http://youtu.be/u_N6ezGK8XE [O Captain! My Captain! Scene from Dead Poet’s Society]
http://youtu.be/tKQSlH-LLTQ [Both Sides Now/Joni Mitchell]
http://youtu.be/IbBwDi9RIgM [Fred Rogers 1997 Emmy Speech]
Excerpt from We Speak Your Names, by Pearl Cleage
...Because we are wise women, born of wise women, who are born of wise women, we celebrate your wisdom.
Because we are strong women, born of strong women, who are born of strong women, we celebrate your strength.
Because we are magical women, born of magical women, who are born of magical women, we celebrate your magic.
My sisters, we are gathered here to speak your names.
We are here because we are your daughters as surely as if you had conceived us, nurtured us, carried us in your wombs, and then sent us out into the world to make our mark and see what we see, and be what we be, but better, truer, deeper because of the shining example of your own incandescent lives.
We are here to speak your names because we have enough sense to know that we did not spring full blown from the forehead of Zeus...We know that we are walking in footprints made deep by the confident strides of women who parted the air before them like the forces of nature that you are.
We are here to speak your names because you taught us that the search is always for the truth and that when people show us who they are, we should believe them.
We are here because you taught us that sister-speak can continue to be our native tongue, no matter how many languages we learn as we move about as citizens of the world and of the ever-evolving universe.
We are here to speak your names because of the way you made for us...
Because of the prayers you prayed for us. We are the ones you conjured up, hoping we would have strength enough, and discipline enough, and talent enough, and nerve enough to step into the light when it turned in our direction, and just smile awhile.
We are the ones you hoped would make you proud because all of our hard work makes all of yours part of something better, truer, deeper – Something that lights the way ahead like a lamp unto our feet, as steady as the unforgettable beat of our collective heart.
We speak your names.
We speak your names....
Have you ever had a special teacher – someone who touched something within you and made you want to learn? Have you ever had a mentor who took you under their wing, and helped you navigate through both the calm or unsteady seas of your life? I have been blessed several times with special teachers whose memory and lessons I still carry with me. I have also been blessed with one very special teacher~mentor whose presence in my life has been monumental in terms of influence and impact. I met her 30 years ago, when I was a Sophomore in college. It was an auspicious meeting that has greatly affected my life with regard to how I think about things. I have an openness of mind that I credit her, in part, for instilling in me.
Before I met her, I spent my freshman year of college out of state in Georgia, and while it was a good experience for me, some things that happened during that first year, as well as the expense of not being a Georgia resident, made me re-think being and staying there. I decided to go to Tampa and get my Associate of Arts degree. I could have easily stayed in Jacksonville and gone to Jr. College at home, before I ultimately transferred to the University of Florida, but part of the college experience for me was being away from home and learning to make my own decisions and stand on my own two feet. I went to Tampa with my parents’ blessing and shared an apartment off Fletcher Avenue with a friend. Karin went to the University of South Florida, and I chose to go to Hillsborough Community College.
I’ll never forget the day I went for registration. I stepped into a building with a line two halls deep with people waiting to schedule their courses.
“Good Lord!” I groaned, shocked by what I saw. I hadn’t planned on spending the entire day at registration.
I was informed by someone that the line I was looking at wasn’t the registration line, but a registration line to get into a certain block of English Literature classes.
I remember making a face and replying to the person who’d informed me of that fact, a disbelieving, “You’re kidding!”
“No,” came the reply. “She’s really good.”
How good could she possibly be? I wondered to myself with a chuckle, then reassessed my thought gaged upon the long line that went down one hall and around another, that she must be pretty doggone good. I’d already had my English classes at Mercer University where I transferred in from, but I also had several electives that I could use at my sole discretion. I knew I had to take the class again and see what all the hoopla was about. I mean a line like that merited investigation. So, I went to the end of it and patiently waited my turn to register for a course that I’d already taken at another university and gotten an A in. I don’t recall exactly how long it took to register for that particular class, but I know that it was more than an hour, and I remember thinking to myself, this had BETTER be good!
