>>Valley Patriot>> |
Remembering
a Teacher
To paraphrase that by-now very tired joke about the 1960’s, yes, I remember the Seventies, and yes, I was “there.” Too much f-----g there. My Seventies show began in what used to be called junior high school. Every morning, the boy who sat in front of me in home room would greet me by “playfully” putting a large knife to my throat. One day, during lunch, he dumped my lunch tray on me; my fellow students, and a few teachers, stood around and laughed at the sight of me, smeared with mashed potatoes. I could go on, but I think the point is clear. Things like that happened to me on a virtual daily basis in junior high and high school. How I survived the experience without becoming a suicide, mental patient, alcoholic or drug addict remains perhaps the greatest mystery of my life. So why didn’t I “fight back”? If you have to ask that question, then you’re the one who wasn’t really “there.” For the same reason, I suppose, that prison rape victims don’t fight back. When you’re a lonely, marked man, a target, devoid of friends or allies, fear becomes your only companion—and chief survival tool. (In my senior year, this treatment finally ceased. A classmate who thought pulling the then-long sideburns on my face would be good fun wound up with some blood on his.) Pre-Columbine, the above saga was always good for a few laughs. (From others, never from me.) No more. After what I’d been through in school, Columbine didn’t surprise me; I only wondered why it took so long to happen. Needless to say, experiencing the above didn’t do much for either my grades or my personality. I wasn’t very sociable in those days; wounded animals usually aren’t. Fully conscious of my status as the biggest loser in school, I withdrew into a shell of angry shyness. And no one, at school or elsewhere, ever really tried to help me get out of it—with one exception. Shirley Hovanasian was a legend at Methuen High School, an English teacher who specialized in Drama and Public Speaking. She taught for several decades, but never changed in either looks or personality. (No small feat, given all the changes in the high school students she had to deal with through the years.) She was the same person at the end of her career that she was at the beginning: fantastically friendly, gloriously gregarious, endlessly energetic—but in a down-to-earth, totally unpretentious way. One had the impression that she was born with her pink Irish face, formidable frame, gravelly voice and shock of white (never gray) hair. Had she been so inclined, she would have made a great politician; as a performer, she would have given the likes of Fanny Brice, Gracie Allen or Lucille Ball some stiff competition. But she was forever and always a teacher—and for me, far more than that. For many decades, I wondered why she cared about and for me so much. I wasn’t friendly, good-looking or academically or athletically talented. I didn’t even seem to have any of that “inner greatness” great teachers are supposed to bring out in underachievers like myself. (When she tried to get me to try out for the School Play, I literally ran away.) Only much later did I realize that those were in fact the very things that attracted her to me. This was not merely the behavior of a devoted teacher, but of one of the few human beings I’ve known in my life who truly loved me, and tried to help me. She was the only teacher I ever had who stayed in touch with me through the years—thirty years after I graduated, in fact. She never gave up on me, even during those many times in my life when I had so obviously given up on myself. Last year,
when her annual Christmas card failed to arrive, I called
her. We had a wonderful conversation—with her, there
was no other kind—and I made my usual promise to get
together with her, soon. Tragically, I’ll never have
the chance to break that promise again. And so,
I’ll say now what I should have said so long ago, so
many times before: Thank you, my dear Mrs. Hovanasian,
for giving me the courage and confidence to finally try
out for the School Play. Send your questions
comments to ValleyPatriot@aol.com |
Prior Columns by Hartley Pleshaw |
Whenever a well-meaning but sweetly naïve
young person (his or her mind cluttered by That 70’s
Show or the sitcom-flashbacks of Nick At Night or TV
Land) asks me just how much “fun” it was to be
in high school in the Seventies, I politely excuse
myself. I try not to ruin a pleasant conversation with
uncontrolled vomiting.