35 YEARS OF TEACHING - a retrospective of sorts

THE BEGINNING AND THE END…FIRST AND LAST DAY….

Christmas vacation, 1971, soon to be 1972. 

       A weekday in a chilly, empty school.  I was sitting in an old wooden chair with casters in room C213, central wing, Clifton Senior High School, in what was going to be my first classroom.  Four classes: two junior English honors, one A-track, one C-track.  Only four classes because the elderly woman that I was replacing halfway through the school year had been in poor health and her department chairman had given her one fewer class than everyone else, replacing it with a hall-monitor duty that amounted to little.

       I had just finished my student teaching in the senior (or north) wing in the week before Thanksgiving break, and had evidently made a good impression on Mrs. Rudin, the English department chairman, who had come in to observe me six times, not the usual procedure dictated by my college. My cooperating teacher had left me (gladly) with her least desirable three classes (two D-track, one C-track), keeping her two A-tracks for herself.  Two days of “observing” her right at the start of the school year – the observations amounting to hearing her yell a lot while handing out books and forms to be filled out – I had told her I was ready to start on that Thursday, September 7^th.

                “You want to take over a class tomorrow?!” she had asked with some surprise in her voice, having been used to other student-teachers who had observed for two weeks before taking anything on.
                “No, give me all three.  I want to get started now,” I had replied, explaining that since it was the beginning of the year, I would be more like their teacher from the beginning instead of replacing her a couple weeks in.  I wanted to start teaching; I had done enough “observing.”
                So she gladly left, only to reappear twice in the following two-and-a-half months to do the required (by my college) two teacher observations and fill out the accompanying forms.  But she had also raved about me to Mrs. Rudin (I guess she had heard some kids talking about my classes) and without my knowledge, they had already decided that I would replace Mrs. Eckstein, hence Mrs. Rudin’s stern request to me that I not accept any job offers from other schools between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.  I also found out later that year that students in my cooperating teacher’s other two classes had constantly bugged her about why they hadn’t gotten me for their teacher, too.  If I never mentioned it, Mrs. Moeller was long overdue for retirement, not because of her age as much as the fact that she hadn’t changed her teaching in twenty years…some of the worksheets she had offered to me had been brown with age.  But she did give me an A for student-teaching, glowing reports to my college, and was instrumental in landing me in that creaking wooden chair that I was now occupying in room C213.

                After what had begun four months before in a different wing of the school, now I was sitting in what was to be and would become, on January 3^rd, my classroom.  I stared at the class lists on the nicked and scarred wooden desk in front of me.  I had read the brief notes my predecessor had left for me, about which kids might give me trouble.  She liked to use the word imps a lot.  But considering the level of homogeneously-tracked classes I had inherited (Clifton Senior High School had made English classes in ability groupings, from Honors down to D-track), and being in a suburban New Jersey school that sent 97% of its graduates (average graduating class: 1,000-plus to four-year schools, many of them Ivy-covered ones, I didn’t foresee problems.  After all, I hadn’t had any with the three classes of “sweathogs” that I had received from Mrs. Moeller, my cooperating teacher.  In fact, those three classes would be ones that threw me such memorable goodbye parties on November 22^nd  that I would never forget them – the parties or the kids. 

                  The D-track kids used to like to say that the school gave them that designation because “it stands for Delinquent…Degenerate…Derelict…Doofus…or just Dumb.”  These were kids that were able to understand, to read, and to actually enjoy Beowulf; they hated Ethan Frome.  They couldn’t understand why Ethan didn’t just “boink” Mattie when Ethan’s wife Zeena was out of town. I had tried to explain the morality of the time period, but….and I still don’t think that one D-track class paid for the Seiko watch they gave me…but I was afraid to ask how they managed to raise the money. And yeah, it was a real Seiko, not a New York City sidewalk knock-off with plastic gears.
                So in a few days, the day after New Year’s Day, I would meet four classes (average of 25 in each) of students that I would be able to call “my kids” and not kids that I would have to return to another teacher, like books at the library.

