Jabs, Real and Imagined

Sydney Lea looks back at the badly behaved young boy he was, and with newfound fondness for the teacher who sought to set him straight.

Sydney Lea as a young boy in the ‘40s, “on the shore of Lake Champlain at my aunt's and uncle's in Willsboro NY.”

A December baby, I was the youngest member of my first-grade class. I hadn’t even been 6 long. But this was it, I knew. There’d be no preventing the torture coming on the very last day of first grade. I’d be jabbed somewhere, the wound inflicted by my teacher her ultimate and direst act of vengeance.

Miss Knudsen—it seemed we called every one of our female elementary school teachers Miss in the late 1940s—was an imposing, even a strapping person. Tall. Broad-shouldered. I can still envision her exactly. As for me, I was a roly-poly, unruly, petulant nuisance.

After my mother died in 2000, I discovered the report card sent home at the end of that year. Except for arithmetic, which daunted me some, I seem to have been a capable student. Miss Knudsen acknowledged as much, but her conclusion read as follows: “Though Sydney is quite quick to learn, he’s full of nervous energy, and, unfortunately, he expresses it by defying me and beating up his friends on the playground.”

I have no recollection, none, of those alleged playground attacks, but I clearly recall, after seventy-five years, many of my flare-ups with Miss Knudsen. I would often flatly disobey her, even though I knew I’d pay a price. Once, for example, she declared it my turn to clean off the blackboard. I sat unmoving at my desk. “I won’t do it,” I said, for which I got a whack or two across the knuckles with a ruler. I’d suffered more excruciating penalties, so I clenched back the tears this time without much effort.

Corporal punishment was common in those days in American schools, public, private, and parochial, so my own mother, whenever she heard of my misbehavior, proved anything but distressed by Miss Knudsen’s reprisals. I remember once explaining that my left ear hurt because the teacher had used it to drag me to do another of the chores that I resisted and my classmates meekly dispatched. “But I didn’t cry!” I bragged. Mom replied that the next time she caught wind of any acting up, she’d take it upon herself to give me something to cry about.

After my mother died in 2000, I discovered the report card sent home at the end of that year. Except for arithmetic, which daunted me some, I seem to have been a capable student. Miss Knudsen acknowledged as much, but her conclusion read as follows: “Though Sydney is quite quick to learn, he’s full of nervous energy, and, unfortunately, he expresses it by defying me and beating up his friends on the playground.”

But I remained incorrigible despite the physical discipline by teacher and parent. I especially recall one instance of mistreatment. (I hesitate to use the term, believing now, as I did even then, really, that I earned each harsh retribution.) At home, I referred to the stalwart Miss Knudsen as Gravel Gertie. There was no reason whatever to liken my teacher to that bulb-eyed woman in the Dick Tracy comics who lived in a roadside gravel pit. I have no idea why I did.

“What did you call her?”

“Gravel Gertie.”

My mother, I swear, laid her ears back like an angry horse, as only she could, and punched me on the shoulder. Like Miss Knudsen, she was a powerful woman. That punch was memorably painful.

“It’s Miss Knudsen to you,” Mom shrieked, “and don’t you forget it!”

Of course, it never occurred to a mere child that Miss Knudsen had a life except as a teacher and as an avenger of intractable kids. I assumed she dwelt at the school. I couldn’t imagine her having any social interaction except with her pupils. The same was surely true of her colleagues, I figured, so once, when I did see a certain woman, a different teacher, at a local movie house’s matinee for kids, I was simply confused.

The woman at the movies would be my teacher the very next year. She sat with a male companion of her age and a boy young enough to enjoy the Disney feature, Song of the South (whose cringeworthy social implications doubtless escaped me). Did Miss Sheffield lead some double life, one in her classroom and a secret one outside it, in which she played partner, parent, and who knew what else? I sank in my seat to be sure she didn’t see me.

At 81 now, far, far older than anyone on the elementary faculty in those days, I’m perfectly aware that my sense of teachers’ lives—shared, I’m sure, by many of my peers—was a product of childish imagination. And yet this morning, my supposedly adult imagination got me thinking just as fantastically. In a bit of a purple mood, maybe, I turned Miss Knudsen into the mother of a child who’d survived polio, the scourge of that pre-Salk-vaccine era, but who’d been badly compromised by it.

In my imagination Miss Knudsen had changed out of her tidy blouse, skirt, and wedgie shoes into a comfortably loose house dress, which showed the usual floral pattern but with colors faded by many, many launderings. I noted how her son’s frantic thrashing had dampened the front of it. So far from being the magisterial presence I recalled from early school days, you see, so far from epitomizing sternness, she struggled to keep her boy upright in his bathtub.

Meanwhile, her husband stood in the kitchen downstairs of my mind, sipping a beer after a long day at some lower-management desk job. I resented him. “You don’t think she’s had a hard day too?” I silently barked. “And she’s still having one. Why the hell don’t you pitch in?” But my righteous indignation was matched by remorse at having played a part in so many of his wife’s trials. I mean, look at all she had to deal with after classes let out!

Sydney Lea more recently.

