005) and Almost Famous: In and Out of Show Biz (Westgate Press, 1986). She’s a retired clinical psychologist, former performer, and film historian. Her many lengthy retrospectives on the lives of often-forgotten Hollywood performers and others have appeared in Classic Images and Films of the Golden Age. More recently, her essays and short stories have been published in The Rumpus, The Manifest-Station, The Coachella Review, Lady Literary Review, NoiseMedium, The Creative Truth, Adelaide, Litro, Canyon Voices, Open Thought Vortex, Fourth and Sycamore, Nixes Mate, Scarlet Leaf Review, Cold Creek Review, Communicators League, I Come From The World, Switchback, The Legendary, Scarlet Leaf, Down in the Dirt and others. Her play “Life Without” was a semi-finalist in the Ebell of Los Angeles Playwriting Competition. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California at Riverside/Palm Desert. 

Two Seasons in Paradise with Joe Hollis

by Jesika Feather

Joe moves with the light gait of a man who’s spent his life wrangling brief footing from loose stones. He has a slight frame, glasses, and a cloud of gray hair that puffs out beneath his signature black beanie. His hand movements depict a lifetime spent pressing roots into soil, extracting seeds from their husks, and subtly shifting this leaf or that stalk to investigate peculiarities.

Joe’s name is generally spoken concurrently with that of his life-project: Mountain Gardens. Mountain Gardens is a wonderland, a four-acre paradise, and an archetype of the existence we self-proclaimed revolutionaries strive for. The property lies at the base of Mount Mitchell, just outside of Burnsville, North Carolina. Joe bought the land raw in 1972 and has spent the last 40 years nourishing the soil, erecting artistic infrastructure, and influencing hundreds of apprentices.

My husband and I interned at Mountain Gardens for two seasons (2004 - 2005). I was attracted to the internship because I wanted to live simply and to gain more practical skills. Because I was taking a break from teaching, I anticipated some mindless, emotionless, nature-based busywork. I imagined (pre-arrival) that weeding might be the ideal task for me. I fantasized about the black and white finality of a job well done: a bed of lettuce or a row of Echinacea starkly contrasted against the uninterrupted, dark, richness of cleared soil. It was exactly the sort of unquestionable triumph that my mind had begun to crave; like coloring inside the lines, or two plus two equals four.

But Joe’s style of gardening is not cut and dry. It’s an intuitive science; a 50/50 blend of intellect and instinct (sort of like teaching). At Mountain Gardens the line between “weed” and “not-a-weed” is a vast gray area. There are very few, if any, plants that Joe actually eradicates from his garden. Though he may ask you to weed the Agrimony from the Angelica he will, later, suggest that you collect its leaves from the odd, sporadic patches where its presence is acceptable. Agrimony (also called Soldier’s Herb) is commonly used in a poultice due to its ability to slow and stop bleeding. Until you become familiar with the ever transforming appearance of each plant and its varied healing or nutritional properties, weeding is one of the more daunting assignments at Mountain Gardens.

Joe doesn’t grow or process any individual plant in mass. He is dedicated to variety and he specializes in Chinese as well as Native medicinal plants. On his four acres Joe has developed a veining, flowering, photosynthesizing Materia Medica… a living library of plant medicine.

Each year Joe harvests seed from the hardiest specimens within his horticultural throng. He scrupulously organizes his yield into film canisters that are labeled and dated. These canisters are arranged ‘A’ to ‘Z’ in snug-fitting holes drilled into shelves that line his custom-built 6’x4’ seed cabinet. As new seeds come in, the outdated leftovers are hodgepodged into a single envelope. In the springtime this geriatric seed medley is scattered throughout the garden (another incentive to pour over those plant identification flashcards)

After my reluctant realization that this internship would actually require me to learn things and make decisions, it seemed natural to invest two years into this apprenticeship. We wanted to reap the full benefits of Joe’s teachings. Joe was a refreshing anomaly for both of us. We could have spent decades learning solely from his lifestyle.

Joe maintains a lenient attitude about… pretty much everything. He eats meat which, to many intern’s chagrin, is not always hormone free or organic. It would not even be unprecedented to discover… ghasp… the tell-tale foil wrapper of a fast food hamburger in his truck.

Even as Joe approaches his 70^th birthday, he doesn’t strive for more amenities, comforts, or conveniences. He plods simply and doggedly into his 40^th year as proprietor of Mountain Gardens, influencing his interns with the same, humble, lead-by-example teaching style. He presents himself as a problem-solving equal, never flaunting his mastery of the avant garde techniques that have become his daily routines.