The memory of that first day of class is as vivid as if it was yesterday. I took my seat in the middle of the room. There’s an unspoken perception that comes along with sitting in the first row in a class, namely that you’re a nerdy, goody two-shoes type. There’s also that same type of perception that comes from sitting in the back of a classroom which evokes images of someone being the exact opposite of that first impression. I was neither. I’ve always been somewhere in the middle – a good girl with a little wild streak in me, not the other way around. But, I digress...
Back to that first day of class. So, I’m sitting in my chair, when in walks a petite, pretty, blonde-haired lady. Okay, actually pretty is an understatement. She was striking–beautiful. I remember adjusting in my seat. I now understood why all the guys were in the class, because it had never been my experience that guys [except for extremely studious ones], cared much about English Lit. If they were going to have to have an English Literature class to graduate, and they were because it was a requisite course, they might as well take it with someone who was easy on the eyes. AJ was easy on the eyes. There were no ifs ands or buts around that fact, but she was SO much more than just a pretty face, as everyone in that classroom would soon discover. I remember watching her glance around the room, taking note and stock of who had come to partake in the experience she was about to give us. At that point, we were only a mass of faces to her. Quickly, she rectified that. She did something that no other teacher I’d had in any class during any stage of my education had done. She told us who she was and gave a little history about herself, then she asked for each of us to stand up and do the same.
She did with each person who stood up what she did with me: she smiled and said “hi”, addressing each of us by name. Then, she listened intently to whatever little detail about ourselves we wanted to share with her. I don’t know if all these years later that’s still her practice, but, at the time, it was amazing. She didn’t just want to teach us. She wanted to know a little bit about who we were. This wasn’t just for her benefit. It also allowed us to get to know about the other students we were sharing this course with – an ice-breaker, so to speak. I’d never had a teacher give me that kind of respect before. I now understood why the line had been two halls deep to get into her class.
Her teaching style, as I remember it, was unconventional. She didn’t parrot back a teaching outline that probably came along with the voluminous book that was her manual. She interjected everyday events to demonstrate or clarify a point she wanted to make about whatever the writer of a particular work had been attempting to impart in their story. Sometimes, it’s difficult to understand what certain writers are trying to convey. Shakespeare and Chaucer spring to my mind. AJ [my term of endearment for her] would often times mention a current movie or an old song to help us grasp something riddled with metaphor or esoteric symbolism to bring it to a level we could comprehend.
She was masterful in her ability to clarify things that were, on its face, sometimes difficult to understand. She understood the difficulty and made the reading and deciphering of some of these works less daunting to young people who found such things as 100s year-old literature or even current literature to be a very intimidating prospect. AJ was the first college professor I had who actually challenged me. You may be wondering what she did. It was very simple. She expected me and everyone in her class to bring something to the class, and take something away from it. After all, we had chosen to be there. I thought I had done that, until I got my first essay back. It had a big red C+ on it. To say that I was stunned or shocked would be a HUGE understatement. I was upset, and I had a brief moment where I was mad that she hadn’t appeared to have the good foresight to have seen what all my English teachers who had preceded her knew about me: I wrote a pretty damn good paper. Why hadn’t SHE seen that? I was truly perplexed! Once I saw past the red, I requested to meet with her during office hours the following day. Graciously, she told what time she’d be in.
I recall stepping nervously into her office the next day with paper in hand. I remember telling her that I thought she’d made a mistake in the grading. I wasn’t entirely certain how the mistake had been made, but I knew when I re-read my paper, it was clear and concise regarding the facts of what I’d read. I needed for her to explain to me what she was missing, because I couldn’t find it.
She looked at me for a minute, considering what I had said. Then, I recall her simple yet direct question to me:
“Why do you think I made a mistake grading your paper, Miss Bosher?”
“I don’t get C’s on English papers,” I informed her. “Math and Science, yeah, but not English.”
She nodded, accepting my declaration. “What grades do you normally get on your English papers?”
I held her look. “A’s,” I stated with assurance. “Occasionally a B but never a C! I don’t understand why I got a C?”
“Did you read my comments?” she asked, curious.
