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.

Sixty Years of Friendship

A few weekends ago, Amber and I travelled to the Town of the Bay and, by extension, a nearby community somewhat ineptly named Mont Belvieu (I have yet to see evidence of so much as a molehill, let alone a Mont) for the celebration of my dad's parents' sixtieth wedding anniversary.

Because they got married when they were twelve.

Actually, I am almost not exaggerating. My grandmother was fifteen. I cannot imagine being married at fifteen, but she is rather the stalwart sort, and I suppose that if one has the fortune to meet the love of one's life as a middling teenager, one had best put a ring on it.

That ring, according to my grandfather, cost twenty-two dollars and fifty cents.* He then went on to explain that he sneakily got my grandmother a more expensive ring with a diamond in it at some point in the sixties, and then proceeded to present her with a further gold band which makes the whole ensemble look like it was bought yesterday, together. Also, this speech was adorable and tears were shed. At the conclusion, my grandmother gave him a wedding band which she finally convinced him to wear (he was a pipeliner; no jewelry), so now they can be married for another sixty years.

More tears were shed.

Throughout my childhood, my grandfather would introduce my grandmother to folks as "My very good friend, Nan." At one point, one of my aunts (whom I am pleased to say has since been ejected and replaced with my aunt V, who is a woman of great character and wit) chastised him for calling my grandmother a "good friend."

Two points of order here, which I did not bring up at the time because children are to be seen, et cetera: 1) If you do not get my grandfather's sense of humour, do not let the door hit you on the ass on the way out, and 2) this woman was hardly the person to be giving relationship advice to people who, at the time, had been married for forty-some-odd years.

Bitch.

Anyway, that method of introduction has always stuck with me because the truth of the matter is that my grandparents ARE very good friends, which probably has a lot to do with why they have been married for sixty years. This is a methodology which my parents followed, and which I made sure to follow when I determined that it would be best for everyone if Amber were to marry me. I do find a certain irony in level of influence this had on me, given the no small amount of weirdness from my sundry family regarding my wedding and its relative legitimacy, but what works works.

I have noticed that the model of marrying one's best and/or very good friend has made for the most successful and lasting marriages. This is obviously not a superlatively profound observation, but given the divorce rate, it may be more profound than I initially thought. Of course, the fact that the "men and women cannot be friends" myth appears to be alive and well, even among the allegedly enlightened, may be the crux of the matter.

I have to ask those who hold this opinion---how in God's name do you plan on living with someone at all, let alone for the REST OF YOUR LIFE if you are not friends? It is not going to happen.

Whatever. My original point was that my grandparents are adorable, and my cousin Dee was right** when she put her arm around me and whispered, "We are so lucky to have them." We are, indeed. They are an example of what sixty years with someone should be like, and I certainly look forward to finding out for myself over the course of the next fifty-four.


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*Adjusted for inflation, this is $190.47 in 2012 dollars. So they were actually, in my opinion, walking in some tall cotton there. Mine and Amber's rings, adjusted for inflation, were $38.62 each. But Nannie's ring is gold and ours are sterling.
**Dee is right about a lot of things; she actually merits her own blog post at some point.

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.

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