                The room itself, one wall made of tilt-in windows covered with banks of Venetian blinds, the rest painted cinder blocks with attached chalkboards and a bulletin board along the back, smelled faintly of chalk dust and floor wax.  The desks were relatively new, with chairs that slid under them instead of the old one-piece desks that I would inherit in subsequent years in subsequent classrooms. (We never got to keep the same classrooms from year to year, one of the numerous annoyances perpetrated but an unfriendly-to-teachers administration, led behind the scenes by a vindictive and evil assistant female principal who preferred women (both in her little coterie and in her sex life).  It was always a real thrill trying to find a janitor who wasn’t on “light duty” to help move the full, three-drawer file cabinet to the next rooms at the beginning of each year, the new room which was often on another floor; the custodians were trusted with keys to the elevator, but we college graduates, most with master’s degrees, were not.  The principal himself was a spineless ex-shop teacher who had been appointed by the politically connected (and politically appointed) superintendent to be a complete ‘yes man.”  When the principal took one of his very infrequent walks out of his office (which was far removed from where any learning was going on) just before Christmas break to wish each of us a “happy holiday” (he was Jewish), kids would always ask who the man was.  One year, a kid named Stanley thought he was Bela Lugosi.

                Anyway, the kids came back on January 3^rd that year.  It was a magical and challenging year and I remember almost every memorable kid from those four classes.  And the rest is history -- ten more years of Clifton history.

                THIRTY-FIVE YEARS PASS….

                Last day of school, June 2^nd 2006…first day of almost summer vacation. 

             A weekday in an air-conditioned, almost-empty school.  I was sitting in a slightly stained, upholstered, high-back chair with casters that a former principal had bequeathed to me when he got a better one.  The lights were still on in room 121, the inner, windowless classroom that I had occupied for 24 years, the only classroom I had occupied, so it had become the room where “MR. B’S BUNCH” had resided for those years as well, filing in for 180 days under the sign that announced “Through this door pass the greatest people in the world.”  They’d liked that for all those years…at least, most of them, I think.

                It was a room that had developed its own character – probably because of the character who taught there…a room filled with unimaginable stuff – more like the interior of a thrift store, if you disregarded the school desks: a grill from the front of a VW, a hanged teddy bear with a sign that read “SLACKER,”  a rack of sweaters hanging from the ceiling, sweaters for the girls who were always too cold for some reason…too much else to record here -- hanging from the ceiling in defiance of one psychotic fire marshall who had mistaken her fire marshall’s badge for Wyatt Earp’s.  A toilet seat that served as the bathroom pass (“Place over head” it said for the gullible).  The two full-glassed walls covered with posters and signs to keep the distractions passing outside in the halls to a minimum; two full file cabinets bursting with the accumulation of file folders filled with stuff that had been part of successful lessons.  Three bookcases and one tall turning stand stuffed with paperbacks and discarded library hardcovers; three separate tables scrounged and carried up from the dusty storeroom in the basement.  A computer table;  a cabinet like a shelved wardrobe.  And a huge old solid-oak desk once used by the IRS, purchased at a school auction for $40, the top sanded, stained, and refinished twice. 

                     ROOM 121, LOUISA COUNTY HIGH SCHOOL, “MR. B’S ROOM”

        

               On that June day, almost everything was gone; all the posters and personal stuff given away, purchased, or auctioned off to either students or other teachers, enough to buy a used laptop on eBay for $170.  All that remained were the pieces of school-issued and county-owned stuff: student desks, the flag, the computer and printer on the one table...and that stained chair. 

                As I sat in that hand-me-down chair, the sounds of lockers slamming shut and the last students dashing out of school on that last half-day, I thought back to what I had begun this whole experiment in mind-expansion with.  It didn’t seem like thirty-five years.  And I thought of my best friend John’s remark from a few years before, a man I had met and had immediately liked in my first year in Jersey. 

                “Remember old Mr. Hopkins when we first started?” John had asked.  Mr. Hopkins, an elderly history teacher who knew, on any day of the year, how many school days were left.
                “Did you ever think we’d be one of those ‘veterans,’ those old-timers?” John had added.
                I’d laughed a little ruefully and had shaken my head.
               Yeah, I thought about all of that…and all of the lessons I had taught, year after year, lessons that students had annually told me, on their written evaluations of me and my class – whether it was an English class or a writing course -- had had meaning for them.

