CREEK ROAD GANG
Your Subtitle text
"You Don't Mean It, Dear!"
Kate Lydon
copyright 2009
Miss Kenny, my
eleventh grade English teacher, had a ruddy complexion, dark hair with
a widow’s peak, almost black eyebrows and black rimmed glasses. She
usually wore suits, pearls and pumps. I was sixteen, and I never
thought about her age beyond that she was “older.” When I look now at
her yearbook picture, I’d guess she was somewhere in her late fifties,
maybe a little older. She had, to my Bostonian ears, a peculiar way of
speaking. She would talk of someone’s “atty-tude,” and describe a scene
as “bee-yoo-ti-ful.” She was also very talkative, telling her students
a variety of stories seemingly unrelated to what we were studying.
At the time, I was writing a lot of poetry – ranging from short to very long unrhymed poems with strong persistent rhythm. Images included stained glass windows, varicose veins, subway walls, high tide and sour milk. Many of the poems were about a struggle to find meaning, hope and connection amidst the angst of my adolescence. I was terribly earnest.
In her own way, so was Miss Kenny.
Very early into the school year, my best friend dragged me into Miss Kenny’s office at the end of the school day and told Miss Kenny about my poetry. At my friend’s insistence, I bashfully let our teacher read some of my poems from the speckled composition notebooks which I carried with me everywhere I went.
Miss Kenny responded enthusiastically. She said she loved my poems, and began talking about imagery, symbolism, and alliteration. Before I could make much of a response, she produced a book of Yeats’s poetry and began peppering me with questions. What did I think of this image? Did I see what he was getting at? What was the symbolism of that? What about the structure? It was all directed at me; my friend might as well have been invisible. Every answer I gave Miss Kenny seemed to be more exciting to her than the last. Finally, after what seemed to me a long ordeal, she let us leave, but only after assigning me some poetry of Yeats to read and eliciting promises that I would come back and tell her what I thought about his poems, and that I would show her my new poems as I completed them. My friend was quite satisfied with the experience, but I was wondering what I had got into.
As the school year unfolded, we learned that Miss Kenny was frequently enthusiastic about a wide variety of things. For instance, she would rhapsodize about her favorite authors in a unique way. “I love Stephen Crane,” she gushed one morning, “because he died so young!” As I was contemplating how silly it seemed to love someone because of premature death, she continued with a string of literary loves. “I love Dylan Thomas because he was an alcoholic! I love Eugene O’Neil because his mother was a drug addict!”
Miss Kenny, we discovered, was prone to bizarre non-sequiturs. In the midst of a class discussion of a short story which had involved horses, Miss Kenny suddenly burst out, “I love horses!” Without losing a beat, she continued, “My father was killed by a horse. It threw him and kicked him in the head and he died. But they’re such beautiful animals!” We sat in stunned silence as she continued a litany of equine praise.
On another occasion, Miss Kenny told us that she was from Philadelphia. She had gone to a religious boarding school at which all the girls were supplied with bibs to wear in the bath tub so that they would not be able to look at their own naked bodies. Like my classmates, I was totally grossed out by that tidbit, although I did wonder how they had bathed without getting the bib wet. Miss Kenny told us that she had become a nun, and later left the convent. I never learned how she ended up teaching English in a public high school in Massachusetts.
True to my promise, I gave Miss Kenny copies of my new poems as I finished them, and I went after school to discuss Yeats with her. She frequently suggested authors I should explore and books I should read, and I searched them out and I read them. So far, so good; but Miss Kenny had a big mouth.
One day in class, she decided that her topic of discussion would be me. She read the class a writing assignment I had handed in. Then she began to praise me as lavishly as if I had been an alcoholic drug addict who died young while riding a horse. In what was to become a regularly repeated refrain, she gushed, “She is erudite, she is prolific, she is upper strata!” I simultaneously turned beet red and tried to fade into the white walls, but the damage was done. Everyone in my class had heard it. As if that weren't bad enough, within days, a sophomore I knew came up to me and said, “Miss Kenny sure loves you! She read our class a paper you wrote. She says you’re prolific. What does that mean?”
“She means I write a lot,” I answered miserably.
I liked the suggestions and ideas Miss Kenny gave me about literature, writing that was new and exciting to me. And she liked me so much! It felt wrong to be dismissive of her. But she said such strange things in class! On top of that, not only was she embarrassing me in front of my own class, now she was embarrassing me in front of kids I didn’t even know!