Joe is a catalyst of the Permaculture movement, from before the term ‘Permaculture’ was coined. However, due to his unpretentious, almost Taoist nature, his writings and gardening practices have mostly provided flashes of insight and inspirational whispers in the ears of more prominent writers and activists.

One of Joe’s initial hurdles in 1972, before any of the infrastructure or gardening could ensue, was to pry innumerable stones from his virgin mountain property. Mountain Gardens crawls up the base of Mt. Mitchell at, quite literally, a 45 degree slant. In accordance with Joe’s use-what’s-readily-available philosophy, he incorporated nearly every one of these stones in the winding retaining walls that embrace each of his garden beds. His rock walls extend about two and a half feet high, supporting garden plots that roll approximately three and half feet back before butting into the subsequent terrace.

Joe doesn’t use mortar, though on occasion I’ve watched him press soil and the roots of rambling plants into weak segments, allowing maturing root systems to cinch the stones together. Because these forty-year-old walls are in a perpetual state of deterioration and re-construction, no intern resides long at Mountain Gardens without an extensive tutorial in the art of rock wall formation.



Mountain Gardens Pavilion

Each structure on Joe’s property is assembled with a similar piece-by-piece, meticulous regard for beauty, sound construction, and amalgamation with the natural environment. In 1984 Joe, with help from friends, hand cut every shingle for the roof of the pavilion: a spacious community structure that incorporates an extensive library and herb shop and whose roof extends further to provide coverage for a large, communal outdoor kitchen. Upon completion of the pavilion, the leftover shingles were used to cover the roof and exterior walls of an exceptionally quaint outhouse.

Even for those accustomed to “alternative spaces,” an initial glance at the pavilion will probably result in the universal first impression: “is this for real?” This space was not created to look like a wizard’s lair, but for all intents and purposes, it actually is one.

Upon scanning the table where Joe prepares Chinese tonic prescriptions for the patients of a local acupuncturist, you will notice the coffee mug containing a few pens, an herb-dusted spoon, and several dried gecko heads on wooden skewers. Like everything else in his mystical apothecary, these disconcerting leftovers are not for show. Many ancient Chinese recipes do indeed call for há jiè (dried gecko): just one reason why most of his tea consumers prefer their tea un-translated.

With the exception of the slow winter months, Joe rarely leaves Mountain Gardens. Dancing is one of the only activities, besides sustainable wildcrafting, that lures him from his property. Nearly two weeks into my internship, as I watched Joe crouched on his haunches - tending a fire, a strange familiarity in his utilitarian grace snagged a two-year-old memory to the forefront.

Long before I’d ever heard of Joe or Mountain Gardens I was at a music venue in Asheville. Though the musicians were giving us their wholehearted-all, the audience was utterly unenthused. The band made animated comments into the microphone and intensified its musical fervor. Still… the audience remained unmoved.

The lively man with gray hair was immediately conspicuous. Aside from tipping the age demographic by a good forty five years, he was clearly unaffected by the surrounding apathy. He danced with abandon. Soon enough, the band gave up on our stodgy crowd and began playing just for him.

I watched as the musicians and their nimble enthusiast transported themselves to cloud-nine. They channeled a full-on shamanic boogie while the rest of us, we humdrum leftovers, remained to fend for ourselves.

As an intern I looked forward to every drum circle, full-moon party, or spontaneous shin-dig that evoked Joe’s crazy imp jive. There were plenty of these opportunities because Joe is a virtuoso at whoopin’-it-up in the woods.

Over the years, Mountain Gardens has inspired the construction of many inventive party enhancements including a wood fired hot tub, a cob pizza oven, and a large deck that bounces under the force of ecstatic dancing.

The revelries generally commence as the hot tub achieves a reasonable temperature. As the night progresses the fire is stoked with increased zeal until only the most hard-core or the most inebriated can dip more than a toe in the celebratory broth. Joe waits until the very end, until everyone else has gone home, passed out, or sustains a healthy intimidation of the smoking hot tub. He is known for his assertion, “I don’t get naked for anything under 108.”

Perhaps it’s this propensity for scalding water that perks Joe’s vitality. Or maybe it’s his proclivity for bushwhacking up sharp inclines on regular wildcrafting expeditions. On each of these off-trail plant missions, Joe easily outpaces his interns. Seemingly unaware that his near-sprint up the mountain puts the rest of us 20-somethings to shame, he scampers along at a solid, inexhaustible clip… rather like he’s darting up a household staircase. There is nothing for us to do but pick up the pace and pray he will discover an oddly colored trillium or an unfamiliar patch of bloodroot… anything that might waylay him while we regain our breath.

