Here's to Ms. Z!

At Christmas, I often give my mom copies of poems I’ve written over the past year. This past Christmas, I went to the computer to compile the last year’s worth of poems. I found…..three. Yes, three, and two had been written in January, nearly a year earlier. Oh…. So maybe I’d been suffering from the dreaded WB (writer’s block)? Well, no, I mean, you have to be aware you’re suffering to actually suffer, right? It’s not as if I’d been staring at a blank page, waiting for an idea to strike. I just hadn’t bothered to come to the page. This had been rumbling around in my head since last December. What to do, what to do…. Then I heard that poet LouAnn Shepard Muhm would be offering a free class at the library – two sessions of two hours each. I’ve never been able to attend of LouAnn’s workshops in the past because of schedule conflicts. I checked THE MOM CALENDAR: my husband would be home those evenings, no dance practice, no piano lesson, no play practice, no meetings. Hmm. What the heck, so I went to the first class last Thursday. As expected, LouAnn was great: she had us do an exercise I’d never done, she had handouts, quotes, poems, the works. She asked us to write some poetry over the next week to share at the next class. She recommended some possible topics for writing, including, “Write about a teacher you had, either loved or hated. Of course, it’s easier to write about one you hated….” And I heard a voice in my head cry, “HA! You never had Z!!” Where did that come from? I hadn’t thought about Ms. Z in quite some time, but I went home and poured my memories onto the page. I wrote a draft of a poem. (Finally!) And oh, I felt all the suffering of months of not writing poetry flow away from me (I guess one can ignorantly suffer, who knew). The next day, I couldn’t help myself, I googled Ms. Z’s first and last name along with the school where I attended kindergarten and the city and state of that school. My first hit came up with a catholic church. Hmm, ok, I’ll go there, I thought. Once I clicked on the link, I found Z’s name in the text as the founder/director of a Montessori school. Next I visited that school’s website and wouldn’t you know, there was an email address listed for Ms. Z. I wrote her a short email asking if she taught kindergarten at the school where I attended. Then I checked my email approximately every five minutes for the rest of the day. With no reply in my inbox, I complained on Facebook, I twitched, I sighed, I waited. Before I went home for the weekend, I checked my email one last time: nothing from Z. Rats. Oh well. Monday morning, when I first arrived at the bookstore, I checked email. (Believe it or not, my family does not have internet at home). She replied! She wrote back! I couldn’t believe it! But wait, maybe it was just a reply saying, “No, that’s not me, sorry.” I opened the email and read: Jennifer, Of course I know who you are! How are you? ... I can still see your little head of when you were five! What do you do for Beagle Books?.......
WOW!! To be honest, it didn’t really matter to me if she remembered me (although, as a friend of mine said to me, “How could she could forget a 5-year old who sometimes called herself Color, was incredibly messy, and was Alkash’s girlfriend?” Ok, fair enough). I wanted to reach out to her and tell her, you mattered to me, I remember you and you were one amazing teacher. Ms. Z used to leave the room when it was time for our music lesson to fetch her “twin sister”, Judy Jupiter. I was absolutely convinced that Ms. Z and Judy Jupiter were two entirely different people. I don’t remember a lot of the particular activities we did, but I remember how much fun school and learning and reading were. This is, of course, what the very best teachers do. As it turns out, Ms. Z was only at that school for two years. I was only there for one year. I’m so very grateful we had a year together. With pen raised, I say, “Here’s to Ms. Z!”