As I walked to school holding tight to my mother's hand, I could hardly contain my excitement. I was going to school finally, that meant I was really a big girl now! I got to go to kindergarten for the morning class, and right after Christmas, I'd be going to the afternoon class. My teacher was an older woman, short, white hair and stocky; I fell in love with her that day. She was the kindest person I had ever known, and she loved kids. She didn't talk down to us, she spoke to us as if we were good friends who stopped by to say hi. Before the year was over, she would suffer a parent's worst nightmare before saving another parent from the nightmare she was still going through.
The school was about a hundred years old, it was dark, chilly and had big square registers in the middle of the hallways and classrooms. The first and second floors weren't too bad, but the basement was really scary; the basement was where kindergarten was located, as well as the restrooms for all of the school kids. I loved kindergarten and the kids in my class and especially my teacher. She walked us down the old basement corridors to the restrooms and waited for us to finish.
I was never afraid of the basement, but the restrooms were a different story. I can still see the long row of stalls on the right of the narrow corridor and the single stark lightbulb that hung from the center of the corridor. It didn't shed much light, so you couldn't really see what was in the stall with you, and that in itself was a blessing in disguise. I thought I saw something big and hairy in the corner of the stall one day while I was sitting on the toilet; I would have made an Olympic Scout proud as I sped down the corridor past my teacher and ran into our classroom.
By the time our teacher caught up to me, I was sitting at my desk, underpanties still not pullled up all the way. I was too young at the time to be embarrassed, I was just glad to be back in the classroom and away from the restroom stalls. After that day, I never went to the bathroom at school again until I was in the second grade. My bladder was ready to burst when I finally got home from school each day, but I didn't care. I would have wet my pants before I went back into the scary restrooms; I had heard several other kids talking about the things they had seen lurking in the stall corners and that was the end of using the schools restrooms for me for a couple of years.
Before I knew it, autumn arrived bringing cooler days and chilly nights. We had to wear light-weight jackets to school when the weather turned cooler, and our teacher showed us where to hang them before school started. We hung them above a stone bench that sat across from our classroom, and while the other kids grabbed their jackets and hurried outside for recess I was carefully checking the inside and arms of mine for any sign of creepy hairy bugs. My teacher had been watching me and asked me once why I was so afraid of bugs and spiders; I didn't have a good answer other than they just scared me. An answer that almost cost me my life a few months later.
Fear and sympathy aren't emotions that most five year olds have experience with, so when I walked into my classroom early the week before Christmas break and saw my teacher sitting at her desk crying, I was scared. She hadn't seen me, she had her hands over her eyes, crying quietly. I backed out of the room and went across the hall and sat down on the stone bench. One of the older girls from second grade was talking to another girl from the fifth grade about something that had happened to my teacher's son, but they saw me and started spelling so I didn't know what they were saying. But I knew it wasn't good, that much even a little kid like me could understand.
Later that night I asked my mom if she knew what my teacher had been crying about and she shooed me off to bed without answering my question. For the next few weeks my teacher looked so sad that I wanted to just hug her and tell her everything would be ok, you know, like my mom did for me when I fell and scraped my knee. Then one afternoon I had to use the restrooms at school, there was no way I was going to make it through until I got home. I rushed into the first stall and sat down and closed my eyes tight so I wouldn't see anything that might be crawling around on the floor. Then I heard the girls talking outside the stall I was in about how terrible the accident with my teacher's son had been.
I forgot about the creepy stall and the hairy spiders as I listened to the girls talking about "the accident" my teachers son had been in. I didn't understand what they were talking about, they were using words I hadn't heard before so I ran all the way home after school to ask my mother what the words meant. She was at the sink peeling potatoes when I came into the kitchen, winded and sweaty. I can still see her face as she turned to me when I asked her, "Mommy, what does discharged mean? I heard the older girls at school saying the teacher's son was cleaning his gun after hunting, and it discharged in his face. What does that mean? Is that why my teacher was crying, because he got hurt?"
