Unravel With Me
For Mrs. Strickland
There are some teachers whose lessons stay with you for a lifetime. Mrs. Strickland was one of those teachers, and I knew even as a child that I was lucky to have her. The news of her death hit Facebook (and my grade school group chat) this week, and when I sat down to put to words what she did for us, I realized that I’d already done this in an entire chapter of Bad Vibes Only, excerpted below. And still, I think it falls short of the impact she made on this world. Rest in Peace, Mrs. Strickland. Thank you for giving so many kids the gift of earnestness and effort and creating without self-consciousness. What a gift. What a gift. What a gift.
I’ve known since I can remember knowing anything that it’s all going too fast, all spinning out of our control.
Our parents proudly sent us to the Catholic grade school in our neighborhood, a three-story redbrick structure that loomed ominously over the local Walgreens we poured into after the bell rang, eager to buy two-for-a-dollar candy bars to split on the walk home. Catholic school conjures up a lot of assumptions: strict nuns, itchy uniforms, and daily Mass.
But Annunciation Catholic School was different. We had uniforms and a few nuns, but we also had Mrs. Strickland. Mrs. Strickland wore flowy dresses and jumpsuits, big silver rings on every finger, and an inordinate amount of authority for a parochial school educator whose one-woman department was Creative Arts.
Creative Arts could and did mean anything. Twice a week, we’d walk to Mrs. Strickland’s room, the former choir loft overlooking the former chapel was now our auditorium and lunchroom. There were no desks or chalkboards, no overhead lighting. Scarves covered the lamps, and a pile of cushions and carpet squares were our seats. The walls were covered with posters for Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, photos of past students and of Mrs. Strickland herself, younger but otherwise exactly the same, strumming an acoustic guitar on the stage below us.
In our forty minutes together, she’d play music and we’d sing along, picking up lyrics as we went, unconcerned with tone, pitch, or harmony. We sang Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, “Free to Be You and Me,” all songs we assumed she wrote herself.
Once, Mrs. Strickland had cleared every classroom and arranged three-hundred-plus children in a circle in our auditorium to replicate the sounds of a rainstorm, pointing at us to indicate whether we should rub our hands together, snap our fingers, clap our hands, or stomp our feet. She played conductor for what felt like hours, and the rest of the teachers stood on the periphery, giving up on their lesson plans so that we could fully immerse ourselves in the creative art of…?
Other teachers were concerned with test scores and quizzes, but Mrs. Strickland was only concerned with our artistic expression (and hers).
By the end of every September, our school schedules would revolve around the upcoming Christmas Pageant, a compulsory performance that included every student from kindergarten through eighth grade. There were rehearsals and blockings and costume prep, Mrs. Strickland breezing into the math or science class to announce she needed us down in the auditorium to sing “Feliz Navidad.”
The Christmas Pageant included four nights of performances for parents and family, and matinee performances for the entire school, where we’d alternate from audience to performers in the same room where we ate our hot lunches and held our Girl Scout meetings.
The pageant ended, every year, with over three hundred children singing Kermit’s “The Christmas Wish,” a song originally performed by an amphibious puppet that made our parents weep behind their camcorders.
We understood our job in these performances was to evoke feeling in our audience, to impress upon our parents the fleeting nature of our childhoods and their lives. We knew that we had just these few years with Mrs. Strickland and with one another, that graduating from eighth grade would scatter us to different high schools and different futures, that we would one day be strangers to one another, names and faces in moldy yearbooks signed with bubble letters and scented pens.
Mrs. Strickland’s room was filled with the ephemera of kids who had come before us, some of whom were now the parents sitting in the auditorium, singing along to the same songs they had sung as children. We were nostalgic for childhoods that had not yet ended, already missing what was right in front of us.
Mrs. Strickland seemed to understand what so many adults did not: that childhood was uncertain and sometimes frightening, that the children she pulled out of math class to create an interpretive dance or to learn how to lip-synch Elton John already knew more about the world than we thought we did, that the passing of our childhood was no small thing, and that there was no such thing as a small event.
It all matters so much in the moment, no matter how old you are.
The worries I’m tending to right now will someday disappear altogether, melted into the softest parts of my brain. I spent two years working with a (male) colleague who made my work and home life miserable. He was unkind on good days, cruel and punitive on bad ones. His name in my inbox filled me with dread, seeing him in a conference room pushed me into fight-or-flight. Writing this, I cannot for the life of me recall his name. Instead, he has been replaced with new nemeses and antagonists real and imagined
Today’s anxieties and shortcomings and grudges will be pushed to the edges of our consciousness, an endless spool of thread unraveling like I do every day.
Yours in earnestness and imperfection,
Nora
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My version was Mr. Brasco the high school band director who has a Facebook group titled Evans High School Band - Richard Brasco Years. It has over 650 members. He gave me a home and friends and a purpose when I walked in as a devastated, sad, angry transfer student 1st period of my Junior year only 3 days removed from saying goodbye to the only home I’d known and everyone I loved to move from the Chicago suburbs to Augusta, GA. Of course I didn’t know that on day 1. But he changed the course of my life for the better.
Appreciate both the article and the THC gummie recommendation. I also can remember Mrs. Abe's name who helped me survive the embarrassment in 6th grade of getting the high score in the class on the sex education test.