I bit my lip. I distinctly remember my front teeth clamping down into my bottom lip when she asked me that.
“To tell you the truth,” I told her. “I didn’t get much beyond the glaring, red C+.”
The response seemed to surprise her a little, because I saw her eyes reflect as much. She had taken the time to give me a great deal of feedback [there had been a lot of red writing on that paper], but I had not taken the time to read her comments and directives. Looking back, it must have seemed like a huge disrespect, which had not been my intent. The truth of the matter was that my brain had shut-down when I saw that red C+ at the top of my paper, and I couldn’t see anything beyond it.
Thankfully for me, I didn’t strike her as a disrespectful, young woman, and she didn’t take exception to my oversight when I offered her my truth. When she explained the grade to me, it changed how I approached my schoolwork and my work in general from that moment forward. She told me that she wasn’t interested in an overview of what I’d read. She knew what I’d read, because she’d read the story many times and would read it many more. What she was interested in was my reaction to and thoughts about what I’d read. She wanted my insights and opinions. She wanted answers to such questions as why I thought the writer approached the subject matter from a specific viewpoint; what did the themes or underlying themes mean to me and how did it relate to a specific element or style of writing that we were learning about. She was interested in whether I agreed or disagreed with this or that regarding the story. If so, why? If not, why not?
I wasn’t accustomed to that expectation of learning before. My thoughts? My insights? My opinions? Until that moment, learning, to me, meant reading a specific document; processing my understanding of it; and, storing it to memory so that when asked, I could state the facts that existed. That was the play-book with every other class I’d ever taken until hers.
Putting my spin on it – offering my take was a whole other bailiwick. It required something more of me–much more. Her expectation brought forth a huff. A huff is an expression beyond a sigh, in case you don't know. A huff is a combination of disappointment and frustration. In that moment, it’s exactly how I felt. I heard what she was saying. I understood now what she would demand of me in this course. Still, it didn’t remove the sting of the grade. A subject matter that had always been easy and comfortable for me was suddenly new and different. Her expectation removed me from my comfort zone that I had previously existed in regarding English class, and I realized that I wasn’t going to simply coast through this with the ease that I’d always coasted through English classes before that moment. I had not imagined that I would begin this class with a C+. It was unacceptable to me, given that it was English, something that I intended to major in before I went to law school. [Story for another day] I felt deflated and no longer confident in an area that had always been my one area where I shined. I nodded my head once again that I understood what she was asking of me, and thanked her for her time, before I rose to leave.
I’m not sure what her thoughts were as she watched me leave, but I knew what mine were as I was leaving: I wanted to cry. I was away from home; starting a new semester at a new college; and, I had just bombed with a subject matter that had, prior to this class, been a piece of cake for me. As if sensing my upset and realizing how much this grade truly mattered to me, she called after me, knowing that I needed something more to make this situation alright.
“Miss Bosher,” she called, with a sensitive compassion in her tone. “Had I wanted a well-crafted paper simply giving an overview of what you had read,” she offered me hope – a thing with feathers, like Emily Dickinson once wrote about. “You would have gotten an A. That’s not what my classes are about. I believe you understand now what I’m looking for regarding essays submitted to me, and if you’d like to re-write it, then I’ll be happy to reconsider the grade.”
I stopped at the door, trying to collect myself – trying to keep my tears that were creeping to the surface at bay. I glanced back at her and smiled.
“Thank you, “Ma’am,” I replied, relieved and grateful for the opportunity of a do-over. “I’ll look it over again.”
She smiled back and nodded. It was in that exchange that I felt the connection.
I don’t know if you’ve ever met someone who you had a special, unexplainable connection with, who you felt you’d known before, but that’s exactly how I felt with AJ. Later, she told me that she had felt it too, which is why she took a special interest in me and encouraged me regarding my writing. She saw something in me that needed nurturing, and she nurtured it.
I re-did that paper, and I got an A with three words written in red ink at the top of it beside the grade: Clap! Clap! Clap! She had wanted me to not only find my voice, but to own it and write with the authority of my convictions on whatever opinions I was giving. To her, my thoughts and ideas were as important as the most important writers in literature. It was an extraordinary lesson–gift, but AJ is an extraordinary teacher.