My mother sat down and pulled me onto her lap and explained that my teacher's son had been cleaning his gun after hunting, and didn't realize it was still loaded. Somehow he accidentally pulled the trigger and the gun discharged in his face ,which meant it went off in face and killed him. I couldn't quite grasp what my mother was telling me, how could my teacher's only child be dead when he was going off to college next year? What I my mother didn't tell me and I didn't know until years later was that my teacher's son was cleaning his gun in their kitchen as he talked to his parents about hunting. They both saw the gun go off and instantly kill their only child.
For weeks after my mother told me what had happened to my teacher's son, it just didn't sink in as to what a terrible loss my teacher and her husband had suffered; I was five years old and the world still pretty much revolved around me and my life. Then I did something I knew was wrong by stealing a nickle from my mother's coin jar and went to the corner store by my school. I bought the one thing I knew I wasn't allowed to have because they weren't in my mother's opinion "safe for little kids to eat". I bought five cents worth of a red, round flat licorice type candy called licorice coins. I had never done anything like that before, and for some reason, at the time I didn't care.
I shoved the bag of candy into my coat pocket after I had removed one and popped it into my mouth. It tasted pretty darn good to me, and I thought again about my mother's warning not to eat them. With a shrug, I sucked on the candy and enjoyed the sweet taste of red licorice. I was still sucking on the candy when I went into the school and sat down on the stone bench beside two of the older girls. After a few moments, I realized how thirsty I was and went to the drinking fountain outside the door to our classroom. After only a few sips of water, I turned to go back to the stone bench to sit down until I finished the candy; I took two steps when I started to choke on the candy that had slid down my throat and was now stuck.
The two girls on the bench looked at me funny as I staggered back to the bench, eyes wide and scared to death. I couldn't breath and I was trying to tell them what had happened so they could help me. No words came out, and I was close to passing out from lack of oxygen when my teacher stepped out of the classroom to usher all of us little ones into her room. The two girls had jumped up and were shouting for somebody to help me; they didn't know what was wrong, they just knew something was wrong. My teacher ran over to me and asked what was wrong, the girls didn't know and I was on the verge of blacking out.
She was in my face, asking me if I had seen another spider and had gotten scared again; I didn't want to get into trouble for having the forbidden candy, so I nodded yes. She straightened up and I remember her saying something about it being time to get over my fear of bugs as she told me to come into the class room. She was walking away and I was dying. I was clutching my throat and making some sort of weird noise that made her turn around. The next thing I knew, I was hanging upside down. My teacher had realized that I was choking on something and reacted the only way she knew how; she had literally grabbed me and flipped me upside down and slammed her fist into the small of my back, and the candy popped out and shot across the bench.
She told my mother later that she thought I was just scared because I had seen another spider or bug until she saw that I was turning blue and unable to breath. When she hit me in my back it dislodged the piece of candy and I remember gagging and throwing up. My teacher set me upright and sat down on the bench as she pulled me close to her. I don't know who was shaking worse, her or me. It was a long time after that before I finally understood what she had been saying as she tried to get the candy dislodged from my throat. Over and over I heard her say, "Please Dear God, don't let me lose her, please not her too".
He heard her and helped her to save my life, and for that I will be eternally grateful. As I grew older, I often wondered why she had to lose her son and why God hadn't kept him safe for her. I loved her all the more for what she did for me that day, and I always felt sad after that when I thought about her son and how he was the only child she had and now he was gone. I kept in touch with her as I grew older, and I felt a mixture of sadness and gladness when she passed away six years ago at the age of 90.
Sadness that she was gone, but gladness because I knew she was reunited with her son and husband after all of these years. She had given so much to her kindergarten children down through the years, and had taught their children and some of their grandchildren as well. My kindergarten teacher was one of a kind; even though she had suffered a loss that no parent would ever want to experience, she still kept her school children safe and out of harms' way as much as she could.
I never had a clue as to what my teacher went through when she lost her son, and then 49 years later, almost to the day, I lost one of my sons to an accident and finally understood what she must have felt. Even through the pain and sorrow, my kindergarten teacher was a sweet loving woman who I still miss dearly. I smile when I think of her because I know someday I will see her and my son and we'll all be together again.