***Of This And That In The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In Search Of…..That Teacher Who Made A Difference    

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

For those who have been following this series about the old days in my old home town of North Adamsville, particularly the high school day as the 50^th anniversary of my graduation creeps up, you will notice that recently I have been doing sketches based on my reaction to various e-mails sent by fellow classmates via the class website. So I have taken on the tough tasks of sending kisses to raging grandmothers, talking up old flames with guys I used to hang around the corners with, remembering those long ago searches for the heart of Saturday night, getting wistful about elementary school daydreams, taking up the cudgels for be-bop lost boys and the like. That is no accident as I have of late been avidly perusing the personal profiles of various members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964 website as fellow classmates have come on to the site and lost their shyness about telling their life stories (or have increased their computer technology capacities, not an unimportant consideration for the generation of ’68, a generation on the cusp of the computer revolution and so not necessarily as computer savvy as the average eight-year old today).

Of course not everybody who graduated with me in that baby-boomer time class of over five hundred students had a literary flare or could articulate their dreams in the most coherent way. But they had dreams, and they have today when we have all been through about seven thousand of life’s battles, good and bad, a vehicle to express whatever they want. As I have mentioned before in other sketches I have spent not a little time lately touting the virtues of the Internet in allowing me and the members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964, or what is left of it, the remnant that has survived and is findable with the new technologies to communicate with each other some fifty years and many miles later on a class website recently set up to gather in classmates for our 50^th anniversary reunion.  (Some will never be found by choice or by being excluded from the “information super-highway” that they have not been able to navigate.) Interestingly those who have joined the site have, more or less, felt free to send me private e-mails telling me stories about what happened back in the day in school or what has happened to them since their jailbreak from the confines of the old town.

Some stuff is interesting to a point, you know, including those endless tales about the doings and not doings of the grandchildren, odd hobbies and other ventures taken up in retirement and so on although not worthy of me making a little off-hand commentary on. Some stuff is either too sensitive or too risqué to publish on a family-friendly site. Some stuff, some stuff about the old days and what did, or did not, happened to, or between, fellow classmates, you know the boy-girl thing (other now acceptable relationships were below the radar then) has naturally perked my interest. Other stuff defies simple classification, as is the case here in paying tribute to a long ago influence, my senior year English teacher, Miss (Ms.) Enos. The whole sketch got started after a couple of fellow classmates began touting their favorite English teachers endlessly and I felt compelled to enter the lists for Miss Enos. Now many time the question of teaching and the effect that certain teacher may, or may not, have on a particular student can be problematic. But hear me out here as I build my case for my favorite:    

 

***In Praise Of Miss (Ms.) Rose Enos, NAHS School English Department, Circa 1964

 

"The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, Upon the place beneath" lines from Portia's speech to the court in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.

 

Yes, I know we did not read The Merchant of Venice in senior year but I am using a little literary license here since it suits my purposes for this sketch.  

 

 

As I  recently came across those above-quoted lines in the epilogue of a book that I was innocently, very innocently, reading about the sources of old time English playwright William Shakespeare’s various works I suddenly developed a 50th anniversary case of the nerves. I had learned to love Shakespeare, and his sense of language, so one could not blame the playwright (the messenger) for the sudden case of nerves. Nor could one blame my peers who have kidded me about my bookish ways, about my still reading such things way after I needed to read stuff, serious stuff, about old times like that, the time of King James I in England and of other places in 17^thcentury Europe. And it certainly was not due to other friends who have had a terrible case of the yawns when I have started to mention anything before about 1950. So the source of those nerves was really easily traceable, very easily traceable, once I settled my nerves down, to time spent in Miss Rose Enos’ classroom learning those very lines of the Bard back in 1964. (I will stick with the time-appropriate “Miss” honorific here.)

