Morning Thanks--Jamie Sargent, Homecoming Queen

The note down at the bottom of the page says Jamie was "Homecoming Queen 4." Honestly, I don't remember that she was high school royalty, nor do I remember the appreciation the entire note offers. That she wrote all of this in my copy of the '72 high school annual is a mark of how close I was to my students. Today, I'm 75, and they're all reaching 70, barely a difference. 

But I was their teacher, and I honestly don't remember crossing a line I maintained quite effortlessly, I'd say, because I don't remember any trying moments, any youthful surges of desire for more than teaching them about Shakespeare or Thoreau. It's hard to imagine being any closer than I was to the kids in my classes, but neither they nor I ever stepped over the line. One 1972 Blackhawk senior signed off--her words are here in the annual--"to the teacher with the best body." All these years later, 500 miles away, she's a Facebook friend. 

I'm guessing that none of them were conscious of the way their teacher was being taught in the same classroom. What I learned in the dairy land of southwest Wisconsin was truly existential. For the first time in my life, I lived apart from the tribe that had raised me. For the first time in my life, I was blessed with the opportunity to choose rituals. For the first time in my life, the people I knew and came to love couldn't care less about the rule book that heritage of mine had set up in my heart and soul.

Once, when I returned home from school, a handbill was affixed to my door knob with a rubber band plugging a rootin-tootin' revival somewhere down the street, at a church I'd never seen. My inherited Calvinism would not allow me to believe that ad was there by chance alone. I thought I'd go. Why not? Besides, maybe my soul needed to be saved. 

This Sunday, the note said, and gave the address. So I went, the only time in two years out there that I darkened a church door. I'll never forget the service. I couldn't help noticing that I was the only customer those door-knob ads harvested. The sermon's bumpy ride and ensuing altar call seemed created for me alone. Not more than a dozen people attended, and the others, it seemed, were regulars. I didn't go to the front.

That was it. I never went back to that church or any other in town.

I was a fair-to-middlin' athlete, coached freshman basketball at the high school, and thus got recruited to play in a town league with a team of other over-the-hillers who loved to relive glory by bruising play on the court. Games were on Sunday. I said I'd play. I remember, as a kid, shooting baskets at a neighbor's, then sitting down between that place and our house to make sure the sweat dried. I wouldn't have wanted my parents to know I'd shot hoops on the Sabbath. 

Come summer, it was baseball. I got recruited by an area ball team. Games on Sunday. "We could really use a good catcher," they said. My students told me I was the first person ever to hit a homer over the left-center field fence. 

That was the summer after my first year of teaching, and I knew my students well enough to realize that if I had said no to Sunday baseball, they'd not begin to understand why on earth I wouldn't play. I wouldn't be a witness; I'd just be weird. 

Teaching English at Blackhawk High School gave me an education, about myself, and the lesser-level ethics which, for better or for worse, accompanied the overall vision of things that was my legacy.

I got myself a Blackhawk High School annual that year, and some students--as kids did back then--asked to sign it. They knew I was leaving, and, the seniors at least, were leaving too. Back then, I must have read what Jamie Sargent wrote, but it took me decades before what's there on the page trumpeted something I today recognize as liberating. 

Mr. Schaap didn't proselytize. I don't think I ever mentioned church, never prayed, never once read from the Bible, didn't lean on the baggage of my familial religiosity, even played ball on Sunday. And yet, what the homecoming queen says is that I was "the only teacher that admits he loves God."

Those two years in the region that once was a mining camp taught me that the signposts I'd grown up with, the sanctifying blessing of my being "a covenant child," were not the only means to an end. Even though to my mind I was no fountain of piety, I had somehow communicated what I was to Jamie Sargent. The road of life may be straight and narrow, but it's still much wider than I'd been led to believe. 

Eventually, I returned to the tribe. I don't regret that choice or forty years here in the land of Dutch Reformed. Still, those two years in a smalltown high school was a kind of liberation for which I'm greatly thankful this morning and every morning. What Jamie Sargent wrote so long ago is one of the most significant passages, a kind of revelation, in my life as a student in a world far wider than I had once thought it was. 

Thank you, Jamie Sargeant, wherever you are.