My Mom fell a couple weeks ago. Ninety-three years and the ground found her. Complications followed and now she lies in the rehabilitation center where some very talented people help her to recover. The body does not mend as quickly as it once did.
She taught middle school Reading and English for over thirty years. The same school where I sat at in seventh and eighth grade. Her shadow was not just long across the school corridors—it was there in my own classroom. I felt her presence even when she taught down the hall. The other teachers watched me with extra eyes. When I stepped wrong, word traveled fast and arrived home before I did.
Starting around tenth grade, high school started to bore me. I drifted through classes unchallenged, doing just enough. My mind wanted problems worth solving, not busy work to complete. I was smart enough to pass, too lazy to excel. She knew this. It disappointed her. But she waited. Once I got to college classes grew harder. They demanded time and effort. My mind found its hunger and I excelled because I was being challenged.
There was only one small problem – I had no money and felt like I was falling behind compared to my childhood friends who were already working full time. Many of them had taken different paths after graduation. They skipped college, took jobs at Digital Equipment Corporation. A new Digital facility had been built on an old cucumber farm just two miles from my parents' house. The smell of silicon and opportunity replaced the smell of earth and rotten cucumbers.
Every summer for me meant finding factory work and saving money for college. A cast iron foundry the first two years and then in 1978 Savage Arms. Foundry work was hot, loud, dirty, and dangerous. Savage working conditions were an improvement and paid much better. Gunstocks arrived rough, and I made them smooth. Piece work. They paid for what I finished, not for time spent. I averaged over twelve dollars an hour—good money then. The faster my hands moved, the more I earned. Some were slow and careful. Not me. I learned to be both quick and good.
My friends drove muscle cars, custom vans with sunroofs and curtained windows, motorcycles with pipes that cracked the morning silence. I could not afford anything with wheels and a motor. Each dawn I cut through the woods behind our house to reach the railroad tracks. At the tracks, decisions waited. Right would take me to my favorite trout stream. Left led to Savage. On those summer mornings, I turned left. Each afternoon I made the reverse journey home. The rails stretched straight as truth. Sometimes I balanced on them like a tightrope walker. It was the only job I’ve ever had that could be reached by foot.
Sawdust covered me each day. It settled in the creases of my clothes, beneath my fingernails, in my hair. I breathed wood for eight hours, and the money was good. I began to think of cars I might buy, of a life made with my hands instead of books.
One July afternoon I came home, dust still in my clothes. My Mom stood in the kitchen preparing supper. Tomato sauce simmered on the stove and filled the house with a smell that made the walk worth it. Her wooden spoon moved in slow circles. I told her, flat and simple, that I would quit college. Sand gunstocks full time. Make money. Live like my friends.
The kitchen went quiet. She stopped stirring. The sauce bubbled once, twice. She set down her spoon and turned to face me. Her eyes found mine, steady as a rifle sight.
"No," she said. Not loud. Not with anger. But with finality.
"No child of mine quits college." Her voice came like hammer strikes on steel. "Not after what your father and I have sacrificed. Not with your mind."
I started to argue. Started to speak of money, of independence. She waited until I was done, then spoke again as if I had said nothing at all.
"You will finish. That is all."
I slept poorly that night, anger burning hot then cooling by morning. She said nothing at breakfast. Nothing was left to say. She never said "I told you so." She didn't need to. We both knew. When fall came, I packed for college.
The gunstocks and the railroad tracks became a story I would tell later. My Mom knew what would happen. She had taught long enough to recognize the difference between a life's chapter and its whole narrative.
Now I sit beside her bed in the rehabilitation center. Her eyes closed but she listens. The woman who once stood before classrooms of children now lies small against white sheets. But her will remains strong. She is mending because she has decided she will. The teacher is not done teaching yet.
