Post date: May 19, 2010 5:37:59 AM
We were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen year old boys with our hormones raging and our imaginations racing. She was no more than twenty-five, and absolutely beautiful. To our youthful innocence and naiveté, she was worldly, exotic, alluring, and all-together mysterious, for we knew that she had been an airline stewardess and had traveled to the far reaches of the globe. And, in those early 1960s, those days of political ferment and endless possibilities, we knew that she was passionate about civil rights, and social justice, and early feminism. When she advocated the formation of a local labor union, the tires of her car were slashed. When President Kennedy was killed, she wept bitter tears. We knew that she was married, but that didn’t bother us. It was — in our adolescent dreams — only a matter of which one of us she would choose to sweep her off her feet, leaving her husband in the dust, to whisk her away to a lifetime of blissful romance. Our delusionary fantasies aside, we knew most that she loved books; she loved good stories; she loved good writing. She was our high school English teacher.