Gutted

I dreaded going to her class. Dreaded it.

In my four years of high school, I only got detentions from her: seven of them in my first semester of freshman year. It got to be a joke. I would be in detention with a whole bunch of other people who never got detentions.

“Miss Clark?” we would ask each other. Solemn nods all around, and then snickers. My best friend received a detention from her for “excessive happiness.”

Miss Clark was mean, and harsh. We found a certain unity in that no one was safe from her ascerbic wit, not even the smartest guy in our grade (probably, actually, in the entire school, for several years before and after our graduating class. Yes, you, Tom). At the time, the only redemption in going to her class was that she made it clear that she thought my archnemesis was the stupidest person she had ever come across.

God bless her.

Miss Clark wore starched men's button-down shirts, stonewashed jeans, and Birkenstocks every day, weather irrelevant. Her grey hair was shaved short on the sides and only a bit longer on top, just enough to curl a bit. And she did not give a good damn what anyone thought about her attire. She, alone of nearly all teachers at Sterling High School, had the spine to tell us when we were being idiots, when we were not thinking things through, or when we were being straight up careless. No one else talked to us like that. She was absolutely terrifying.

I dreaded her class, in which the powers that were enrolled me because I had the temerity to be on the drill team (Do Not Say A Word) and orchestra at the same time. My punishment, therefore, was to have class at half past seven in the morning with the most intimidating teacher I had ever had, who, I was certain, existed solely to torture me.

However, the great thing about it was---and it did not actually take sixteen years of retrospect to come up with this (in other news, Holy God I was a freshman sixteen years ago aaaaahhhhhh)---she never talked down to me. Other teachers would put on their Very Disappointed face and tell me that I simply was not applying myself, and I could do so much better, and I should prioritise their class, et cetera. Not so with Miss Clark.

“Holly Ivy,” she would say, keeping me after class. She always called me Holly Ivy. I do not know why. Probably specifically because it irritated me. “Holly Ivy, what was your point here? Don't say 'uh' to me. This paragraph is completely unecessary. Tell me what your point is here. I would somehow managed to stammer an answer. “Okay, so why did not not write that?” I would say something about how I was not sure if I was right.

In reply, she glanced up, on this occasion, at the door, then lowered her voice. “Holly Ivy. I don't give a damn if you agree with me or if I agree with you. I only care that you can make a decent argument. If your argument is dumb, I will tell you.”

Then she sat down on her desk and winked at me. “You know I'll tell you the truth.”

Damn right she would, like no other adult. If one were to looke up “Brutal Honesty” in a dictionary which included adjectives, Miss Clark's picture would be there, accompanied by no words. Somehow I survived that year.

Imagine my horror when I received my class schedule for my junior year and found out that I had Miss Clark again. I walked into her room, probably looking like I was being led to the gallows. She laughed at me. “Good to see you, too, Holly Ivy.” It turns out that she actually just hated teaching freshman.

Day two of her class, she took me to the book closet and I picked up copies of All Quiet on the Western Front, Catcher in the Rye, The Chosen, and five or six other books I cannot remember right off hand. This year, she said, everyone would read what they wanted, and we would write analytical essays, present our findings, and discuss each other's work in class.

It was amazing, for a couple of weeks.

Then, in a stroke of bullshit of enormous magnitude even for the powers that were at Ross Sterling High School, we were unceremoniously removed from Miss Clark's class and sent to the class of one of the most milquetoast individuals I have ever had the misfortune to come across.*

I did not really get the impact Miss Clark had on me for a few years, but I am pretty sure I survived the Honours program at Lee College because she started getting in my face about thinking at the tender age of fourteen. I survived my bachelor's degree because after having my wee fourteen year old ego ripped to shreds and then nuked from orbit, I was used to criticism and there was not a lot that could faze me. One of my professors actually, sarcastically, told me that she “assume[d] that [I] have more than two brain cells rattling around in there” while lecturing me on some transgression that more than likely had to do with my attendance.

In retrospect, that is one of the greatest complements I have ever received from a professor. Backhanded and brutal, but great.

Normally, when I write one of these essays about someone who had a significant impact on me who has died, I trot out the fact that I, fortunately, am not one of those people who “never listened and now it's too late woe and regret.” This remains true, but still I have some woe and regret because my thirty-year-old self wishes that my eighteen-year-old self would have had the damn sense to go get a mailing address from her so I could keep in touch. I am quite convinced that she had yet more wisdom to impart.