“It’s over.  I’m never going to be doing this again,” I thought, and the feeling of the stress beginning to leave my body became replaced with some kind of panic.

“Who’s gonna teach them to write?!” The Voice asked me.  “Who’s gonna teach that stuff from Our Town and Huck and Beowulf?  The rest of them (referring to my “colleagues” at the time) don’t teach writing, they don’t teach grammar, they don’t do a damn thing or bring in a damn thing from outside the textbooks!  They teach to the damn SOL (state-mandated standardized) tests!  There’s not a single section of Advanced Comp scheduled for next year!

My anxiety was extinguished – at least momentarily – by a female colleague from another department who came down to give me a hug and wish me a happy retirement.  When she left, I got up and shut off the lights.  On my last classroom…on my last day of teaching.  And I could feel everything slowly draining out of me. 

The Voice returned one more time to tell me that I’d done my part and I couldn’t do it forever.  And The Voice was right, even though there is still no one teaching writing there anymore.

It was a good trip.  And retirement is wonderful. 

My Latest Novel

Hi.  My 16th novel on Amazon for Kindles and other readers  is now available.  Attached is the cover and below, the synopsis.  Thanks in advance for any and all support.

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WHISPERS

For everyone who has heard the voices, some of them are real. For everyone who has seen the signs, they are everywhere.  Listen, and you will hear; look, and you will see. Then you can understand. On your eighteenth birthday, someone your own age, someone that you have known for less than a year, goes off to die so that you may continue living; what do you do?  If you’re Matthew Morning, you make an annual pilgrimage to his grave to remind yourself of why you are still alive…and you tell the story. 

 

Start with Matthew, approaching eighteen in depressed rural Lee County, Virginia, in 1961 as he learns to understand the power of love for a girl named Ginger, daughter of a poor mining family. Add adventures in the woods, a mysterious and hidden old mansion on an equally mysterious mountain, abandoned houses, and the daily goings-on of a high school.   What do these places hold for three young friends -- one black, the others descendants of long-gone Native Americans -- brought together by accident, growing up quickly and trying to deal with the bigotry in a world that is not kind or patient, but also holds many beautiful secrets?  What will these boys – Matthew, TeePee, and Jeffie -- do without giving in or giving up?  Their backgrounds couldn’t be more different, yet the common ground they share and the strong bonds they form create a connectedness that will last beyond their lifetimes. Honor, justice, revenge, strength of family and heritage, tenderness, and bitterness – these will draw the reader into the story of a man, a teacher, as he recounts the turmoil of the most powerful year of his life, the year he lost everything and everyone he had come to love.  The novel moves between Matthew’s life with his mother in their first real home and his final year of high school, where he meets friends whose values and understanding will help him through the turmoil of death and incredible loss.  Ultimately, Matthew will be drawn into a dark experience that will require him to kill.

 

 

A SOLUTION TO THE NAME OF THE WASHINGTON REDSKINS

I think I have resolved the controversy over the name of the Washington NFL team.  To pacify the Native Americans who view “redskins” as a derogatory term and to satisfy the football team’s fans who don’t want to see the name changed…simply keep the name “redskins” but replace the insignia on the sides of the helmets.  Remove the Indian’s head and replace it with a red-skinned potato.  Then dress the mascot at the games as a big red potato. 

          “Yes, Phil, I think the Giants have a good chance of beating the Taters this Sunday.”

          There!  So everyone, please shut the hell up because there are a lot more important problems in the world and in our country these days.

GENERAL OCCUPATIONAL RESEARCH SURVEY

       GENERAL OCCUPATIONAL                

    RESEARCH PERSONAL PROFILE

Determining the career field best suited to your interests and aptitudes.

DIRECTIONS:  Answer each of the questions below, circling ONLY ONE answer from each group given.  On some questions, you may not particularly like any of the possible responses, but you MUST ANSWER with the least objectionable choice.

