The Name Tag at Our Class Reunion

The envelopes

The one person who would not let me forget about school was Mrs. Ellen Moss.

She taught junior English. She was maybe forty-eight then, the age I am now, with reading glasses on a chain and a cardigan in every color God ever made. The week after I left, a manila envelope showed up in my mailbox with her handwriting on the front.

Inside was the next unit. “The Scarlet Letter,” of all things. Ten chapters to read, a list of questions, and a note on a recipe card that said: Tammy. Due back in two weeks. Mail it or drop it on my porch. E.M.

I laughed out loud standing at the mailbox. Then I sat on the front step and cried, because it was the first thing anybody had sent me in a month that wasn’t a pamphlet.

She sent an envelope every two weeks for a whole year. Through the summer, through the baby, through the winter.

I did every assignment at the kitchen table with Brooke in a bouncy seat beside me. Mrs. Moss graded them in red ink and mailed them back, and the grades were not charity. She gave me a C on an essay once and wrote, You can do better than this and we both know it.

It counted for nothing. The school would not take the credit. It was just Mrs. Moss, deciding on her own that I was still her student.

The long way around

I took the GED at nineteen, in a classroom at the vocational school in the next county, with Brooke at my mother’s. I passed it on the first try. I mailed Mrs. Moss a copy of the certificate, and she mailed back a card that said only, Told you.

When Brooke started kindergarten, I started night classes at the community college. One class at a time, two nights a week, for six years. Accounting, business law, public administration, a speech class that nearly killed me. Mike would come home from the garage with grease to his elbows and take over bath time so I could make it out the door by six.

I got my associate degree in applied business when I was twenty-eight. Brooke was in fifth grade. She sat in the bleachers at the ceremony and held up a sign she had made with poster paint that said GO MOM in letters a foot high.

I went to work as a deputy clerk at the county courthouse that same year. Filing, docketing, title work, standing at the counter for people who were having the worst day of their lives and needed somebody to be kind to them while they paid a fine or filed a petition.

I did that for fourteen years. I learned every form in the building. When the clerk of courts retired, the county party chairman asked me to run, and I told him he was out of his mind. Mike told me I’d be good at it. Brooke, who was in college by then, told me I’d better.

I won by eleven hundred votes. I have been sworn in twice since, both times on my grandmother’s Bible, with Mrs. Moss in the second row.