I did run into Miss Clark at the grocery store in Baytown a few years ago, and I hugged her and told her the standard rubbish about what I was doing with my life. I hope that encounter was enough for her to know the affection which I, in retrospect, held for her. I knew that I respected the hell out of her, and I am pretty sure she did know that, so I have that going for me.

However, last night, when I found out that she had died, I felt absolutely gutted. This is what it is like to not realise how much someone means to me until they are gone.

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*This was actually the beginning of the end for my high school career. In retaliation for being put into this class, I tested out of junior and senior English. Then I tested out of junior and senior history. Then I tested out of health and government. I tested out of everything except for physics and mathematics. Eat it, GCCISD.

An Ode to my Father; Neighbourhood of B

As a teenager and an adult, one hears many complaints about one's parents, and most of what I tended to hear were complaints about fathers, to wit:

– Father does not allow x because of unjust reason y.

– Father is all up in one's business.

– Father is never around because he is always at work.

– Father is in fact a fascist.

– Father is in fact Satan.

While I recognise that my dad and I had an extremely difficult period while I was between the ages of seventeen and approximately twenty-one, my only complaint about him was his slight double standard regarding housekeeping and his tendency to want me to work on vehicles with him when it was -5 degrees outside.* Indeed, at my most unreasonable of ages, I did not feel as though my dad was too close, too far away, a fascist, or Satan.

I did harbour an, as it turns out, unfounded fear that the second he found out that I am a giant homo that he would hate me forever. Given his rather conservative tendencies, I do not think that fear was unreasonable; however, in retrospect, it really ought have occurred to me that my daddy would never disown me, ever. EVER. In fact, when my first girlfriend broke up with me in a most ignominious fashion, he apparently desperately wanted to give her a good dropkick. Across the street.

We have a bit of a family joke that Mom and Daddy have been married for thirty some-odd years and lived together for approximately twenty of them because when we lived in Corpus, Exxon saw fit to send Dad out of town to Houston all of the time, and once they transferred him to Houston, they sent him to Corpus all the time.

Apparently, this makes sense to someone in management.

At any rate, the point is that even though Daddy was out of town a good period of the time when I was very small, he was hardly an absentee father. I am not one of those kids who does not have early memories of their father. I have many, ranging from Mom and Daddy making an orrery out of their fists to show me how eclipses work (followed by Dad picking up Mom in his arms and spinning round for a bit), or Dad and I biking to the HEB with me in the baby seat on the back of his bike, to him reading me my bedtime stories, carrying me to bed after M*A*S*H was over, and teaching me the states on this large vinyl map. Daddy also played his guitar almost every night. When I started teaching myself to play the guitar, it took me about ten seconds to pick up the bass line of I Walk the Line because he played it so often.

And walk the line he surely did, and continues to this day.

My friends who tease me about my 'chivalry' have my father to blame/thank, because he never met a door he did not hold. He treats my mother like Queen Elizabeth herself. He also insisted that I be able to take care of myself (this was a joint effort on the part of both of my parents). Things I have repaired, built, or remodelled as a joint effort with my father include, but are not limited to, the following:

– Our fireplace, hearth, and chimney.

– No fewer than five vehicles, not including my Mustang.

– The cable routing to our living room.

– The kitchen.

– Drywall.

– The front door.

– The garage door opener.

That is just off the top of my head.

Back to my childhood, something which haunts me to this day is my reaction to a present he brought me once. When I was really little, one of the things we always watched was Nashville Now, of which I have no other memory than a character called Shotgun Red. I loved Shotgun Red. He was awesome. So, at some point when I was incredibly wee, Daddy thought it would be nice to get me a Shotgun Red doll, and he brought it home for me.

That doll, for reasons I still do not understand, scared the everloving shit out of me. And by scared, I mean scares. I feel horrible. Daddy was trying so hard to be nice and get me a present. And that Shotgun Red doll lives in the top of his closet to this day, and when I go into my parents' bedroom at home, I carefully avoid looking in the direction of his closet when the door is open lest I catch sight of that Shotgun Red doll.

I feel horrible. Right now. I am the worst daughter ever, in this moment. Jesus. Let us speak of something else.

Oh, I know. Let us talk about my underlying fear that EVERY SINGLE CALL from my mother is going to be telling me that something horrible has happened and the pipeline Daddy is working on exploded spectacularly. I used to tell myself that these fears are fully unfounded, and it sort of worked until a prominent member of our church died in the most recent Texas City disaster.