Joe also puts a lot of stock in his daily intake of Gynostemma tea. Gynostemma (Jiaogulan) is a Chinese veining plant that Joe has adopted as one of his specialty herbs. It is a longevity booster with very similar chemistry to the Ginseng root. Gynostemma’s medicinal properties can be extracted from the vine and leaves and, therefore, it can be harvested far more sustainably than Ginseng which is currently verging on extinction in our native forestland.

During the 16 months that I interned at Mountain Gardens, I retained very little knowledge concerning plant medicine or gardening. Instead I was inexorably influenced by my daily interactions with a man wholly committed to his life-mission. His dedication is not based in an intellectual ideal or a nine-to-five obligation. Whether he is teaching, dancing, gardening, or re-directing a compulsive intern, Joe is wholeheartedly contributing to a positive outcome in the cosmic plot line.

In an addendum that he attached to his well-known essay, Paradise Gardening Joe wrote:

… I still hold firmly to the belief that the best way to address global warming, diversity loss and other planetary problems, the best way to address war, injustice and other social problems, and the best way for humans to live on the planet to realize our full physical, mental and spiritual potential are the same ‘way.’ Mountain Gardens is an effort to act out this theory – We are actors in a piece of ‘visionary ecological theater.’

When I think of Joe I imagine him accompanied by his ubiquitous mug of Gynostemma tea, sifting through piles of gardening literature at a table dusted in potting soil and residual root tendrils. Or I imagine him meandering through the day’s projects… repotting, seed saving, weatherizing… the seemingly minute alterations which, over time, have built his Utopia.

In a world mesmerized by quick progress and instant gratification, Joe holds a space for methodical, meaningful, real-time change. At Mountain Gardens the tedious cycles of growth, decay, and reconstruction are understood, simply, as the Earth’s stalwart style of instruction. Joe nurtures his own property with a similar relentless, unassuming nature. He is a true “Earth-style” instructor whose very life demonstrates his fundamental belief: that humans can interact courteously with the rest of this planet.

Jesika Feather is a mother, teacher, writer, and community organizer who lives in Eugene, Oregon. She enjoys living closely with brilliant, zany individuals and then writing about the ensuing rigmarole. You can find some of this in Communities Magazine or on her blog at: http://jesmamasmusings.blogspot.com.

Accordions

by Melissa Wiley

An accordion can all too easily take your breath away, and that, of course, is the danger. I was riding the New York subway the other weekend, where air is notoriously scarce, when a dark, stout man, balding though still young, sidled up beside me as I stood mid-car gripping a steel pole at its abdomen and began playing his accordion. At the moment, I was nursing one of those mild a-causal bout of melancholy that come on about a week before my menstrual period, and his music instantly altered my breathing, my own breath deepening with the accordion’s exaggerated and noisy inhalations of unaccountably fresh, ample sound waves. I couldn’t help staring, down as it happened, because he was about 3 inches shorter than me, at a large, glistening pimple insolently perched atop his left eyebrow. Soon a seat became available, and I sat down, at once perfectly gemütlich in this impromptu underground bier garden, directing my gaze upward now instead of down at the gentleman, though still a little distracted by the purulent mass raising and lowering with his eyebrows in time to the music as he ambled gaily down the car, followed closely by what I reasonably assumed were his wife and son at work collecting money in a brown newspaper cap.

The woman wore a tan sweater with a tight weave and bell sleeves and a long, flowing print skirt. She would have looked completely put together and somewhat lovely even, with her soft olive skin and light green eyes, had she not so conspicuously been not wearing a bra. The abrupt plunge of her small breasts as her nipples pointed askew like confused metal detectors within the taut tan sweater robbed it of its dignity, I couldn’t help but think a cheap cross-your-heart for her and some salicylic acid for him would have made all the difference—that and the absence of the shadow of worry on their faces, though I can’t imagine having been all open smiles myself were my own unfettered jubblies swaying quite so freely in the tunnel breeze, positioned at eye level with the seated passengers I was soliciting. But these thoughts were quickly silenced as a policeman curtly summoned them off the train at the next stop and escorted them out of the station to the muted jeers of the passengers, the ghost of the reverberating music still lingering like fraying spider silk among the metallic screeching of the train’s aging breaks.

