Muse
My high school is having a reunion. The school’s been around for 50 years, and is rightfully going to toot its horn. Most people go to reunions to find out what happened to the peers who were the background of their youth. I would like to see my teachers. I had some wonderful and some not-so-wonderful teachers. Either way, each of them impacted my life in ways that I couldn’t predict or appreciate as an adolescent.
Okay, let’s call her Kate (secretly, my favorite name in high school). She’s fourteen years old, completely unaware of life barreling down on her. An idea comes into her head, (where does it come from and why? She’s too green to even question it) and she decides to write a story about fox hunting.
She knows nothing about fox hunting, but her innocence leads her to the library. She researches, learns the jargon, the history, smells and sounds of the foxhunt. She writes a brilliant story, fresh with sentiment and overflowing with relevant details. (Okay it’s a mediocre story, but it’s her first. Give her a break.) The story gets noticed by the powers-that-be: the editor of the school district’s student magazine, Fledglings. Kate thinks it must be a fabulous story to be published in such an august journal, but the truth is the editor didn’t have many stories to choose from. Her peers are too bleary-eyed with hormones to worry about arts or literature. Few of them even notice her startling debut, and those only wonder why she would bother.
Kate does get her moment to shine when Mr. Walter Whitehead, English teacher, calls her into his office, something he had never done. He wears a purple silk shirt and his horn-rimmed glasses are attached to a long silver chain draped around his shoulders. (Geez, you can't make this stuff up.) Kate wonders why he wears the glasses, because he never looks through them; they perch on the end of his nose and he peers over the rims. His face is ruddy and flaky. He mouth is either an exaggerated grin or melodramatic frown. Never anything in between. Students say he has a beautiful young wife. Kate doubts it.
He asks Kate in his Shakespearean voice (he is also the drama teacher) how she knows so much about fox hunting. Pride and fear tinting her voice, Kate tells him about the hours she spent researching the topic in the library. His smile plummets to a frown.
"From now on, you should only write about what you know. That, my young friend, is what separates us from the apes,” says Walter.
That is the end of Kate’s interview. All through math class and part of geography she ponders Walter Whitehead’s attempt at mentorship. She looks at her peers who sit with glassy eyes while the teacher drones on about plant-life in the Canadian tundra. Someone snores quietly. Others agonize over first love jitters and first heartbreak horrors (but with much less panache than Kate gives them credit for).
Kate feels that now familiar urge to pick up a pen. She opens her notebook. The idea is coming…it’s almost here…yes…She writes.
What do you do with a drunken sailor when she’s your mom?
2008 by Kim McDougall