It never is, though, and Dad is the biggest safety fascist in the universe (so, okay, yes. My dad is a fascist. About safety. Woe) and does not put up with bullshit which might endanger people on his job site, so that makes me feel better. It probably makes Mom feel better, too.

I could go on probably for days about the ways in which my dad has shaped my life. Softball and baseball are down to him. My congenital aversion to weird noises in cars is obviously down to him as is my strong aversion to structures which are not square.

Most importantly, my daddy has never, ever, said an unkind word to me regarding my intellect or ability to do something. His opinion has always been that practice makes perfect, and that if I work hard enough I can make it happen. Furthermore, my super conservative, probably totally voted for Mittens father walked me down the aisle at my wedding.

And that, honestly, is probably the most concise summary. My father walked me down the aisle at my wedding. Our friendship has improved drastically as I have gotten older, and I am incredibly grateful for that. I am most grateful, however, that he has always, always loved me, my mom, and my sister for as long as he has known any of us. Apparently, that is hard to come by.

___________

*I feel like discomfort was some sort of prerequisite. Trivia: my dad is actually Ron Swanson's cousin.

HUGE Tracts of Land!

I have come to the important conclusion that I have been persistently making a fundamental error in how I have gone about conducting my life. I do not think that this is particularly anyone's fault, or caused by any one thing or event that has happened to me. I can point to two specific issues, however, which I know for sure contributed the problem. The first is that I made the naive mistake of showing far too much literacy too early in my life. That, of course, sounds really backhandedly arrogant. Oh, woe is me. I could read when I was but a wee lass. My life has been ruined.

Whatever. I make no bones about the fact that I am quite literate and always have been. Other people get to be extremely attractive or talented or athletic, and I get to be literate.

Anyway, the actual problem is that all of the adults in my life noticed this, and as a result, told me two things:

• That I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, and

• That the thing I would be would be Great.

No pressure. By Great, I mean rocket scientist (this was not unheard of, given the proximity of NASA. I knew actual rocket scientists). President. Murphy by-God Brown. Of course, who is going to tell a kid that they are going to grow up to be tech support? That would be a great way to induce alcoholism in six-year-olds. So, upon being told that I was really smart and would therefore be Great, I spent the next twenty-two years trying to be just that.

Great.

There is just one problem: I, it turns out, am not Great. I do not suck or anything. I received a marriage proposal from a man in Tanzania at four this morning because I fixed his website. So, I would definitely argue that I am above average, but Great may not be in the cards, and I think I understand the origin of this rather drastic misunderstanding, and it comes down to algebra (and if we are speaking literally, Algebra II. Thanks Ms. Stark. You ruined me for maths at a very important juncture and as a result I am not a physicist. And yes, I blame you, personally, for this.); consider a graph where x is age and y is academic prowess. I feel like I started out with a greater y-intercept than my peers but have a less steep slope. Everyone else started out with a lesser y-intercept but have a steeper slope. As a result, we have all ended up at roughly the same (x,y) by now.

Except for those bitches who made my life miserable in eighth grade. May all of their soufflés fall flat into eternity.*

Verily.

I had a point.

Oh, it is that I am probably merely above average, and I find that I am happier having come to that conclusion. Strange as it is, I actually rather enjoy my eight hours at a desk. Perhaps I enjoy it because it is new, or because I know I shall not be doing this job in six months' time, or because I am aware that I am no longer sinking into the swamp of student debt. I built the castle of college, and it sank into the swamp. So then I built the castle of grad school, and that sank into the swamp. But now I am building a castle of employment---and this one is going to stay up.

There may yet be a capacity for greatness within me, but I have have to say that I prefer happiness to greatness, and I shall not ever again sacrifice the former for the latter. I know for sure that it is the unconditional love I have received from such luminaries as my parents, my friends, and my wife which has made me comfortable with this decision. My attempts at greatness required far too many sacrifices and far too many bottles of wine, and the thing is, by the time I actually got into a position where I could get to alleged greatness, I was so damned sick of it that I pretty well just hated it all, and if I were married to someone with a more volatile temperament, I would be incredibly divorced right now.

And that would suck all over the place.

Anyway, I still might do something super awesome with myself. I am still working on my alleged novel (in fact, that is the working title. Alleged Novel: A Memoir of the Future), and I am going to take all the trainings at work so that I can have a slightly less frenetic job (because I am here to tell you that I only have about six months of this in me. Seriously). I am going to continue to improve myself, but in the interim I have every intention of being content.

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*Seriously, fuck them. Assholes.