Playing the accordion, I have always felt, is not something you can do on the sly, especially not on a crowded subway. It is, above all, an expansive, smiling instrument, a way of widening your chest and your lungs vicariously through its plodding rhythmic compressions. And whether you like its particular timbre doesn’t matter much; when it’s there, you know it, and you expand along with it to some degree. The fact that the most likely place you’ll happen upon one is at a German bier fest, two, three, or four sheets to the wind, only increases the odds of falling under its monochromatic spell. As I said, there’s no hiding from this one, and perhaps the man with the greasily climaxing mass of pus on his lower forehead should have known as much.

I had, as it happens, all too frequent encounters with a Burmese accordion during my most impressionable years. Our grammar school priest, a man we called Father John, a refugee of Myanmar, then Burma, would enter our classrooms at will, interrupting our tests in long division and American history to play songs like “Bless Me Jesus” and “This Little Light of Mine,” to which we could never sing loudly enough for his partially deafened tastes. While I was fighting against the clock for elusive traces of memory about Nathan Hale and Aaron Burr, Father John’s accordion would announce itself a mere two classrooms down, and our teacher, eyes yellowing, would whisper-scream to the class, “You are not retaking this test! If you haven’t finished it by the time Father John gets here, automatic fail.” Frantically extracting straws of surface knowledge from my hippocampus, the tempo of the encroaching song’s refrain accelerating with growing amplitude and the neighboring children’s voices metamorphosing into punctuated demonic shouts, the squeezebox-driven pressure was enough to make you throw down your number-two pencil, run screaming into the cafeteria, and drown yourself in Kool-Aid as the only legal precursor to your inevitable incipient career as a perpetually glassy-eyed patron at the local bier garden, where accordions knew their natural place. Just as Father John’s light, buoyant step crossed the classroom threshold, however, you’d scratch off the last answer, place your pencil inside its premolded slot at the top of your desk, and exhale, your face now a glowing infernal red from holding your breath to stave off the insidious influx of the chivying, caterpillar-like instrument. The accordion had nearly cost you a passing grade in history, not to mention a life of peaceable sobriety. But life, you were told by those who had lived more of it, was short, and you were prepared to be the bigger person, which even at nine years old I was easily on my way to being, Father John being the wee-est of wee Burmese men.

And in a moment, the accordion pressing its august air against the yellow cinderblocks and inflating the classroom a good 10 square feet beyond its previous test-taking proportions, you were at ease, if slightly deafened with the fresh force of the instrument’s arresting propinquity. Like all good sensory overload, however, it had the salutary effect of erasing your more distressing and entangled thoughts, thoughts of violence toward the most amiable of men, a servant of the Christian god and a refugee no less, from a place with much more textured, ethnically layered cuisine, and here he was stuck on a diet of dry cereal and corndogs in small-town Indiana. In any case, you were not supposed to mess with him, and you were glad that your hippocampus kicked in before you were driven to any irrevocable damage.

How they ever received an education in Burma, of course I didn’t know, what with their evident casual attitude toward the sanctity of the American Revolution, but I felt magnanimous in casting aside my previous frustration and shouting out “Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!” with the preternatural vocal strength of a 10-year-old Mahalia Jackson. And it was the only appropriate response, even if I hadn’t finished the test and consequently initiated my decline into the life skills curriculum. Assailed by as big an oaf of an instrument as you’re ever likely to come across, I realized, you don’t send it and its player packing off the train—you let it dilate into its natural stentorian splendor and uplift the otherwise drab subterranean train ride. You don’t wear a bra and you let it shine.

But the authorities eventually caught up with Father John as well. In addition to the accordion, his other, dueling passion was King’s Island, a theme park in Ohio a tantalizing two hours away by freeway in his speeding orange-striped station wagon. He would invite up to six lucky children at a time to escape with him there every weekend with clement conditions, when he would forego the more immediate physical thrill of the water slides and roller coasters and even the gentler pleasures of the carousel for the shadier carnival games. For a singularly diminutive man, Father John had quite the arm and tossed brightly painted ping pong balls into goldfish jars as well as heavier dusty orbs into convulsively shifting hoops for six, seven, eight hours on end, crushing his enormous plunder of stiff-limbed stuffed animals into a storage container on top of his vehicle. His personal residence, the parish rectory, was an opulent three-story house with stippled flesh-colored paint. Anyone without a mania for acquiring life-size Styrofoam-filled panda bears and plush Smurfs with pert pug noses would have easily left at least five rooms hollow and uninhabited. But Father John had adorned them all with the cynosure, the fuzzy, cheap sunlight of every materialistic child’s eye. Piled to the ceiling in lampless room after room, labyrinthine catacombs of frozen plastic-eyed playfulness that would not decay for centuries, his seraglio of faux fur flesh formed an ever-smiling audience for his accordion practice. I took home dozens of toys at his insistence. One, a peach bear in a navy blue cheer leader costume with a matching bow, I only gave away to the Salvation Army this year, at the age of 33.