That winter Miss Kenny invited me to go with her to a reading by Emlyn Williams of Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales. She picked me up at home and drove to East Boston so that we could take public transportation to the event. I remember watching her nod off to sleep on the subway, and worrying that I’d have to wake her for our stop. I was greatly relieved when she awoke with a start following a particularly sharp lurch of the train. We made a transfer onto a trolley and got off near where the event was to be held. As we headed across a wide street to the building, Miss Kenny said, “I believe that’s Fred Kerrick, right there across the street! It is Fred!” Mr. Kerrick had been my seventh grade homeroom teacher. Miss Kenny took off at a gallop, waving one hand in the air and shouting in a high pitched voice, “Fred! Fred Kerrick! Yoo hoo! Fred!” I had no choice but to jog along behind.
Thankfully, Mr. Kerrick turned to us, so that Miss Kenny stopped yelling. “Hello, Teresa!” he said warmly.
Miss Kenny introduced me, telling Mr. Kerrick that I was erudite, prolific and upper-strata.
I blushed, smiled and said hello.
Mr. Kerrick said kindly, “I remember you very well from junior high school.”
“She’s my gem!” Miss Kenny added, a remark with which she tormented me for the rest of my high school career.
The Emlyn Williams reading was wonderful, and I loved it. It had been very kind of her to bring me, and I was grateful to Miss Kenny. I just wished she didn’t have to be so embarrassing.
Miss Kenny liked to have class discussions of literature, and would stand smiling, and apparently transfixed, as we discussed theme, purpose, style, symbols, structure, character, conflict. She would nod benevolently at each point made, sometimes encouraging us to elaborate, but never rejecting a comment. When she was surprised either with what we said, or with the vehemence with which we said it, she would comment, “You don’t mean it!” It was an innocent remark which grated on my fervent sixteen-year-old sensibilities.
One day, after I had made a particularly impassioned point in a class discussion, Miss Kenny responded, “You don’t mean it, dear! You don’t mean it!”
Without thinking, I blurted out, “I do mean it, Miss Kenny! I do!” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I froze in horror at my rudeness.
Miss Kenny laughed, and continued the discussion.
Unlike her self-conscious teenaged charges, Miss Kenny didn’t seem to worry, before or after, about what came out of her mouth. When we read Poe’s “The Bells” in class one day, she immediately began to free-associate. “Bells,” she said. “Did you ever see the movie, ‘The Bells of Saint Mary’s?’ It was wonderful! It had Bing Crosby! Such a bee-yoo-ti-ful voice!” Then, loudly, with an excess of vibrato, she sang: “The bells of Saint Mary’s! Ah, hear they are calling….” We sat as quietly and awkwardly as if our own mothers had burst into song in front of our friends, but Miss Kenny didn’t care. When she finished singing, she told us the plot of the movie, and somehow worked the conversation back to Poe.
That spring brought me two outings with Miss Kenny. She took a small group from my class to a performance of a play at Brandeis. Miss Kenny picked us up and drove us to the campus in Waltham for a Saturday evening performance. I’ve long since forgotten the name of the modern edgy play we saw, but I was thrilled with it. Another weekend she took me as the representative from our school to a regional conference for high school English students. The conference itself was not very memorable. Instead, what stands out in my mind was sitting in the front seat of Miss Kenny’s car and talking with her as she asked me about books I was reading, poetry I was writing, my family, and what I wanted to do with my life.
It was around that time that Miss Kenny began to encourage me to enter contests. She would sometimes hand me copies of flyers describing one or another competition which she thought I should enter. With her encouragement, I sent in entries. One of my poems won in a poetry contest for high school students sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and another was published in an anthology of poetry by Massachusetts high school students. Contest results were delivered to Miss Kenny as the faculty sponsor before I heard anything about it. She in turn alerted the Main Office at school. I discovered that I had a winning entry when the news was announced over the loudspeaker to the entire school; more blushing.
As my junior year was drawing to a close, we came to English class one day with yearbooks which had been distributed to us earlier that morning. “Let me see!” Miss Kenny said. She opened the yearbook to the faculty section and looked for her picture. “Oh, look at that!” she exclaimed. “I look pregnant!” We tried not to laugh.
This was the woman who introduced me to Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Virginia Wolff, Archibald MacLeish, T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Mann, Joyce, Kafka and even Alan Ginsburg. She talked to me about literature and was generous with her time and her encouragement. But sometimes she seemed nuts!
In twelfth grade, our English class moved on to English literature with another teacher who had a habit of peppering his sentences with the phrases “if you will,” or “as it were.” I learned a lot from him about English history and literature. Unlike my experience in Miss Kenny's eleventh grade English, though, I found his class neither embarrassing nor inspiring.