 

Miss Rose Enos (see the English Department photo on page 101 of the Manet), my senior year English teacher, made many people nervous. Who am I kidding, she made one Frank Jackman, Class of 1964, and king hell king of the loner universe at old North Adamsville High nervous. Others can, on their own hook, come forth with their own benighted and heart-rendering testimony but she made me nervous before her class, nervous while in her class, nervous after leaving her class, and nervous in that occasional dark hour just before the dawn when I woke up, woke up with the sweats, became that book report due Monday morning bright and early was not coming together the way I wanted. Come on, again, who am I kidding, waking up with the sweats kidding, the way that she wanted it. Wanted the no- rush- no- night –before- it- was-due- well-thought- out- and- drafted- concise- with- some- kind- of- original- twist- to- it paper, and written like some come down from the mountain patriarchal tablet screed, or really an endlessly re-written version of that self-same screed.

 

Worse, worse than not being concise, worse than not having an original twist idea, was that you had to publicly defend your ideas in front of the whole class. But, once again who am I kidding, the class was child’s play, putty in my hands once I  started throwing my obscure, arcane, in-your-face two thousand facts at them, and they retreated, or better, surrendered, white flags in hand. No, it was her, Miss Enos, that I had to impress with my obscure, arcane, in-your-face knowledge but here is the rub, she had no surrender, or white flag, in her because she was privy to those two thousand facts, had in fact taught me a bunch of them, and had a few thousand additional ones in her own storehouse just waiting for me to make that one wrong move, the one wrong move that was inevitably to come from a young, still unformed, mind.

 

And worse, much worse than public Enos humiliation, worse than being at a lost for that original idea was to not be with her, to not be with her one- hundred percent, when she spoke, almost in a hushed whisper, of some piece of literature the virtues of which she endlessly drilled into the class. When she did this almost trance-like exercise I thought that she had her eyes set on me. (I found out later that that feeling was shared by every at least half-awake student in the class, the others were just ducking behind some book hoping not to be noticed.) As I thought of those books I remembered the time, trying to be one- hundred percent with her, when I blurred out that Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye “spoke” to me, spoke to me about my own teen alienation, spoke about what can a kid do when the cards are stacked against him in this cruel old world, a world he didn’t put together. Spoke to me of teen angst in trying to find my place in the sun when everybody was pushing me in about six different ways and I was pushing myself in about seven.

 

And there I was, proud as a peacock, feeling like a junior-sized literary critic and then she, Miss Enos, in high dudgeon, lowered the hammer and dismissed the book, and the author, as so much hot air and New Yorker-style cheapjack kid’s story, barely pabulum. And that was the end of it for once Miss Enos pronounced someone a mere kid’s stuff story writer oblivion beckoned. She much preferred that her Franks tackle James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, and Edith Wharton who wrote serious novels, great novels, and therefore were not assigned to hellish depths. And you know in a funny way I have to admit that she was right, right in the sense that these other guys had a lot to say and that one should no put all their “literary light” eggs in one basket, although she was still wrong, wrong big time, about J.D. Salinger. Wrong that is if she is not now nearby and ready to pounce, nearby this side of the grave that is.

 

Thinking on it all I realized that I was not close to Ms. Enos, certainly not her "pet." Perhaps she did not even really know who I was, although her notations in our daily notebooks may have pointed the other way. I do not know about today but back then the classes were very large and there were many minds to feed. So it was possible that she did not. Perhaps she did not even “like” me if she did know me. That too was possible. I did not display my better side, the "better angel of my nature," in those days, on most days.

 

As I nervously finished up my musing over the exploits, the maybe in great scheme of things un-heroic exploits of Miss Rose Enos, I thought about  those lines from Portia’s speech to the court in Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice, lines that she made the class memorize, although that memorizing business was not her style in general. And I chuckled to myself that I did not, after all, have to look those sentences in that speech up, although if I was sitting in a courtroom under oath I would have to confess that I did look them up in order to see if there was one or two p's in “droppeth.” I knew those lines and more from the master by heart. And that fact, that fact of remembrance, served to bring up something, something that was heroic about Miss Enos. About what she said, said endlessly. Literature matters. Words matter. I have, on more occasions than I care to remember, honored those ideas more in the breech than the observance but I have tried to be guided by them. They, no question, were planted there by Miss Enos. So whether she knew me or not I do know those two things about her. That wisdom has more than balanced things out. And I say now in that same hushed whisper she used, Miss Rose Enos wherever you are-thanks.