*from the archive and oh maybe the early 2000s? who knows at this point, but, in increments I will share and, knock wood, you will enjoy, this old-ish story. Mildred Jensen was an actual math teacher I had in middle school, she was tall and leggy, but everything else is entirely fictional here. I really liked her, a lot, even if – at the end of her career when I had her as an instructor – she was showing not only her age but the age of some of her ideas (boys are better at measuring things, for one).
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Mildred Jensen, now a teacher, became almost immediately famous for her smart, pithy statements to boys and girls who weren’t paying attention: ‘time will pass, will you?’, lobbed toward those caught peeking at the wall clock, anxious for the buzzer to ring, and the rhetorical ‘am I right or am I wrong?’ Once she put a boy out the window for talking back, making him walk around the entire building with the math textbook balanced on his head to meet her at the front door from where he went straight to the Principal’s office; the story ran around the school for weeks and became legendary in the town, including how the parents, along with the administration, backed her up. She was tough, that Miss Jensen, as well as funny; she made them sit up and pay attention, she got through to them, she stayed on top of the material and the students’ vagaries, and really cared; she made them laugh, and memorize the times and division tables whether they wanted to or not.
She thought she would never forget the boys and girls of those first few years, particularly the group she had in her room when the news of Pearl Harbor came down the wires. She and her students fretted and prayed together during the long years of the war, and, despite what was going on, she kept them on point, learning math, working hard; this was not always easy to do, so many of the local boys, older brothers, uncles and fathers, were part of the overseas forces and more than a few were lost. When the war was over, only one of her brother’s, the youngest, had survived, and Mildred felt as if her family, her community, and nation as a whole took a deep breath as the jubilation of the war’s end moved all too quickly to a sober reassessment of America’s place in the world, as well as of how much had been lost.
She had grown-up, they all had, in the war years. Mildred had volunteered, organizing scrap metal drives, serving as assistant secretary for the local draft board; she made do with less, as they all had to, wherever and whenever she could. She tried, and failed, to stop thinking about her brothers, and the pain in her parents’ eyes when she visited the farm. But no one, no one family, was entirely untouched by loss. Even those whose brothers and fathers return had been celebrated weren’t entirely if the person they’d known before the war was the same as the haunted stranger set in his old place.
Mildred was good with money; the year after the war she bought her first car, a Packard with deep leather seats, a true thrill for a country girl who had learned how to drive in the seat of a tractor, moving row by row through her father’s fields. She named it Polly the Packard and told her colleagues and students so, unashamed of her eccentricity, finding too that she really loved making others laugh. She visited home more often now that she had ‘Polly’, and freedom of movement. She brought the outside world to their door, describing life in her new town with all its characters, characters whose charms she embellished to astonish them, savoring their belly laughs and shaking heads as darkness fell. She was still their clever daughter, a good girl; it was a comfort.
Mildred, along with several other women teachers, also unmarried, spent their weekends and holidays traveling, days trips, going on local hikes up Catskill peaks, easily doable in a single twelve hour span, taking picnic lunches along. They hosted raucous card games in their apartment in town, serving sandwiches and sherbet, feeling young and good about themselves, doubly blessed that the war was over, grateful for life and all its riches. Mildred tried smoking and drinking, learning that for her, smoking was not going to work for she hacked so after the tiniest puff she decided that it was best not to try, and she learned as well to stick to an occasional beer or small glass of wine or sherry, despite the other girls touting the sophisticated delight of rye, gin, and fancily named and colorful cocktails.
They spent longer vacations, Mildred (the dependable one) at the wheel, traveling to Niagara Falls, Lake Champlain, and down the east coast to Washington, Monticello and Gettysburg. Mildred loved seeing American History up close; it made everything so real. She told her companions this, who liked Mildred but laughed at her earnestness (‘it is real, Millie!’) and her blunt way of speaking, laughter she joined in on, enjoying it, knowing it was entirely good natured. She confessed, to some hilarity, standing in the bedroom at Monticello, that she had always been a little in love with Thomas Jefferson. She had always liked, she said, red heads, still did, although it was known, she solemnly pronounced, that their tempers were quick. The other teachers smiled while Mildred mused on about flame-headed people, ‘their minds are generally quick, too. Not that I suppose it’s been scientifically proven.’
Mildred’s life was good; she was happy. As her contemporaries married, one by one, some moving away, wedding boys and men they’d know in college or from their childhoods, others staying put, marrying local boys, she made up her mind that single-hood was good enough for her, as she had always suspected it would be, and that she would set an example for ‘another way’. And if it hurt her never to be asked for bridesmaid, or maid of honor, she didn’t say. She was a good sport, that Mildred, or Millie as she was now so often called. Everyone said so, about her being such a nice girl, such a sport; she didn’t even use her extra inches and those long arms of hers to grab the bouquet, almost, although you couldn’t tell, stepping aside for the prettier young women to make the happy catch. It was a game she would rather not play, grimly thinking in her room at night that this was one prize she would never win; let the others who cared so much have and savor this particular triumph.