 

It is a beautiful day in late spring.  You would most likely enjoy:

1. going on a picnic
2. weeding the garden
3. feeding the birds
4. beating a cat

It is a rainy day in the fall; the skies are gray and dismal and it is pouring.  You would most likely enjoy:

1. talking to a friend on the phone
2. going on a picnic
3. watching a horror film
4. reading the phone book

You are hunting in the woods with a rifle; ahead you see an animal that you want to shoot.  You would most likely enjoy shooting a(n):

1. armadillo
2. squirrel
3. bat
4. black bear

Regardless of your natural skin color, you are being given the opportunity to change it. You would most likely enjoy changing your skin color to:

1. blue
2. green
3. clear
4. plaid

If you could talk to anyone in history for an evening, of the following choices, you would most likely enjoy talking to:

1. Adolf Hitler
2. Attila the Hun
3. Arnold Springer
4. Dagwood Bumstead

You have nothing to do this weekend, so the choice is yours; you would most likely enjoy:

1. stretching a cat
2. swimming across The English Channel
3. watching episodes of Three’s Company
4. listening to Barry Manilow

You have a chance to go back in time and add ONE subject that you wished you could have studied in elementary school; you would most likely enjoy:

1. organic chemistry
2. environmental marketing
3. understanding sphincters
4. the internal humidity of dogs

You are in a fancy French restaurant with a very important “other” person who asks you to order for him/her; You would most likely enjoy ordering:

1. escargot
2. Merde d’Mar
3. fish and chips
4. a fine vintage bottle of Thunderbird

Your employer gives you a choice of attending one of several conferences; you would most likely enjoy attending the one on:

1. The Environmental Impact of Electric Can Openers on the Ozone Layer
2. Economic and Political Planning for Death
3. The Psychology of Division of Motor Vehicles Employees
4. Planning and Implementing Pothole Replacement

Two friends are having a heated argument over the BEST coating for Southern fried chicken and have asked you to choose; you would most likely choose:

1. graham crackers
2. 10W-30 Havoline
3. recycled chewing tobacco
4. bird seed

For a possible occupation, you have to decide what to do with your hands; you would most likely enjoy:

1. getting your hands dirty and greasy
2. getting hard calluses on your fingers
3. typing form letters to blind old people
4. keeping your hands clean by using your feet

For the environment for your daily work, you would most likely enjoy:

1. working outdoors with others
2. working indoors with others
3. working outdoors with wild animals
4. working indoors with pets

For the PHYSICAL environment for your daily work, you would most likely enjoy:

1. working outdoors in a wilderness area
2. working inside in a small closet
3. having a corner office with lots of windows that look out over Central Park and a high-powered telescope with which you can look into other offices and apartments
4. a hot-air balloon with a phone

Of the possible adjectives that BEST describe your interactions with peers, you would most likely choose:

1. friendly, hostile, lugubrious
2. timid, resounding, tenacious
3. odorous, odoriferous, odious
4. damp, scented, parked

Of all the possible characteristics in someone you work WITH, you would most likely admire and respect:

1. respectable
2. gullible
3. ludicrous
4. wet

During your breaks during the workday, you would most likely enjoy:

1. reading the obituaries
2. talking like a parrot
3. drinking from the bottle of Jack Daniels in your desk
4. writing funny things about your supervisor on the bathroom walls

You are planning a gala party for friends to celebrate your entry into the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes; for the foods to serve, you would most likely enjoy serving your friends:

1. peanut butter on a Ritz
2. potted meat finger sandwiches
3. sliced wild boar with skunk cabbage vinaigrette
4. pigs in parkas

You are walking along a dark, deserted road in the country at midnight; you hear a strange series of noises in the woods along the road.  You would most likely NOT want the sounds to be caused by:

1. a saber-toothed tiger
2. a chicken molester
3. a 1988 Oldsmobile
4. the entire USC Marching Band

Please circle the issue that is MOST important to you in terms of your occupation:

1. money
2. salary
3. income
4. pay

Given all the choices one has to make about one’s life, the topic that you would most likely find MOST important is:

1. marriage to someone of the opposite sex
2. where to spend my summer vacation
3. whether to send Christmas cards next year
4. the price of beer

If you were given a chance to spend next week somewhere different, of the following choices, you would most likely enjoy:

1. going to a dude ranch
2. swimming with sharks off the coast of Somalia
3. rock climbing in Nebraska
4. taking a bath

If you were asked what your closest friends were saying about you right now, you would most likely say that they are saying:

1. “He’s/she’s a wonderful sailor.”
2. “He/She would give you the shirt off my back.”
3. “He/She once told me a dirty joke about a nun and a Great Dane.”
4. “He/She flosses.”