When I was in my early-twenties and living in Chicago, my mother told me over the phone one Sunday afternoon that Father John had been accused of stealing tens of thousands of dollars in funds from the parish. Nothing incriminating I believe was ever proved, but it also came to light that, presumably in the months when King’s Island closed its gates, he plied his dexterous right arm to the craps table at the local casino, temporarily leaving his accordion and his coterie of stuffed animals behind. His superiors swiftly relocated him to another parish, ostensibly without either a children’s theme park or another nearby means of testing his limits with Lady Luck. But may God give them adult acne for ever evermore if they took away his accordion.

So in my experience at least, playing the accordion and pressing your luck go very much hand in hand. There is a trenchant vulnerability, a mordant plea for gaiety in one who straps a squeeze box onto his chest and commences playing such an instrument, sending out obstreperous cornpone melodies into the ether in a New York subway or from a provincial church altar minutes before transubstantiating a host of bread into the body of Christ. There can be no false starts here with the accordion, however many there may be elsewhere, in the background of life. Whatever drove that man in the subway and his son and braless wife to seek money among strangers for a rousing few bars of “Roll out the Barrel” or whatever similar tune he played, he was not lying low with his volcanic pimple, gripping a steel pole at its abdomen, breathing shallowly in the cloistered, damp air, and keeping his eyes on the gum cemented into the floor grooves. He was making melodic, moronic waves that made me smile. For the few moments he was there, there was more air in the overcrowded train car as a result. And that's perhaps worth betting on.

Melissa Wiley is a freelance food and culture writer living in Chicago. When not minding her Ps and Qs, she seizes every opportunity to remove her shoes and walk barefoot with half-painted toenails through airport security in pursuit of global opportunities to dance, draw, laugh, and gape. She also volunteers as a literacy tutor and endangers children’s lives when flying her kite at full mast along the beach.

 

Practical Joke

by Murray Edwards

It was the era when swallowing goldfish and sitting atop flagpoles made you a big man on campus. At the height of the Depression, college students struggled to pay for their education and living expenses, leaving little additional cash for extracurricular entertainment.  Ever resourceful, the young men and women, who later gained fame as “The Greatest Generation,” developed their own inexpensive diversions - dancing in all-night marathons, listening to network radio shows, and playing harmless pranks on one another. 

My father, Weldon Edwards, and his best friend, Les Stephenson, learned to swallow goldfish at McMurry College, a tiny Methodist school in West Texas.  As famous as that made them around campus, they acquired an even bigger name by mastering the art of the practical joke.  Honing their skills on naïve freshmen and should-have-known-better sophomores, these aw-shucks farm boys tested the patience of college faculty and administrators, themselves the victims of periodic tomfoolery.  

On one occasion, Weldon and Les borrowed a Holstein cow from a local dairy farmer and stashed her in the backyard of a friend’s house near campus.  Around midnight, they haltered the compliant bovine and sneaked her into the darkened Administration Building, leading her up the columned stairs and into the college president’s office.  When the straight-laced administrator opened his oak-paneled door the next morning, he was greeted by a cud-chewing Holstein heeding nature’s call on the polished marble floor.  Having a good idea who was responsible for the stunt, the president immediately summoned the two farm boys into his office.  Without admitting their roles in the caper, they helped clean up the mess and led the Holstein back down the stairs.

Employing animals in an altogether different fashion, incoming freshmen were targets for the pair’s signature stunt.  Les, the set-up man, warned newly arriving students about the “crazy” senior living upstairs in the dormitory.  It was possible the upperclassman had contracted rabies and hydrophobia as the result of a recent skunk bite.  Should there be an incident, Les gravely noted, it would be every man for himself.  Later in the week, Weldon appeared on the freshmen floor of the dormitory dressed only in his undershorts, with toothpaste foaming from his mouth.  Yelling gibberish and brandishing a starter’s pistol he liberated from the track team, the “rabid” senior chased the gullible underclassmen down the hallways and out the front door.  Presumably, most of them returned to finish the semester.