These images I’d contrived filled me with desire to offer Miss Knudsen my abject apologies, even though I knew the woman must be long dead. My eyes actually dampened when I thought of her poor, half-paralyzed son and the challenges he would face. How confining his life– and his mother’s! I even cut Mr. Knudsen some slack because he may understandably have been in denial. And, no matter that at six I was unaware of all this domestic anguish, I was ashamed to have poured so much disrespect on a person who suffered like that when I wasn’t looking.

No matter all these visions were entirely invented, I hope my elderly turn of mind suggests that the malice a little boy inflicted on a teacher was innocent, if that adjective can be used to qualify malice. As a child I hadn’t been able to empathize with her trials simply because I had no idea she had any. The ones I conjured this morning were made up out of whole cloth, but that’s far from saying the woman had no distressing situations to deal with. Real ones, no doubt, not fanciful. Everyone does.

As a grownup, before reaching some negative conclusion about another person’s belligerence, I now surmise that some private difficulty explains such behavior. Because there is virtually always an explanation, even if we usually can’t discern it.

I think, however, of a moment when an explanation did present itself. I had a chin-to-chin confrontation some decades back with a citizen of the tiny Maine village near our cabin. I did not know him, which seemed odd, as I’m at least acquainted with virtually everyone there. In any case, insisting that my wife and I had deliberately trespassed onto his backwoods property while walking our dogs, the guy kept screaming foul language at us. He was scarlet with fury.

I endured the man’s tirade for about three minutes, patting myself on the back for keeping my cool, but suddenly I lost it. “Shut the fuck up!” I growled, sinking to his level.

This fellow leapt from the cab of his truck. He strode toward me. I strode toward him. Big people both, we were soon, as the saying goes, in one another’s faces. Happily, my sensible wife intervened, shoving me back to our own truck. My incensed opponent kept up his verbal attack even after I’d turned away.

My wife’s was the mature response. I knew that. Still, there were moments for weeks and weeks, especially as I lay awake in the small hours, when I second-thought myself. “I should have...,” I’d begin, imagining myself giving that crude bastard a good thumping. My wife, who knows me as no one else can, kept telling me to let the whole affair go. I generally did, but not consistently.

As a grownup, before reaching some negative conclusion about another person’s belligerence, I now surmise that some private difficulty explains such behavior. Because there is virtually always an explanation, even if we usually can’t discern it.

I don’t believe I’d harbor violent thoughts like those today, toward him or anyone. That’s in part because of something that transpired the next summer. We were back at our camp, and I happened to mention the past winter’s clash to Dave, an old local friend, who was bewildered: he’d never seen anything in that man’s character to explain such hostile conduct. “That’s just not him,” he claimed.

“Well, it damned well was him!” I maintained.

Then my friend said, “Wait! When did this happen?”

“Last February,” I answered.

“Oh,” Dave breathed. “I know what that was all about, then.” He explained that the man’s daughter had married a log hauler. Over the three short years of their marriage, her father apparently grew to love his son-in-law as much as he would an actual son.

“The guy hit black ice on Route 9 last February,” Dave told me. “Rolled his truck over, timber and all. Killed him. That must be what got your buddy so ugly.”

Grief masquerading as rage. I’ve too often witnessed it in my own behavior. I punched through sheet rock all over my apartment when, only 56, my father died of a coronary. And I deliberately provoked a bar fight just after my younger brother’s fatal aneurysm. I could gather further examples, but you catch my meaning.

Now every fiber of my being forgave and sympathized with my opponent in Maine, who, sadly, himself died not so long after, not yet 65.

This morning, I surprise myself by seeing how far my thoughts have wandered from the last day of school in my sixth year. That was the fraught day I knew I’d be summoned, like each of my classmates, to sit on Miss Knudsen’s lap, there to be bidden farewell and embraced.

Trembling, and only after much insistence I took my seat on the teacher’s knee when she called my name. I was preoccupied with self-protection. There it jutted, the barb, a stiff, inch-long hair from a mole on the teacher’s chin. The woman didn’t fool me with her sweet act; she’d soon jab me somewhere in the face with that shaft. None of her other physical punishments had daunted me, but this one would do more than that.

I tried to turn my head away from that little weapon as it neared, but there was no escaping her strong grasp. When the woman hugged me, however, I was astonished that the stabbing I’d so dreaded never came. The whisker must have been rather soft after all; I felt nothing.

My nemesis assured me that all was forgiven but counseled me to behave better in Grade Two.

“You and I have had our fights,” she declared, “but I still love you. And you love me too, don’t you?”

I said not a word.

Doubtless, soon after school let out, Miss Knudsen forgot my intransigence, but yes, whatever her treatment of me, psychological and physical, right or wrong, I’m sure it had motives quite apart from the institutional alone. As I move inevitably toward the end of my own life, I recognize the fragility of everyone else’s. At the time, her asking me that final question seemed entirely absurd. These decades upon decades after_—knowing the vulnerability even of those who seem invulnerable—I wish I’d responded very differently when she asked me if I loved her.

However untruthfully, I should have shouted “Yes!” Shouted it for all the world to hear.

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Sydney Lea has published several essays in Oldster Magazine.