Through the Teaching Glass

About the Book

Teaching English at Esperanza Junior High was much different than playing with chicken bones at Golden West Elementary. I guess I was ready to grapple with 7th and 8th graders. If my regular class of 32 kids had ever decided to pile on top of me, teacher at the bottom, I’d have been pinned to the linoleum, unable to breathe. But most times it was one-on-one and I could hold my own. When Leann entered the room, time stopped. She didn’t yell, kick furniture, push the little children away, the little non-entities in the class that she called “my little Dogpatch children”. “So you read L’il Abner,” I said. “Who’s your favorite character? Daisy Mae?” “Naw,” she said, “Daisy’s just an air-head. The only real girl is Moonbeam McSwine. Now that’s a real girl.” She didn’t have to resort to any bullying tactics because it was understood that Leann was in charge. Leann McSwine was in control, the force that had to be reckoned with. This thirteen year old girl stood a solid and straight six feet tall, weighed something close to 150 pounds, had a mop of auburn hair, and wore her acne as a challenge. No one dared speak a single word about her raging zits. That kind of teasing was out of the question because Leann could knock out anyone in the class with just one of her fierce looks that said, “I’ve got this right cross ready for you, you little jerk. Go ahead, say something and I’ll lay you out flat as a pancake.” Leann lived in the south Esperanza flats and was proud of it. That was where the real blue collar families lived. She didn’t live in the deep south flats where the truly poor lived, or as Leann so casually put it, “Welfareville.” She was not a hill kid, a pampered kid, a kid who lived in a perfectly admirable house in the hills. Her house was not a house with a view of the bridge, because who cares about that dumb ol’ bridge, the Carqueniz Bucket-o-bolts. “If great-grandfather had stayed in Letterkenny, that’s Donegal you know, I could’a been Lady of the House, the Dame of Donegal. But great-grandpa always said that eatin’ rocks gets pretty tiresome after a while so he went to get him the gold in Californ-i-a, and if’n all the gold’s been got sure’n some o’ the milk-n-honey’s still left, and here we are,” the blustering Leann said, tossing her shock of uncombed hair. She tried for the Irish accent, long since lost, but her Irish pride was evident in the old country story. But what was not so evident, what she kept very secret was the thing that came out in her counselor’s office. Her counselor, Jack, was a 300 pound barn of a man and Leann’s benefactor. He had dug around in her elementary school records and found out that this young lady was highly gifted. She belonged in the 8-9 Stanine classes, the gifted classes. So into my English class she walked, Queen Leann, make room for the Queen, get out of the way, “I’ll sit by the window so I can watch the birdies,” she said as she plopped down that first day, slid down, and challenged me with those light blue Irish eyes. Leann sat where Leann wanted to sit. “Hm, so you’re Leann,” I said, “wouldn’t you like to sit in the row by the windows?” She sat bolt upright, held tightly to the front of the desk, and said, “Why yes, that would be just fine, thank you very much.” Leann said she had never really written any prose, much less, Heaven Forbid, fiction. But here she was in my English class, and, I said in perfectly acceptable understated language, “Come Plague or Pestilence, Fire or Flood, every Friday a paper is due. And not just any paper, a high quality paper, a paper like the ‘A’ papers I’ll read every Monday as examples of Good Stuff.” It didn’t take long. Leann with her competitive spirit, finally found her work being read as the Good Stuff. She was wary, holdbackish, but somewhere in there, in that Donegal Irish heart, was a tender little girl. She was actually a Daisy Mae who carried a big shillelagh. I spent a long time g

About the Author

I was born in Minneapolis in 1933, a depression child who asked many questions. This book tries to answer some of the questions of a family whose roots were in Eastern Europe. My family moved to Vallejo, California just before World War II. A middle class childhood in California posed few new questions, but the University of California at Berkeley opened my search for art and literature. That search lasts up to this day. Readings in theoretical science and history provided few answers. I earned a Master’s Degree in Art at Berkeley and went on to teach English and continue my art. Perhaps the answers I sought were in Minneapolis or in the Carpathian Mountains in the village of my Rusin grandmother. This book is about Danko, his father, and his grandfather, all of whom ask questions in a different way. A search for answers is always cyclical and must start at the roots.. The human imagination is a magic boat that transports pilgrims back to their beginnings. If the trip is successful the seeker is reborn into his own life and time.