I must not disappoint those who now come to expect daily postings on the memoirs, and because I've been working on something to be ready for Thursday's posting, you fine people may, if you wish, read what I read to the teachers of Haddon Elementary and LAUSD on the day of my mom's retirement from school teaching.

She said she loved it, but God pays her to say that.



I think it’s significantly hard to look back at my more prolific teachers, and not see them in part as parental figures. Five days a week, morning till afternoon, breakfast through lunch, and if you’re naughty you may be around for dinner. They reinforce what’s right, and oh do they let you know when you’ve done wrong. They lay the brick and mortar of knowledge that you’ll build on for life. And if they’re a good teacher, they’ll make you ravenous enough where you’re never content. You will seek, and you will wander, search and question, always knowing there is more to know, better ways to do the same old thing, a glimmer and an idea for a way to make this tired world a better place. Knowing in the end knowledge is only important if it’s used and translated in to wisdom, to not create heads of floating data and dates and places and pages of textbook, but wise, strong people who will take their education and become better people in the world.

With teachers being so parental, it’s hard to not see my mom as one I’ve shared with so many children through the years. My mom loves sharing the story about when she was pregnant with my sister, and having little problem in making what I was thinking and feeling very clear even as a 3 year old climbed up on her with the admission, “Mom, I was thinking. I’m very worried once the baby comes; you won’t have as much time to spend with me.” She expressed amusement, and assured me, she’d be able to split her time fairly. If my memory serves me, she made good on that pledge.

She’s had to do exactly that for years - split herself in pieces, being teacher, confidant, advisor, authoritarian, dancer, chorographer, and artist 32 times over. Months becoming school years becoming decades. I can’t imagine that was ever easy for her, but she did it well – and I’d like to give credit where credit is due - I benefited.

I’m a different sort of folk. I annoy my friends to all ends with my, “..but why?, I research cities and weather patterns of places I’ve never been, I get calls from people who know I will know how to find the answer to just about anything, I Google, and I question, and I seek, and I search, and I pull out my Iphone at the dinner table to look things up, and I’m never, I am never, satisfied, with who I am, or what I know, or what I think I know. I think that’s the beauty that comes from being the daughter of a teacher. I am smarter, and wiser, and a better person in the world because I come from the home of a teacher.

But all would be of little importance without this. My grandmother has this quote. Of all the quotes, and all the stories, she tells and tells again, it’s the one I have heard the most often. She says, “Find what you love, and you’ll never have to work.” It took years, and the internet, before discovering alas my grandmother was not the original author of these words. But in keeping with tradition, with all things I enjoy from the lips of my mother, and her mother, I have continued to repeat it as if it was them who authored them always. “Find what you love, and you’ll never have to work.”

Eventually the body asks for its toll, and we can’t go on forever. Eventually we all must slow down. But I have to imagine it’s awfully gratifying to do that with a rear view mirror’s view of a career you’ve loved. My mother’s mother said it to her, and my mother said it to me, and I only ask that of everything I’ve learned from my mom as a teacher, the most valuable lesson, the last lesson she will teach, is that I find something I love, as she had.