Female students also endured their fair share of collegiate high jinks.  The farm boys purchased a damaged coffin from a local undertaker and stashed their pine box in the trunk of Les’ car.  Double dating with two wide-eyed and unsuspecting freshmen, Weldon and Les began the evening by acting the part of sophisticated seniors promising to show the girls around town.  Gradually, the boys’ All-American demeanor changed into something much more sinister.  Over the course of the night, they talked cryptically of “needing to dispose of a problem” and “finding a suitable location.”  Eventually parking on a secluded country road, Weldon and Les excused themselves to the back of the car, where they dramatically unloaded the coffin and dumped it into the roadside ditch.  When the terrified coeds demanded an explanation, the pair reluctantly admitted they worked for gangsters and were disposing of “someone who had double-crossed the boss.”  It’s a safe guess the girls refused a second date with the pseudo hit men.

Somehow amidst the jokes the pair completed  their educations, and after graduating with a degree in education, Les became the superintendent of a small country school in Denton Valley, an unincorporated settlement about twenty miles southeast of Abilene.  Weldon returned to his family’s ranch, also near Denton Valley, and assumed the life of a college-educated rancher, an unusual credential for those days.  Although the two remained close friends, their girthy repertoire of practical jokes slimmed down to occasional stunts involving unsuspecting church friends and ranch hands.

In January of 1941, with the country shuffling and mobilizing for war, the Denton Valley School found itself in need of a new English teacher.  In those last painful days of the Great Depression, as jobs remained scarce, the local school board limited teacher employment to “heads of households,” defined as  unmarried women or married men.  According to the unenlightened policy of that time, if a single woman chose to marry, her employment immediately terminated in favor of someone deemed “more necessitous” of the position. 

As superintendent, Les asked Weldon to accompany him to interview teacher candidates at Howard Payne College, a small liberal arts school about 60 miles away in Brownwood.  Aside from being Les’s best friend, Weldon’s qualifications as an interviewer aren’t entirely clear.  He wasn’t a school board member or an administrator, and his expertise extended to Herefords, not Shakespeare.   

In respecting the Denton Valley School Board’s policy, the two college buddies exclusively interviewed unmarried female graduates, with Les introducing Weldon as his “special advisor.”  One English major in particular caught the attention of both men—Dorothy Jean Soules, an attractive, enthusiastic nineteen-year-old senior from a small community in Central Texas.  Decades later, she would remember the handsome interviewers, only five years older than herself, seemed less interested in her transcript and resume, and more focused on how well she filled out her sweater and skirt. 

After consulting with his special advisor, Les offered Miss Soules the teaching position on the spot.  Her employment was subject to the approval of the school board, he explained, and would require a contract provision that should she marry, her job would immediately terminate. 

Before accepting his offer, the senior coed questioned Les about the school, her duties, and responsibilities.  Worried that she might seem inconsiderate by leaving Weldon out of the conversation, she asked whether there would be a room or an apartment to rent somewhere in town. 

The cowboy-turned-education-expert immediately suggested the president of the school board and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Barton.  They boarded teachers on occasion and, coincidentally, lived directly across the road from his family’s ranch.  Trying his best not to sound too eager, he offered to introduce Miss Soules to his neighbors.  Hesitating for a moment, he added that Denton Valley was not really a town, since it no longer had a post office, but was more of a settlement.  Weldon hoped she wouldn’t be disappointed in living in a rural area.  

The prospective teacher knew all about country life, she said, from growing up on a ranch and graduating from a school about the size of Denton Valley.  Unfortunately, she didn’t own an automobile and would need transportation to and from work.  Would she be able to ride the school bus? 

After receiving a positive response regarding her transportation, and with no other job prospects in sight, the young lady accepted Les’ offer of employment.  After all, a paycheck was a paycheck.

A week later, even though she’d never seen her new school, Dorothy Jean Soules packed her bags and moved to West Texas.  Delivered by her parents to the intersection of two lonesome gravel roads, and spotting the neglected, weather-beaten signpost that read “Denton Valley,” she surely must have second-guessed her career decision.  Besides the cream-colored flagstone school, then comprised of only eleven grades, the settlement consisted of an exhausted cotton gin; two paint-peeled, clap-boarded churches; a long-abandoned blacksmith shop, and a barn-like country store which sold fresh eggs, ammunition, and gasoline.  Sadly, the most attractive feature of Denton Valley seemed to be its cemetery, a postcard-worthy patch of land with native post-oak trees randomly interspersed among the uncrowded rows of tombstones.

After the new teacher settled into the Barton family’s spare bedroom, Les and Weldon immediately competed for her attention.  Both quickly decided against swallowing goldfish or performing other stunts to impress her, because unlike the flighty freshmen of their college days, this woman was different—confident and poised, and although possessing a playful sense of humor, she displayed little regard for sophomoric pranks. 

