Friends Old, New, and Soon to Be,
My daughter gets excited to go back to school. It’s not a feeling we share. I always felt the first day of school as a collar being secured around my neck. I still get anxious at the sensation brought on by the smell of industrial cleaning agents and the bite of too-cold air conditioning in a freshly waxed hallway. But I am thrilled she feels differently.
I suspect her excitement is a function of her teachers, folks who work hard for notoriously little reward. I reckon their willingness to do so is the secret sauce that makes them the kind of folks to whom my wife and I entrust the single most important person in our lives. Six of her seven teachers are repeats from last year, great people who honor her interests while holding her to high standards. I hope you’ll indulge my bragging when I note she got straight A’s last year, earning her way into Honors Algebra. It is something I, who barely passed High School Algebra when I took it in college, have a hard time comprehending. But when I think of my own teachers, and where I am thirty-four years after I graduated high school (and spent ten more years in college and grad school), I see a through line established by the people who made their living guiding my own.
Martha Barton taught me Advanced English in Sixth Grade, remaining after school for countless hours to help the kid who won the “Number of Pages Read” competition by a factor of thousands, but could not diagram a sentence and despite becoming the guy who makes his living with words, still gets called out by his mother for grammatical errors. I expect she’s already firing up a handwritten note to me. Martha and her son, my friend Hoby, got me into Boy Scouts. There, my Scoutmaster Ed Shelnutt, an outdoorsman and Special Forces soldier, taught me fieldcraft and gave me books that influenced me in a decades-long career. I became a Marine because my father, who is my model of a good man, was one. I became an Eagle Scout, and later a Marine Raider, because I wanted to hang out with Ed.
For a high school freshman who liked drawing and painting, an art teacher like Bob Cummings was a revelation. He was a painter and sculptor; passionate and loud and dramatic. He gathered the kids that didn’t necessarily fit anywhere else and told us to make our art bigger and bolder and brighter, dammit! He didn’t try to control us. He just demanded we commit to whatever we wanted to do. Years later, in places where commitment meant survival, I thought of that. Years later still, I became a writer, committing my thoughts to the record, and now, when I edit my work, I think, “Bigger! Bolder! Brighter, dammit!”
By the time I was a high school junior, I had accumulated a very mixed academic record. I was repeating freshman Algebra because, although I’d passed it by a tenth of a point as a freshman, it was clear I’d retained none of it. But where words were concerned, I was confident. I was also lazy and undisciplined.
Michael Price taught Advanced Placement US History, in which I regularly registered in the bottom third of the class, not least because I wanted to read the books Ed Shelnutt gave me rather than the Federalist Papers. In our second semester, the entirety of our grade rested upon a single project worth 1000 points. Mike let me write about a novel I still love and why it mattered to me. When I got it back, with a grade of 980/1000, it bore a single comment that has never left me, “Imagine what you could do if you worked this hard every time.” I still have that paper.
Our best teachers are critically important to our lives and the lives we impact. Some of them are found outside of the classroom. Many of my teachers are found here at the Tom Beckbe Field Journal. My friend and fishing guide, Captain Seth Vernon, patiently teaches me the same knots again and again while sharing his deep knowledge of flora and fauna found in the Cape Fear region. My friend and fellow Marine, Darren Jones gifted me with my first successful turkey hunt. Shawn Swearingen took me on the most magical duck hunt of my life, not the most productive, but the truest expression of everything waterfowling should be. David Joy gave me the best advice I’ve received as a writer, “Be fearless and vulnerable.” He and I head to the woods next month in pursuit of Western North Carolina’s mountain whitetails, where I expect we will once again learn a lot from the woods and one another.
Lastly, having written to you faithfully for three years now, I must acknowledge all I’ve learned from you. I would love to hear from you at EAL@tombeckbe.com.
Yours,
Russell Worth Parker