From then on, I regularly visited her during office hours if no one else needed her help, not because I necessarily did, but because I wanted to talk more in-depth ideas with her about what we were studying. The conversations branched out into world events, music, movies. She knew that I was away from home, living in an apartment without a lot of friends in Tampa. She had two children of her own, so she understood what it meant for me to be alone in a big town, especially given that I was more the studious type than a party girl. As a result, she took me under her wing with regard to my courses, offering me sage advice on things that had nothing to do with stories or essays. She was my constant during the year that I worked hard to earn my Associate of Arts degree. I looked to her for direction, advice, and feedback. I declared her my advisor and confidante, and she graciously and lovingly accepted that role. She is one of the smartest women I’ve ever known; she has been one of the greatest influences in my life; and, one of my most valued teachers.
The second literature course I took with her was no less challenging, insightful or informative as the first. AJ’s style of teaching is something that one must experience to truly understand and appreciate. The best I can liken it too is Professor Keating in the movie The Dead Poet’s Society. She wasn’t wild and crazy like Robin Williams, but her approach was unconventional and her classes were fun. Rarely was there an empty seat in her classroom. She had a unique ability to engage her students and make them want to participate in the discussion, which says a lot about her, given that some students aren’t comfortable with doing that. No one seemed to have a problem joining in the discussion in AJ’s classes. There’s something about her that draws one in. Thirty years ago, when I was her student, I remember watching how she interacted with us and thinking how cool she was. It wasn’t a sentiment I shared alone, rather, it was the general consensus among her students. Being cool, by the way, isn’t a trait that a teacher can develop. As Frank Sinatra once said, “being a cool cat is something you’re born with. You either have it or you don’t, but it ain’t something you learn.”
There is a style and grace about her that’s unique. Some might classify it as a Bohemian flair, but whatever it was, it made her stand out as a teacher and securing a seat in one of her classes was a coveted spot to be in. I’ve often thought about the things I’ve learned from her, and how best to describe it, and I always come up short. Profound is a word I continue to return to when I think of AJ: profound affect; profound insight; profound intellect. She gave so much of herself to so many of us in her fervent desire to make us better, smarter and wiser than when we’d first stepped foot into her classroom. As much as there are students with a passionate desire to learn, there is equally a number of teachers with just as much passion to educate. Each is distinguishable. I believe the reason that AJ’s classes were teaming with both eager and uneager English students was because each of us knew that she cared about what she was doing, and it mattered to her that we did well with the lessons she imparted. I guess that’s the difference in someone who seeks that profession as a job versus those who accept it as their calling.
All I know is that I embraced Shirley Jackson, Nikki Giovanni, Oriana Fallaci and Eudora Welty, to name but a few, in a way that I’d never thought possible: I savored them. For most of us as students, we take a class and when it’s over, it’s over and long forgotten. I remember in vivid detail the lessons and discussions we had in AJ’s class about most of the things we read.
The day after we read Shirley Jackson’s, The Lottery, I remember AJ leaning against the front of her desk as she looked at all of us, folding her arms and asking with a Cheshire cat smile, “That was a surprise wasn’t it?”
She laughed when one of her male students in the back of the room called out that it was a Stephen King surprise. In one of the stories we read of Eudora Welty’s that exposed us to a style of writing full of rich imagery, I remember her asking who of us had realized that the old woman lying in her bed and fretfully complaining to her familial caretaker that there were ants in her bed biting her, was really a dying woman who was fading in and out of consciousness, and the ant bites weren’t ants at all but the sharp pricks of needles administering intermittent medication? Oh, it was good – like a delicious apple dripping sweet juice down your face kinda good. Then, there was the poetry of Nikki Giovanni. I love poetry and have read a great deal of it in my lifetime. But, until that class, I’d never heard of Ms. Giovanni or of her Cotton Candy on A Rainy Day. Let me offer you a little taste:
“Don't look now
I'm fading away
Into the gray of my mornings
Or the blues of every night.
