Hannibal: The Scab

      I had not been teaching long when I got a call from sister Barbara Lou in Memphis. She had been worried about Mom, and took her to live with her for a while. She got worse, and was now in the hospital there. I drove down. When I got there, she was already in a semi-coma state. Something had gone wrong in the back of her head. I realized, as I sat there beside her, that I had never told her that I loved her. Now, I know that is hard to believe, But open expressions of love were just not often said in our house as I grew up. Or maybe that was just me. With a mother like God blessed me with, I should have said it every day. And I knew it.

      I started saying it over and over to her, as if I could make up for all the times I didn't. She was moved into intensive care, and one or two of us could visit every three hours. I lived in the ICU waiting room for days.

There was a shortage of recliners there, and other chairs were not comfortable at all. One night I did have one. About midnight, an elderly woman and her two daughters came in. I gave my recliner to the elderly woman, and she was very appreciative. I moved over and answered the phone the rest of the night. The next day, I noticed as I came and went from visiting Mom, that one or the other of the two daughters were always sitting in that recliner, if the elderly woman was not. About 8:00 that night, the daughter sitting in the chair called me over. “We have been saving this chair for you all day. You gave my mother this chair last night, when she was in very bad shape. You need to sleep tonight.”

      My oldest brother Harry arrived from California, and we took him in to see Mom. She had been in a coma for days, and we never knew if she heard anything we said. When I told her Harry was here, she stirred visibly. I now knew she had heard me tell her I loved her all those times. But way too little, far too late, for a sweet woman like her. She died shortly afterward. I made a vow that there would never be a shortage of expressions of love in our family, from that day forward. And I have kept that vow.

     An Italian guy, Michael Via, interviewed for the assistant principal's job the year I came there. He came from a school in inner city Chicago, and had dealt with a variety of shootings and stabbings while he was in administration there. He was asked in the interview, “If the situation comes up where corporal punishment is needed, could you do that?” Michael looked at the interviewer with disbelief for a moment, then put his hands around his own throat with a choking motion, and said, “You mean like this?” He got the job.

      Digital watches were first being introduced about then, and a guy who taught math got one as a present from his wife. He was a bit of a gadget geek, and that day in the teacher's lounge he came around to each of us, proudly showing us all it could do, punching every button. Then he sat down, and pressed all the buttons the rest of the period for his own entertainment. He laugh and giggled with his new gadget all period. Toward the end of the period, he pressed a button, it just shut down, and never ran again. He almost cried.

      I continued working for Bleigh Construction on Saturdays and holidays. Several other teachers did too. On union jobs, I sometimes got 3 or 4 different wage scales in a single day, one scale for tying rebar, another for using a hammer, still a third and lesser rate for digging a ditch. But it rained a lot that year, and I was most always up to my knees in mud. Once when I griped a little about the mud, I think the foreman must have heard me, because the next day I was up on the steel skeleton, five floors up, reaching out over the edge holding a beam up while the welder fastened it in place. When I got back to the mud, I never griped about it again. On one union job, a disagreeable guy called me a scab one day, and I didn't realize I was being insulted. In Arkansas, a scab was just the top part of a sore.

      I was well into my first year of teaching at Hannibal junior high, and I began to realize, most of the teachers I spent time with in the teacher's lounge every day were a little stand offish toward me. Just didn't quite know what to make of this Arkansas hillbilly in their midst. My buddy and I decided to try to shake them up a little one day. I had already lost a good bit of my hair, so I got a lady's wig, put it on, and strolled into the lounge when it was full, as serious as I could be. To my field of vision, they acted perfectly normal. But in my buddy's vision,(he was trailing behind me,) they went wild! I pulled it off, we all had a good laugh, and they warmed up to me.