Despite being only a few years older than most of her charges, Miss Soules demanded hard work and exceptional performance.  She encouraged the students to broaden their horizons and consider careers that seemed beyond reach.  Decades later, these same students—now doctors, lawyers, and prominent business people—would continue to communicate with their favorite teacher, often commenting on her influence on their lives.

During the day at school, Les pressed his advantage of working with the new teacher, but Weldon’s proximity to her boarding house gave him the upper hand in the evenings.  The courting rivalry, always good-natured, continued throughout early 1941, with the young men agreeing that no matter who won her heart, they would remain close friends.  Both admitted it would be a difficult promise to keep. 

Gradually, the young teacher’s affections favored Weldon; but since Les employed her, she hesitated to suggest he was losing the battle, for fear he would not extend her contract. 

Just before the end of the spring semester, the superintendent gathered all the teachers into the school lunchroom and presented them with renewal contracts for the 1941-42 school term.  Consistent with prior agreements, it retained the prejudicial clause regarding teachers remaining single.  On April 23, 1941, Miss Soules signed her contract, which was approved and counter-signed by the school board president, Mr. Barton, as well as her superintendent, Les. 



Dorothy Jean and Weldon Edwards



Then, two days later and barely four months after arriving in Denton Valley, Miss Soules and Weldon eloped to Breckenridge, some 60 miles away, in what must have been the most dangerous and exhilarating weekend of their lives.  Secretly married by the justice of the peace, they kept their nuptials quiet until the end of the school year.  Dorothy Jean continued to work for the superintendent and live in the school board president’s spare room, as if nothing had happened, but rendezvousing with Weldon whenever possible.  Les must have wondered why his favorite teacher’s affections toward him suddenly cooled and why she was no longer available for courting.

After the school term ended, the newlyweds revealed their marriage to the flabbergasted superintendent.  Hoping Les would honor their commitment to remain buddies, Weldon explained it as a “practical” joke—practical in the sense that Les would have been forced to fire his best friend’s bride had he known the facts.  Les, heartbroken over losing out to Weldon, was nevertheless a good sport and wished the couple well.  He immediately set about recruiting a replacement English teacher—this time without his special advisor.

That fall, Dorothy Jean managed to secure a position at Eula, another country school nearby, but one without the antiquated requirement of teachers having to be the “head of the household.”  In time, she would retire from education to concentrate on raising three sons, including this writer, and helping Weldon on their cattle ranch.  Eventually, the community of Denton Valley, as well as its school, would dissolve into a distant but pleasant memory, memorialized only by a roadside marker at the picturesque country cemetery.

Pearl Harbor would change the Greatest Generation’s focus from sitting atop flagpoles and swallowing goldfish to more weighty matters—building thousands of bombers and tanks, retaking the shores of Normandy, and defending obscure Pacific islands. 

Shortly after the United States declared war, Les left Denton Valley for service to his country.  After the war ended, he settled in Dallas and pursued a career in the natural gas business.  He found and married a love of his own, but continued his special relationship with Weldon and Dorothy Jean for the next 60 years.  Maintaining an active friendship through those years, the now-mature farm boys continued to play jokes on their friends, and occasionally, even their wives.  But none would ever surpass the “practical” joke Weldon and Dorothy Jean played on Les in the spring of 1941.

Murray Edwards pretends to be an agricultural commodity trader when he's not pretending to be a West Texas rancher.  His first book of short fiction, Looking for Lucy Gilligan, won a silver quill award and was named one of the ten best Texas books for 2009.

Becoming His Hands

by Mark Hummel

He was a teacher.  I knew him, as so often we know our teachers, only in that context.  I knew nothing of him beyond the classroom, knew nothing of his past or his family.  Mr. Reed taught Mechanical Drawing to pimply-faced teenagers.  I knew him for one semester my sophomore year of high school.  I was in his presence for one hour each day, first hour, a time of day when most high school students remain asleep whether or not they are physically present.  Mr. Reed made first hour bearable and he made the products of drafting boards beautiful.  He was a teacher, one of the teachers I liked and respected, and, unlike most of his colleagues, even many of the good ones, he treated his students with respect.  He was one such teacher of several I was fortunate enough to have, among them, Mrs. Kouris, Mrs. Garcia, Mr. Botoroff.  Probably most students rarely get one such teacher.  I count myself lucky.  Mr. Reed made first hour bearable in part by allowing us to listen to music while we worked, so long as the class agreed on the music and so long as we finished our work.  This was 1977, and “Hotel California” had been released the Christmas before, and everything I recall about Mr. Reed and mechanical drawing is wrapped up in my enduring love of that album.  It is a wonder that love persists given how often we played The Eagles that year and a greater wonder that I’ve spent a good part of my adult life trying to be half as good of a teacher as Mr. Reed was.

