I am preparing for year #20 of teaching, and I am trying to work myself up to that word everyone says as the new school year begins. Parents and students alike will hear it about a hundred times that first week, as kids from ages 5 to 17 enter the once-again polished school building. It's the word "excited". And as I strive once again to be that teacher that every child wants to sit under, my mind goes back to the first teacher I had, the one who I'm still talking about 50 years later.
Her name was Mrs. Squire, and she was my first grade teacher at Sunnymede Elementary. She had platinum blonde hair, wore bright red lipstick, and drove a red convertible that matched her bright red lips. When she smiled, her eyes seemed to disappear. And when she hugged me (because you could do that back then), I never wanted her to let go.
When I would come home from school, I would line my dolls up at the end of my bed, and I would take the chalk-stubs she would give me and teach on my make-shift blackboard (a closet door that my mother made me wash constantly because of the chalk residue that is probably still there today).
I wanted to be a teacher, just like Mrs. Squire. But it wasn't until I was 19 years old that I really understood why she had stood out from all the others. That was the year my mother died. When my dad and my sister and I returned from picking out my mother's casket, I was told that Mrs. Squire had come by the house to see me. I was so touched that she would come, after all those years. But what happened next has forever changed me. She came back that night, walking through my front door and taking my face in her hands, she said, "I just had to see your face". I said to my heart, as she drove away that night, "Lord, let me be that kind of teacher someday".
I don't know if the word "excited" was ever used by Mrs. Squire in that classroom. And maybe, I've tried too hard to work it back into my vocabulary as I begin another year. What I do know is that she brought something into that room that I hope never leaves my own: a smile that never disappeared, a heart that never stopped caring, and a legacy that said, "Always see their face".
If she was still alive today, I would put on my red lipstick, put a flip in my blonde hair, and leave a kiss on her beautiful face; the one that never stopped seeing my own.