...It seems no matter how I try,
I become more difficult to hold .
I am not an easy woman to want ...”
Mm. Good stuff. The only thing that made it better was AJ’s teaching of this material. My favorite assignment we had during the summer of 1982, when I took that second Lit. class with her, was the reading of Letter to A Child Never Born by Oriana Fallachi. It was both a beautiful and powerful story about an unmarried feminist who discovers that she’s pregnant. Her feelings about it are conflicted, ambivalent, – uncertain. The father of the child wants her to have an abortion, but she doesn’t want to do that. The story is a series of conversations she has with this “child” as she works through the reconciliation of mixed emotions that this pregnancy has brought about for her, only to miscarry the child in the end, which came as no surprise because of the title. Yet, it was a surprising conclusion, when it reached that climax. It was sad and raw, tinged with confusion and finally resignation, and I wasn’t sure why it resonated so strongly within me at the time – the part regarding the miscarriage? [I have since suffered two of my own.]
It’s a book that I kept, because it was one of the most masterful things that I’ve ever read. It’s out of print now, and I consider it among my literary treasures. AJ brought her own eloquent ideas to our discussion about it. I’ve never forgotten it. Like a superb movie [To Kill a Mockingbird], a song that’s lyrically perfect [Imagine], or a speech that’s flawless in its message and delivery such as JFK’s ‘61 inaugural address or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, I Have a Dream speech, when something remains with you for decades, and you can recall with precise detail the lessons that contained those same thought provoking synopses like the examples listed above, but in the case of Letter to A Child Never Born, it was coupled with her personal pearls of wisdom, and you remember it as though they were given to you just yesterday, you have experienced a form of excellence that is uncommonly special. I wish that every person could have a year of education and learning like the year I had in a junior college classroom in south Florida 30 years ago. It wasn’t just a learning experience. It was a life-grooming of sorts. I have always had a great love of books, but I learned to have a deeper appreciation for them because of a woman who didn’t accept what I thought was my best but, instead, challenged me to reach beyond myself to something that was greater within me.
I remember when my time in Tampa and HCC was over, she walked me to my car and we hugged in the parking lot. I had packed up my car the previous night so that I could drive home to Jacksonville for a few weeks directly after final exams, before I returned for fall semester at The University of Florida. I buried my face in her shoulder and cried. It was the kind of cry you have when you know that something exhilarating and wonderful is ending and you aren’t ready for it – you want to hold onto it for as long as you possibly can, if only for a minute longer.
She patted my back and said in her gentle, reassuring voice, “Sweet Jhill! Our friendship isn’t going to end simply because your time here has.”
I nodded into her shoulder, unable to find that adult voice that she had helped nurture.
“Gainesville is only two hours away,” she continued. “You’ll come back and visit, and we’ll go to lunch. You have my phone number, and you can call me anytime,” she said, trying to soothe my angst.
I nodded some more as she kissed my cheek and told me to be careful. I looked at her in that moment with a deep and abiding sense of gratitude and respect. She had given me so much in that last year, more than I think she is even aware of, and opened me up to deeper level of reasoning and understanding. It seemed odd and un-familiar to me that I wouldn’t be seeing her that following Monday morning.
However, true to her words to me on that last day that I was a student at HCC, we did keep in touch. I drove down, periodically, and we had lunch then would go back to her house and have coffee and talk for a couple of hours before I headed back to college. She turned me onto Joni Mitchell, and I turned her onto the poet, Merritt Malloy. That was a GREAT quid pro quo! I learned that John Lennon was her favorite Beetle, and she learned that George Harrison was mine.
At that time, she was one of a handful of people who knew the worst thing that had ever happened to me. [In the ensuing years that worst thing has changed.] She is also on that same hand of people who knows the worst of my sins. Like a deeply flawed parishioner desperately needing and seeking absolution from their trusted priest, I told her one day with mortified regret something that I had done which was selfishly uncharacteristic of me, certain that she would send me away, not wanting to hear from me ever again. Much like she had done when I told her of the worst thing that ever happened to me, she wrapped her arms around me and gave me a good squeeze. Yet, when I told her of my transgression, she didn’t look at me with anything but compassion, taking into account all that she knew I’d been through in my life, and she assured me that I wasn’t the horrible person that I was painting myself out to be.
