I had an early appointment this morning, and I was stunned when I went outside. The air was so humid I had trouble getting a deep breath. Nothing moved: not a leaf, not a branch and not a bird. Even they were quiet. I jumped into the car and got the AC blasting just so I could breathe. This humidity has to stop. We need a dry day. Even one dry day would make all of us happy and much less grumpy.

The sky goes from sunny to cloudy. I actually have no preference. I wish the cloudy meant rain, but it doesn’t and hasn’t.

After I learned I couldn’t be a priest, I decided to be a teacher. Professional women in my younger days were generally teachers or nurses, but I didn’t know I was bound by these choices. I just figured you could be whatever it was you wanted to be, and I wanted to be a teacher. These women were my heroes. They had such power they could bring me back to attention with a single look or word. They also had these amazing talents like being able to see behind them, identifying whisperers without looking up from their desks and writing straight and beautifully on the blackboard. That was the one I envied the most. No matter how hard I concentrated, my blackboard writing tended to angle up so high I almost couldn’t reach it, and the letters were so cramped you couldn’t read them. Teachers always knew all the answers. Stump the teacher was a game doomed to failure. I knew by the time I was ten that I would be a teacher.

I started college on the teaching track but got sidelined junior year. The law grabbed me with such intensity that teaching faded from my memory. I saw myself as a female Perry Mason confounding my Hamilton Burger with legal tricks pulled from my magician’s hat, tricks which always showed the innocence of my client and exposed the guilty.

Senior year I applied to law school and to the Peace Corps, even got an offer for a teaching job, but it was the Peace Corps pulling me. It just seemed the right thing to do: to give a paltry two years for the life I’d had and the opportunities I’d been given. When I was accepted, I was so joyful I wanted to run up and down the streets announcing my good fortune to the world. I was also accepted into law school but decided to defer if I could for the two years. I could, and I did.

I taught for those two years and couldn’t imagine spending my life doing anything else. I never went to law school though I still think Perry Mason and I have a lot in common. Instead, I chose to teach, and “…that has made all the difference.”

This entry was posted on August 14, 2018 at 11:47 am and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.