However, Miss Kenny and I had not come to a parting of the ways. During my senior year, she was teaching an English department elective, Journalism, and I signed up. I don’t remember much difference between the two classes I had with Miss Kenny. We read, we talked, and we wrote. Miss Kenny would periodically remind the class that I was her gem, erudite, prolific and upper-strata. I would try to ignore it.
My senior year was very busy. In addition to my classes, I was involved in a lot of school activities. Outside of school, I was even a co-editor of a local attempt at an “underground” newspaper. Besides that, my two best girlfriends and I spent many afternoons together talking, drinking coffee, talking, doing homework and talking. In my spare time, I wrote, read, walked by the beach, completed my college applications, and worried. I didn’t have time to talk with Miss Kenny as frequently anymore. If she noticed, she never mentioned it.
Toward the end of classes that spring, Miss Kenny had a surprise for us. One day in journalism class, she distributed copies of a literary magazine which she had put together herself from assignments handed in to English teachers, and which was being given to all students in the high school. I quickly searched the list of contributors, and found my name. Eagerly, I turned the pages to see what piece of mine she had chosen.
I found an acerbic character sketch I had handed in for a class writing assignment; just the type of thing one might expect from an erudite, prolific, upper strata gem such as myself. It concerned an irritating fat old woman, her fat lazy adult son, and her fat ugly dog, The only problem was that I had written it about someone I knew. It seemed to me such a clear description of this woman's behavior and circumstance that I was sure my classmates, or, heaven forbid, their mothers, might recognize the object of my sharp pen. Horrified, embarrassed and ashamed, I prayed that the poor irritating fat old woman would never find out what I had written, and, thanks to the limited popularity of high school literary magazines, I don't believe she ever did.
After graduation, I worked full time all summer and went away to college in the fall. I didn’t see Miss Kenny anymore.
At some point, I heard from that same high school friend who first dragged me and my poetry notebooks into Miss Kenny's office that Miss Kenny had retired. I was surprised, but assumed she must have been older than I thought. Sometime later, my friend told me that Miss Kenny had gone to live with a sister and had died.
When I look at Miss Kenny's yearbook picture, even the one in which she said she looked pregnant, I see that same beaming smile she always brought to class. I understand now that she was kind, dynamic, quixotic, intellectual, uninhibited, inspiring, exasperating and loving. I regret that I never told her how much her encouragement meant, but I'm also sure that Miss Kenny would understand. I didn’t altogether appreciate it then, but I was lucky she considered me her gem.
At the time, I was writing a lot of poetry – ranging from short to very long unrhymed poems with strong persistent rhythm. Images included stained glass windows, varicose veins, subway walls, high tide and sour milk. Many of the poems were about a struggle to find meaning, hope and connection amidst the angst of my adolescence. I was terribly earnest.
In her own way, so was Miss Kenny.
Very early into the school year, my best friend dragged me into Miss Kenny’s office at the end of the school day and told Miss Kenny about my poetry. At my friend’s insistence, I bashfully let our teacher read some of my poems from the speckled composition notebooks which I carried with me everywhere I went.
Miss Kenny responded enthusiastically. She said she loved my poems, and began talking about imagery, symbolism, and alliteration. Before I could make much of a response, she produced a book of Yeats’s poetry and began peppering me with questions. What did I think of this image? Did I see what he was getting at? What was the symbolism of that? What about the structure? It was all directed at me; my friend might as well have been invisible. Every answer I gave Miss Kenny seemed to be more exciting to her than the last. Finally, after what seemed to me a long ordeal, she let us leave, but only after assigning me some poetry of Yeats to read and eliciting promises that I would come back and tell her what I thought about his poems, and that I would show her my new poems as I completed them. My friend was quite satisfied with the experience, but I was wondering what I had got into.
As the school year unfolded, we learned that Miss Kenny was frequently enthusiastic about a wide variety of things. For instance, she would rhapsodize about her favorite authors in a unique way. “I love Stephen Crane,” she gushed one morning, “because he died so young!” As I was contemplating how silly it seemed to love someone because of premature death, she continued with a string of literary loves. “I love Dylan Thomas because he was an alcoholic! I love Eugene O’Neil because his mother was a drug addict!”
Miss Kenny, we discovered, was prone to bizarre non-sequiturs. In the midst of a class discussion of a short story which had involved horses, Miss Kenny suddenly burst out, “I love horses!” Without losing a beat, she continued, “My father was killed by a horse. It threw him and kicked him in the head and he died. But they’re such beautiful animals!” We sat in stunned silence as she continued a litany of equine praise.