Given the choice of desserts, of the following, you would most likely enjoy:

1. Asparagus Jubilee
2. Vienna sausages and syrup
3. chocolate anything
4. tapioca smothered in whipped buttermilk

Of the following famous personages, which one do you LEAST admire?

1. Sylvester Stallone
2. Pontius Pilate
3. Brittany Spears
4. Charles Manson

If you could be a fruit, you would most likely enjoy being:

1. a banana
2. a prune
3. Rock Hudson
4. a pork chop

You are swimming in the ocean; you would most likely be afraid of:

1. jellyfish
2. sharks
3. fat women
4. I have no fear

You are still swimming in the ocean and you have decided that you DO have fears; you would most likely fear:

1.  jellyfish

     2.  sharks
     3.  fat women
    4.  the subway

The fairy tale that MOST RESEMBLES your life so far is:

1. “Hansel and Gretel”
2. “The Night the Horny Otter Got Grandma”
3. “Smokey the Bear and the Three Coeds”
4. “Cinderella”

Of the following famous personages, the one that you MOST admire is:

1. Ethel Merman
2. Josef Stalin
3. Marcia Brady
4. Herb Moskowitz

If you could replace the nation’s capital, you would most likely choose:

1. Passaic, NJ
2. Bumpass, VA
3. Truth or Consequences, NM
4. Paris, France

You are running a mile-long race and you finally see the finish line in the distance.  There is only one runner ahead of you.  You would most likely:

1. try to run faster
2. find something to hit him/her with
3. give it all you have left
4. shoot him/her with the small-caliber pistol you had hidden in your shorts

Your house or apartment catches on fire and you have only enough time to save ONE valued possession; you would most likely choose to grab your:

1. money
2. birth-control materials
3. important papers
4. refrigerator

The title that comes closest to summarizing your attitude toward others is:

1. Twenty-thousand Leagues Under the Sea
2. Wuthering Heights
3. Of Mice and Men
4. King Kong

You have won a contest that gives you the choice of visiting ONE famous site, anywhere in the world; you would most likely choose:

1. The Great Pyramids
2. Stonehenge
3. Graceland
4. Bob’s house

===================== 

SCORING:

Step 1. Add all the numbers of your answers to get a total.

Step 2.  Wait for the results.

 

©2013 by Ed Buhrer.  All rights reserved.

A Possum's Tale

A POSSUM’S TALE (original version submitted to Chesapeake Bay Magazine and published)

 

Wednesday, August 18, 2004 11:04 AM

 

 

  ...so there we were, having a lunch at the dockside restaurant along the Chesapeake Bay, on Solomon's Island, MD, when Toni looks out toward the dock and asks,

"Do you see that thing on that piling?"

"That 'thing' ? On which piling?" I wonder, knowing I should be used to my wife's non-specific choice of words. Following her typically vague wording and unanswerable (for the moment) question, I turn to look at the fifty-odd pilings within vision until I see one right off the edge that looks as if it's got a growth on one side of the top.

"Oh, look, it's moving!" she says, just as I see the one she's referring to.  We go out on the outside eating deck and realize that it's a baby possum hanging onto the piling, with nothing but water under it.

 

Soon, a small crowd of diners and a couple waitresses join us, as the two of us are trying to figure out how to save it.

"I saw that when we came in in our dingy," a guy behind me tells me, "but we thought they were river rats." 

"They?" I ask myself.

Then a beefy fellow in his late fifties, at least, on one of the many expensive boats docked at the marina yells over to tell us that there're another two swimming below the other one, and sure enough, two more babies are indeed swimming back and forth with no clue how to get out.

