The Shoebox My Teacher Kept

Sharon

Sharon was harder. Girls change their names when they marry, and the pink card just said SHARON, no last name, and the grade book had her down as Sharon H.

It took me three weekends and a lot of driving and one very patient woman at the county library who still knows how to read a microfilm reel.

I found her in Portland, which is the Portland in Indiana, not the one in Oregon, which is a thing you learn to clarify fast around here. She is a grandmother of six and she runs the nursery at her church and she had no idea anybody in the world remembered her maiden name.

I sat at her kitchen table, which had a plastic cloth on it with cherries printed on it, and I told her about the box.

Sharon was a cystic fibrosis child, back when that word was a death sentence spoken low in kitchens. She spent more of fourth grade in a hospital bed than in a desk. The doctors had not expected her to see thirty.

“They told my mother not to get attached,” she said, matter of fact, stirring her coffee. “A doctor said that to my mother. Don’t get too attached.”

But Miss Rowe got attached. Miss Rowe drove the hour and ten to Sharon’s hospital, longer than she drove for any of us, twice a week, with the lessons and a library book and, Sharon said, once a small bottle of the lavender water that the other girls wore, because Sharon had said she felt like she smelled like medicine and nothing else.

“She brought me perfume,” Sharon said, and her voice finally went. “Fifty years ago she brought a dying kid some perfume so I could smell like a regular girl. And I’m not dying. I had six kids. I’m not dead.”

I put the pink card in her hands. She held it against her chest like you would hold a sleeping baby.

“She kept it,” Sharon said. “All this time she kept it.”

What the Marks Meant

By the middle of the summer I had found seven of them. Seven living people out of a box full of names, because fifty years takes some of them, and a box of get-well cards is, by its nature, a box of children who were very sick.

Every one of them told me a version of the same story, and every version taught me more about what those pencil marks had cost her and saved them.

There was the man, now a pastor, who had been so poor as a boy that he wore the same pair of pants to school for two years. Miss Rowe wrote “Pants, two pair, 6.00” in the margin the fall he was eight, and never a word to him or his mother. He learned it from me, in his own church office, and he had to close the door.

There was the woman whose mother drank, who missed Mondays all through third and fourth grade because somebody had to clean up the weekend before the little ones saw it. “Present, home duty,” Miss Rowe wrote, week after week, so the county would never come knocking and split that family up.