On another occasion, Miss Kenny told us that she was from Philadelphia. She had gone to a religious boarding school at which all the girls were supplied with bibs to wear in the bath tub so that they would not be able to look at their own naked bodies. Like my classmates, I was totally grossed out by that tidbit, although I did wonder how they had bathed without getting the bib wet. Miss Kenny told us that she had become a nun, and later left the convent. I never learned how she ended up teaching English in a public high school in Massachusetts.
True to my promise, I gave Miss Kenny copies of my new poems as I finished them, and I went after school to discuss Yeats with her. She frequently suggested authors I should explore and books I should read, and I searched them out and I read them. So far, so good; but Miss Kenny had a big mouth.
One day in class, she decided that her topic of discussion would be me. She read the class a writing assignment I had handed in. Then she began to praise me as lavishly as if I had been an alcoholic drug addict who died young while riding a horse. In what was to become a regularly repeated refrain, she gushed, “She is erudite, she is prolific, she is upper strata!” I simultaneously turned beet red and tried to fade into the white walls, but the damage was done. Everyone in my class had heard it. As if that weren't bad enough, within days, a sophomore I knew came up to me and said, “Miss Kenny sure loves you! She read our class a paper you wrote. She says you’re prolific. What does that mean?”
“She means I write a lot,” I answered miserably.
I liked the suggestions and ideas Miss Kenny gave me about literature, writing that was new and exciting to me. And she liked me so much! It felt wrong to be dismissive of her. But she said such strange things in class! On top of that, not only was she embarrassing me in front of my own class, now she was embarrassing me in front of kids I didn’t even know!
That winter Miss Kenny invited me to go with her to a reading by Emlyn Williams of Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales. She picked me up at home and drove to East Boston so that we could take public transportation to the event. I remember watching her nod off to sleep on the subway, and worrying that I’d have to wake her for our stop. I was greatly relieved when she awoke with a start following a particularly sharp lurch of the train. We made a transfer onto a trolley and got off near where the event was to be held. As we headed across a wide street to the building, Miss Kenny said, “I believe that’s Fred Kerrick, right there across the street! It is Fred!” Mr. Kerrick had been my seventh grade homeroom teacher. Miss Kenny took off at a gallop, waving one hand in the air and shouting in a high pitched voice, “Fred! Fred Kerrick! Yoo hoo! Fred!” I had no choice but to jog along behind.
Thankfully, Mr. Kerrick turned to us, so that Miss Kenny stopped yelling. “Hello, Teresa!” he said warmly.
Miss Kenny introduced me, telling Mr. Kerrick that I was erudite, prolific and upper-strata.
I blushed, smiled and said hello.
Mr. Kerrick said kindly, “I remember you very well from junior high school.”
“She’s my gem!” Miss Kenny added, a remark with which she tormented me for the rest of my high school career.
The Emlyn Williams reading was wonderful, and I loved it. It had been very kind of her to bring me, and I was grateful to Miss Kenny. I just wished she didn’t have to be so embarrassing.
Miss Kenny liked to have class discussions of literature, and would stand smiling, and apparently transfixed, as we discussed theme, purpose, style, symbols, structure, character, conflict. She would nod benevolently at each point made, sometimes encouraging us to elaborate, but never rejecting a comment. When she was surprised either with what we said, or with the vehemence with which we said it, she would comment, “You don’t mean it!” It was an innocent remark which grated on my fervent sixteen-year-old sensibilities.
One day, after I had made a particularly impassioned point in a class discussion, Miss Kenny responded, “You don’t mean it, dear! You don’t mean it!”
Without thinking, I blurted out, “I do mean it, Miss Kenny! I do!” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I froze in horror at my rudeness.
Miss Kenny laughed, and continued the discussion.
Unlike her self-conscious teenaged charges, Miss Kenny didn’t seem to worry, before or after, about what came out of her mouth. When we read Poe’s “The Bells” in class one day, she immediately began to free-associate. “Bells,” she said. “Did you ever see the movie, ‘The Bells of Saint Mary’s?’ It was wonderful! It had Bing Crosby! Such a bee-yoo-ti-ful voice!” Then, loudly, with an excess of vibrato, she sang: “The bells of Saint Mary’s! Ah, hear they are calling….” We sat as quietly and awkwardly as if our own mothers had burst into song in front of our friends, but Miss Kenny didn’t care. When she finished singing, she told us the plot of the movie, and somehow worked the conversation back to Poe.
That spring brought me two outings with Miss Kenny. She took a small group from my class to a performance of a play at Brandeis. Miss Kenny picked us up and drove us to the campus in Waltham for a Saturday evening performance. I’ve long since forgotten the name of the modern edgy play we saw, but I was thrilled with it. Another weekend she took me as the representative from our school to a regional conference for high school English students. The conference itself was not very memorable. Instead, what stands out in my mind was sitting in the front seat of Miss Kenny’s car and talking with her as she asked me about books I was reading, poetry I was writing, my family, and what I wanted to do with my life.
