The Letters That Came Home

Why I started the letters

To understand that sack you have to understand how the letters began, and they began with a failure of mine, not a kindness.

My very first class graduated in the spring of nineteen eighty-eight. I was young and I thought I had done a fine job with them.

On graduation night I stood at the back of the gym in my good dress and watched them walk across the floor one by one, and I watched their families stand up and holler when the names were called.

And I watched one boy walk across to no sound at all.

His people had not come. I will not put his name in this. He was a hard boy, the kind who sat in the back and dared you to teach him, and I had spent a whole year fighting him instead of seeing him.

He crossed that floor with his jaw set, took his paper, and walked straight out the side door into the parking lot while the rest of us clapped for the next child.

Nobody said one word to him. Not me either. I had a year of words for him and I used them all wrong, and on the one night it would have mattered I had nothing.

I drove home that night and I could not sleep. I kept seeing that side door swing shut.

So the next morning I sat down at my kitchen table and I wrote him a letter. One page. I told him the truth, which was that he was smarter than he let on and that I was sorry I had spent the year arguing with him instead of telling him so.

I mailed it. I never heard back, and I did not expect to.

But I decided that night that no child was going to cross that floor through my school and not have one grown person put down in writing that they had been seen.

The next June I wrote all of them. Twenty-four letters. And it turned into thirty-eight Junes before I ever looked up.

The green pen

I did not write those letters with just any pen. I wrote every one of them with a green Esterbrook fountain pen, and the pen was not mine to begin with.

It belonged to my own senior English teacher, Mrs. Doak. She was a tall, stern woman who wore her glasses on a chain and did not hand out praise.

I was a farm girl with a chip on my shoulder and a mother who was sick, and I had decided I would graduate and go to work at the canning plant and that would be my life.

On the day I graduated, Mrs. Doak found me in the hall. She did not hug me. That was not her way.

She pressed that green pen into my hand, and with it a letter, folded in thirds, sealed.

“Do not read this until you are home,” she said. Then she walked off down the hall in her low heels and that was the last real thing she ever said to me.

I read it at my kitchen table that night. One page, front only, in her slanted hand.

She wrote that she had watched me for four years and that I was a teacher, whether I knew it yet or not, and that the plant would still be there in the fall but that I belonged in a classroom.

She wrote that she was giving me her pen because a teacher ought to write with a good one.

I still have that letter. It lives in the front of my ledger. It is why there is a ledger at all.

I went to the teachers college that fall on a loan I was scared to death of, and I came back and taught in the same building where she had taught me.

So every letter I ever mailed to a senior was really Mrs. Doak’s letter, going out again in a different hand. I never told a soul that until now. It felt like mine to carry quietly.