While I knew virtually nothing about the man, I did know, we all knew, that he was sick, sick in such a way that he was frail, a man as thin as the mechanical pencils that marked his trade.  He had a quavering voice and difficulty controlling his fine motor skills.  He was sick in a way that could have set him up for the ridicule of high school males testing misplaced superiority onto authority, but instead he was the kind of teacher who we wanted to please.  Beyond the transitory recognition of his illness, I was typically high school ignorant.  Selfish.  If pushed, perhaps I knew his aliment was A.L.S., Lou Gehrig’s disease, but I certainly did not meaningfully understand the severity of his disease or calculate it as a death sentence.  He showed up without fail each morning as we expected teachers to do, drank his coffee at his desk, and every day he added a new layer of difficulty to the drafting assignments, just as every day once we started to work he quietly asked Phil Lucero to turn the music down a notch so as not to disturb the other classes.  Each day he offered a smile to weary teens, added an assignment that would challenge our limited abilities, and suggested a few, quiet words of advice experience at the drafting table had taught him.  Only as an adult do I begin to understand how much pain he must have been in, how he must have felt that his life was slowly being erased, day by day.  Only now can I recognize that his disease had already forced him into an early official retirement and he now taught a class or two out of devotion or habit or need, not quite letting go of that life he’d once had.

Looking back, I cannot tell if there was some facet of his disease that aided in the fondness and respect our class felt for Mr. Reed or if there was something innate within him that had always garnered such respect from students.  I knew him only, as is usually the case with our teachers, in the moment of my passing through those school halls.  He was the sort of teacher we labeled as “cool,” our highest compliment.  Who else let students listen to music as they worked on their own?  But beyond “cool” he was the sort of teacher you wished to make happy.  You wanted him to be proud of the work you produced.  Everyone in the room sought his praise.

This was years before computer-aided software replaced hard skill.  Mr. Reed was a perfectionist without ever saying so, a trait common to a profession that produced sheathes of precise documents for others who must then build the things the documents mapped in all their dimensions.  It was the sort of class where you were expected to master the precision with how you labeled and lettered your drawings long before you were deemed ready to add complexity to the drawings themselves.  It was a smartly conceived course that built week upon week and offered additional difficulty after each small success.  Every element had an exact placement and logic behind that placement.  Every line had an expected weight and heft.  Every pencil had an exact job to accomplish.  We learned precision.  We learned to raise our own expectations.

Sometimes, however, the world is cruel.  How often do the brightest minds develop Alzheimer’s?  How many musicians have gone deaf?  So often it is the most energetic among us who are cursed with MS.  Before it stole other things, A.L.S. robbed Mr. Reed of his hands.  So we, his students, became the hands he could no longer command.

Each morning Mechanical Drawing began with a demonstration, the development of a drawing for instruction in a particular technique or technical detail.  Mr. Reed chose one of the two or three best students in the class and had the rest gather around that student’s drafting table.  He stood behind the student, who was seated on a tall stool, and took hold of the student’s hands.  Then slowly, carefully, precisely, he guided the hands, one sliding the square, one gripping the fingers that held the pencil, and using those hands buildings and machines and intricate mechanical parts and tangles of electrical circuits emerged.  When a template was needed, or a compass or ruler or a heavier weight of lead required, he call out simple, precise instructions like a surgeon requesting an instrument.



Cheyenne Central High School, 1975 Yearbook



His hands wavered and quavered within the space of open air, but once they took hold of yours the trembling settled and you were surprised at the strength of his grip, the guiding power of his hand.  I am certain every student wanted to be chosen to become Mr. Reed’s hands.  Chosen, you negotiated the new terrain of allowing your own hands to become a conduit, found a balance point between executing the line the hand on top of yours requested and placing enough confidence in the steadiness of your own hand to complete that bidding.  The feeling was altogether foreign. He whispered commands, trying to stay a millimeter ahead of your hand, and you listened with absolute concentration. At the end of a demonstration, just before Mr. Reed distributed completed drawings of the next assignment and told Philip Lucero to cue the day’s music, often you marveled at the work before you on the table, and you felt the press of his hands long after they left yours.

Mr. Reed stopped teaching altogether after that year, and we heard news of his death a few years later, but if I try hard enough, I can still recall the press of his hands guiding mine.

(Mark Hummel is the editor of bioStories.)