The Shoebox My Teacher Kept

The Bottom of the Box

I thought I had reached the bottom of the box, and then one August night I took everything out to dust the inside, which is a thing I had started doing, the way she must have.

Under the oldest row of cards, the ones the color of weak tea, there was a flat layer of tissue paper gone brittle as a moth’s wing.

Under the tissue were more cards. But these were different. The paper was older than any teaching she had ever done. And the name on them was not a student’s name.

The name on them was Audrey.

GET WELL AUDREY. FEEL BETTER AUDREY. There were seven or eight of them, made in crayon by children’s hands, and the dates penciled on the backs were from 1948.

In 1948 Audrey Rowe was nine years old.

I sat on my kitchen floor with those cards and I finally understood what her nephew had said. She was just paying it back.

In 1948, in a town a county north of ours, a little girl named Audrey had been sick enough that her classmates made her cards. And some teacher, some woman whose name is on none of these cards and is lost now to everyone, had driven out to a sick farm girl with her lessons and a library book, so that Audrey would not fall behind, so that Audrey would not be held back, so that Audrey would grow up.

Audrey grew up. And Audrey decided, somewhere in there, that she would spend the whole rest of her life being that teacher for somebody else. Over and over. Two counties over and an hour and ten and forty minutes each way in the snow, for thirty-six years and then some.

She kept her own cards at the bottom of the box the whole time. Under all of ours. The seed of it. The reason.

A nine year old girl in 1948 got driven lessons in the snow, and seventy-eight years later a tire man outside Muncie, and a grandmother in Portland, and a pastor, and me, are all walking around alive and grown and not held back because of it.

That is the longest chain I have ever held in my two hands. It ran from a lost teacher’s name in 1948 straight through a shoebox and out into seven lives and however many more that I will never find.