 

So one of the waitresses comes back out with a round serving tray, lays her very ample bulk down on the grass-and-wood edge of the dock and manages to get one of them to crawl up onto the tray and then flips it over her shoulder onto the grass, making most of the small crowd jump back as if it were a baby raptor or something. Meanwhile, the other swimmer is still doing the possum-paddle.

 

The guy on the boat asks me if I want to borrow his crabnet and I say sure.  So he brings it and I scoop the other swimmer out of the water, while the boat owner tells us that on another morning, he'd seen the mother (and kids) living under the restaurant's open-air deck.  Sure enough, I take my catch out of the net and put it in the grass by the deck and the little critter crawls back under the deck after my wife carries it most of the way there; Toni and I can hear the mother making some kind of clicking noises to call them.  Meanwhile, the first rescued one looks like the proverbial drowned rat and is totally disoriented and crawling around in circles in the grass, sneezing out water in little bursts, with everyone else scattering when it comes close (these things are maybe five inches long, not counting the tail).  So I pick it up by the back of the neck, lay it down in the grass maybe two feet from the deck overhang;  Toni points it in the direction of the mother; it, too, goes home.  That leaves the one in the photo, still clinging to the piling.

 

So I finally get the metal part of the net under it and practically have to pry it off, since the poor thing's scared to death and desperately trying to crawl into that hole in the top of the piling that might be big enough to harbor an egg...the critter gets tangled in the net, and wraps its tail around the metal part, but I finally get it, too, out of the net (it opens its mouth as if trying to bite me...lots of teeth on those beasts!) and Toni pushes that one home to Mom Possum.

 

I guess the only downside to the whole experience was when other diners asked Toni what was going on and she voiced her concern about the lives of the little buggers, some people looked at her as if she were nuts, or they just couldn't care less.  Okay, I know grown possums are downright ugly things, but jeez, little babies?  If we stop caring about baby critters, who's next?  And it's not as though we're PETA fanatics (we're not) or country hicks; we both grew up in the city before escaping to the rural, central-Virginia county we brought our kids to and still live in. 

 

A memorable lunch adventure and the highlight of our one-night mini-vacation...

 

 

 

A TEACHER GETS A PORSCHE

 

So there I was, sitting in my classroom, C-213, after school on October 9, 1976, when in marches my entire fifth-period junior honors English class, along with a middle-aged guy in a tweed sport jacket, a woman wearing sunglasses and carrying a notebook, and a very tall black guy with a couple cameras around his neck.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

The kids just laugh (a few of the girls still giggle) and Jim Pekar hands me a long, thin envelope, the kind that greeting cards come in.

“What’s this?” I ask this time.

“Open it, open it!” a few kids say excitedly.

So I slit it open somewhat hesitantly, still wondering about these three strange adults standing by in the room.

I take out a greeting card, a birthday card – and I apologize for not remembering a thing about it…and out slides a car key on a keychain.  The ornament on the end of the keyring (if that’s the right word for it) is the Porsche crest encased in plastic.

“Okay, what’s this?” I repeat.

“It’s for your Porsche!  Happy birthday!” young Jim kinda shouts as the rest of the kids clap their hands, ending my concerns that they were all there after school, voluntarily, to complain about their research-paper assignment and that the adults were a couple lawyers and their photographer, there to gather evidence of how unfair a teacher I was.

“Are you serious?!” I say, somewhat skeptically.

“You said we’d all get A’s if you got a Porsche!s” Joanne informs me of something I may have said…well, I’m sure I said it, but….

“It’s waiting for you out in front of the school,” the guy in the sport jacket informs me.

“C’mon, Mr. B.!” some other student shouts.

Thus begins a march to the other end of the very large suburban school in suburban Clifton, New Jersey.

And there it was, indeed, a metallic lime-green 1976 Porsche Targa 911 convertible.

“Get in, get in!”  the kids all shout as the guy in the tweed, who I have since discovered on the Long March is a Porsche salesman, the woman is a reporter for the Passaic Co  County Herald News, and the black guy is the photographer for the paper.

“You told them they’d all get A’s, huh, man?  Boy, you’re in it now!” he had whispered to me.  Tweed Guy opens the driver’s side door and gives me the “get in” gesture.