“Sweet Jhill,” she replied, offering her soft-spoken grace. “You’re human not horrible, and the important thing here is what you learn from this ‘mistake’ more than the fact that you made it. We all make mistakes. You can’t truly learn and grow unless you have a few of them in your mea culpa column.”
I remember feeling the weight lift off of me as I hugged her and sighed with relief that I’d not become an ugly ogre to her in the telling of my faux pas. “Thank you, Aunt Judy! Thank you.”
It is a gift when you have someone in your life who can see the good in you no matter how bad your picture, in that moment, looks. She has always been one of those people in my life. She has a discerning eye, but not for seeing my flaws. Rather, she’s always found the beauty in me.
She was the first person I called after I had my first date with my husband. I remember telling her that I’d found the man I was going to marry, and if I didn’t marry him, I probably wouldn’t settled down like that. She told me that she hoped, if that were truly the case, that I’d found my prince charming. [I did.] She was the second person I called after Tom proposed to me. I remember her telling me that she was very proud of the woman I’d become. That comment made me feel good because her opinion has always mattered to me.
I wrote to her years ago, after I’d seen The Dead Poet’s Society, and told her how much that movie impacted me and made me think of her. It put into perspective what she’s meant to me in my life – the significant role that she has played. She is my Captain! I told her as much, and I’ve loving referred to and held her in that context ever since. She believes and has stated that I have given her too much credit. I believe and have stated in response that I have not. I informed her of my position with that confident, assured voice that she helped me find and cultivate 30 years ago. She thanked me for the gift of that sentiment, because I gave it to her at a time in her life when, apparently, she needed to hear it.
It’s like that old poem states: 100 years from now, it won’t matter how big the house you lived in was, the kind of car you drove or how much money you had in the bank. What will matter is if you were in important in the life of a child. To this child of the world, her one-time student, her always friend, she’s been important. She’s been very, very important.
Today is her birthday, the day when we celebrate the exceptional people in our lives for the special someone they are, and the journey they have come through to reach this point in their story. Today, my 10 seconds of remembering “someone who cared about and wanted what was best for me in MY life,” are reserved solely for her with heartfelt love and gratitude. Today, I speak her name: Dr. Judith Chambers, with reverent love and appreciation.
The imprint of her hands went deep into the clay of me. She helped to shape and mold many of the ways that I look at things, and I wear the lessons she instilled as part of the uniquely dimensional fabric of my character. She, like my parents, loved me into being the woman I am today. She graced me with her wisdom, inspired me with her knowledge and enlightened me with her words and insights. She is my teacher; my mentor, my sister; my friend; and, I am all the better for having been gifted by the presence of this rare and brilliant light in my life.
O, Captain! MY Captain! Happy Birthday to you! You are such a treasure! I hope your day and the years that remain are filled with rich and glorious blessings tailor-made just for you. I hope that they are all both beautiful and joyful, no less than what you are and have been to all of us who know and love you...
http://youtu.be/yRhq-yO1KN8 [Imagine/John Lennon]
For those who would like to read the Walt Whitman poem from Leaves of Grass:
O Captain! My Captain!
O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done; | |
| The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won; | |
| The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, | |
| While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring: | |
| But O heart! heart! heart! | 5 |
| O the bleeding drops of red, | |
| Where on the deck my Captain lies, | |
| Fallen cold and dead. | |
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; | |
| Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills; | 10 |
| For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding; | |
| For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; | |
| Here Captain! dear father! | |
| This arm beneath your head; | |
| It is some dream that on the deck, | 15 |
| You’ve fallen cold and dead. | |
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; | |
| My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will; | |
| The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done; | |
| From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won; | 20 |
| Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells! | |
| But I, with mournful tread, | |
| Walk the deck my Captain lies, | |
| Fallen cold and dead. |
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