It was around that time that Miss Kenny began to encourage me to enter contests. She would sometimes hand me copies of flyers describing one or another competition which she thought I should enter. With her encouragement, I sent in entries. One of my poems won in a poetry contest for high school students sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and another was published in an anthology of poetry by Massachusetts high school students. Contest results were delivered to Miss Kenny as the faculty sponsor before I heard anything about it. She in turn alerted the Main Office at school. I discovered that I had a winning entry when the news was announced over the loudspeaker to the entire school; more blushing.
As my junior year was drawing to a close, we came to English class one day with yearbooks which had been distributed to us earlier that morning. “Let me see!” Miss Kenny said. She opened the yearbook to the faculty section and looked for her picture. “Oh, look at that!” she exclaimed. “I look pregnant!” We tried not to laugh.
This was the woman who introduced me to Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Virginia Wolff, Archibald MacLeish, T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Mann, Joyce, Kafka and even Alan Ginsburg. She talked to me about literature and was generous with her time and her encouragement. But sometimes she seemed nuts!
In twelfth grade, our English class moved on to English literature with another teacher who had a habit of peppering his sentences with the phrases “if you will,” or “as it were.” I learned a lot from him about English history and literature. Unlike my experience in Miss Kenny's eleventh grade English, though, I found his class neither embarrassing nor inspiring.
However, Miss Kenny and I had not come to a parting of the ways. During my senior year, she was teaching an English department elective, Journalism, and I signed up. I don’t remember much difference between the two classes I had with Miss Kenny. We read, we talked, and we wrote. Miss Kenny would periodically remind the class that I was her gem, erudite, prolific and upper-strata. I would try to ignore it.
My senior year was very busy. In addition to my classes, I was involved in a lot of school activities. Outside of school, I was even a co-editor of a local attempt at an “underground” newspaper. Besides that, my two best girlfriends and I spent many afternoons together talking, drinking coffee, talking, doing homework and talking. In my spare time, I wrote, read, walked by the beach, completed my college applications, and worried. I didn’t have time to talk with Miss Kenny as frequently anymore. If she noticed, she never mentioned it.
Toward the end of classes that spring, Miss Kenny had a surprise for us. One day in journalism class, she distributed copies of a literary magazine which she had put together herself from assignments handed in to English teachers, and which was being given to all students in the high school. I quickly searched the list of contributors, and found my name. Eagerly, I turned the pages to see what piece of mine she had chosen.
I found an acerbic character sketch I had handed in for a class writing assignment; just the type of thing one might expect from an erudite, prolific, upper strata gem such as myself. It concerned an irritating fat old woman, her fat lazy adult son, and her fat ugly dog, The only problem was that I had written it about someone I knew. It seemed to me such a clear description of this woman's behavior and circumstance that I was sure my classmates, or, heaven forbid, their mothers, might recognize the object of my sharp pen. Horrified, embarrassed and ashamed, I prayed that the poor irritating fat old woman would never find out what I had written, and, thanks to the limited popularity of high school literary magazines, I don't believe she ever did.
After graduation, I worked full time all summer and went away to college in the fall. I didn’t see Miss Kenny anymore.
At some point, I heard from that same high school friend who first dragged me and my poetry notebooks into Miss Kenny's office that Miss Kenny had retired. I was surprised, but assumed she must have been older than I thought. Sometime later, my friend told me that Miss Kenny had gone to live with a sister and had died.
When I look at Miss Kenny's yearbook picture, even the one in which she said she looked pregnant, I see that same beaming smile she always brought to class. I understand now that she was kind, dynamic, quixotic, intellectual, uninhibited, inspiring, exasperating and loving. I regret that I never told her how much her encouragement meant, but I'm also sure that Miss Kenny would understand. I didn’t altogether appreciate it then, but I was lucky she considered me her gem.
~ ~ ~
Biographical Note: Kate Lydon is a storyteller, writer and editor who also hires out as an adjunct professor. She grew up along the rocky coast of Massachusetts, but has lived most of her life amid the trees of Pennsylvania. Daughter of a man who made the best donuts in the world and a woman who acted out Macbeth and read poetry for her children, Kate is the oldest of five, and thus is prone to giving advice. However, her husband, two children, two cats and one dog, independent souls all, pay scant attention, and so she writes. Kate’s satirical murder mystery, Off Center, is now available through Amazon’s Kindle Store. She is currently working on another novel, as well as a book of stories. See other stories by Kate Lydon in the September and October issues.