So I get in, along with the salesman…and I turn the key.  You know, the engine sounded just like the one in our ’68 VW Beetle that was sitting at home, in our garage. (We lived a couple blocks from the high school, so I walked to school with the kids every day.)

“Go ahead, take it for a drive,” Tweed Guy says.

So, gritting my teeth and hoping I don’t have a problem with an unfamiliar clutch – it would have been kinda embarrassing to stall the thing out, after all – we pull away from the front of the school to the cheers of an entire English class and the clicking of the guy’s Nikon.  Maybe it was a Canon.

As we near the end of the school’s driveway, about to exit onto Colfax Avenue, Tweed Guy turns to me and says,
”You know, this is great!  The local paper is gonna give us great free publicity for this and we can make your dream come true, all at the same time!” he says with this big, manure-eating grin.

So I have to ask, somewhat incredulously,

“Listen, are you giving me this car, like as part of some kind of tax write-off?!”

I thought Tweed Guy was going to have a stroke.

“No, no!  We’re not giving it to you, but I can give you a good price on it!”

“Listen, I’m a teacher, not a lawyer!  How much does this car cost?
After he tells me, I inform him that I make less than that for my annual salary.

“Well, we have some good used Porsches at the dealership.  What kind of car are you driving now?” he asks.

When I tell him about the Beetle, he smiles and says,
”No, I mean, what is your regular car?”

So I tell him there’s only one car at home, the same VW.  He doesn’t say anything else. So I inform him that he is not making my dream come true, that’s it’s more like taking a kid from the ghetto to Disneyworld but making him go back home to the projects that night.  He doesn’t say anything.

So I drive to our house, the same one that’s a couple blocks away, put the Porsche in neutral, get out, and go ring our front doorbell since my wife is not working at the time in order to be a full-time mother to our second kid.

Toni opens the door and I point to the Porsche at the curb and tell her I’m taking it for a test ride and thinking of buying it.

“Oh, sure,” she says and closes the door.

So fifteen minutes after getting into the car, we pull back in front of the high school where most of the kids are still waiting to greet me with some scattered applause.  I park and turn off the engine and get out.

The article in the paper the next day said that I stood there with “a  bemused look” on my face, so I guess that’s what was there.  I shake hands with Tweed Guy, who tries once more to entice me to go look at the dealership inventory, at which point I remind him that I’m still a teacher and that I’d have to take out a second mortgage and sell my first-born, the daughter, to some Arab sheik to be able to afford a Porsche.  He gets in and drives it away.

“We all get A’s now, right, Mr. B.?” someone shouts.

“You’ll be lucky if you see a passing grade after this!” I growl and they all laugh, knowing that I’m kidding…they hope.
Well, Andy said we all have fifteen minutes of fame…in my case, I guess it was fifteen minutes of being a Porsche owner…or borrower.

COLLEGE PROFESSOR FALLS OUT A WINDOW

 

English Professor Falls Out Window

 It was the spring of 1963, and I was a freshman English major at Montclair State Teachers’ College (which dropped the Teachers’ at the end of that semester and has since exchanged College for University these days) and I had an elderly professor for Early English Literature who fell out a window…honest. As I said, he was old – ancient, actually, because my mother had had him in 1940! -- and on that nice spring day in 1963, he was sitting on the sill of an open window in a one-story, post-WW II wooden building that had been built for married veterans who were finishing college on the GI Bill, and he was reading some of THE CANTERBURY TALES in Middle English and he just fell out…I remember seeing his white bony legs and argyle socks in a pair of scuffed and unpolished brown loafers as he disappeared backwards…we all just sat there in shock, then some of us ran to the window, but he was gone…the next thing we knew, the door to the end of the pre-fab building slammed, and in Dr. Russell Kraus came, still holding the open book, and still reading…with bits of leaves and grass in his remaining white hair and his horn-rimmed glasses somewhat askew…as if nothing had happened. It became a legend at Montclair State…don’t know if anyone tells the story anymore so I thought I’d preserve it here, before those of us who witnessed the moment are all gone.