More War

As long as I'm remembering goofy things that happened in school, I might as well tell a few more war stories.

One of the craziest things that ever happened to me was the day I was helping out in the office for a short while. I happened to be on hand when a secretary had to run somewhere with a message and asked me to cover for her. So I stood by the counter thinking my own thoughts and a large woman came in the door. The thing that struck me first was the way she walked. Extraordinarily stiff. No bilateral motion, if you know what I mean. Her arms rigidly attached to her sides, her head straight forward, her eyes straight forward. She walked up to the counter.

Me: May I help you?
Her: Yes, I'm here to shoot Mr. Reed. Would you know where he is?
Me: Well, sure I know. I'll go get him for you. How about you have a seat and I'll be right back.
Her: Thank you.

I walked calmly around the corner and then ran as fast as I could go to the office of the school policeman. I told him the situation. He immediately phoned the station for back-up. He went to the front of the school to wait for the extra officers and asked me to go back to the office and stall the woman. I gulped but agreed to go back to the office. On the way to the office, I stopped in the teachers' lounge and got a cup of coffee and a handful of cookies.

Back in the office...
Me: I'm so sorry. Mr. Reed is going to be a few minutes. Could I ask you to step in here where there's a table and have a cup of coffee with me while you wait?

I took her into a side office where there was a table and I got her to sit down with her back to the door. Then I excused myself and went out to see if the other police had arrived yet. They had. They asked me to please go back to the office and sit talking to the woman so they could grab her from behind, hopefully avoiding a shoot-out. I got another cup of coffee and went back to the office.

Me: Mr. Reed will be right here. He's on his way. So, what made you decide to get up this morning and come to shoot Mr. Reed?

All this in a chatty voice.

Her: Well I couldn't do it before because I was out of town.
Me: Oh, yes? On vacation?
Her: No. I was in the hospital.
Me: Oh, I'm sorry. Feeling better now?
Her: Yes I do feel better when I take my meds. Yesterday I ran out, though, and I don't feel very good today. My head feels funny.

A policeman's head peeked out around the door frame and the man gave me a wink. Suddenly all the police rushed into the room and threw themselves on the woman, wrestled her to the ground, handcuffed her. One of them looked into her purse and sure enough, there was a hand gun. She hadn't given them much of a fight and still seemed pretty calm so I asked, "But why did you want to kill Mr. Reed?"

Her: I was in his class when I was a kid and one time he flunked me. I swore some day I'd get even for that because it wasn't fair. Today was gonna be the day, but now I guess I'll just have to do it some other time.

War Story Number Two...

One afternoon as I was about to leave the building, two little girls ran in the front door and one of them grabbed my arm.

Child: You have to come out with us. Please. There's a crazy woman out there and she just mooned us. I have to wait out there for my mom and I don't want to go where that lady is without a grown-up.

So I went out with the girls to see the crazy lady. Sure enough there stood a very peculiar woman. Seeing the girls, she began to shake her fist and and yell at them, some incoherent nonsense. I asked her to come into the school with me. To my astonishment, she turned her back, bent over and pulled up the one garment she was wearing. No underpants. She stood back up to see the effect this had on me. Probably I looked shell shocked, my mouth hanging open. Now that I thought about it, I realized that the garment she wore was some kind of tight see-through tank top and she had no bra. Since she was a fairly big woman, this was quite a spectacle.

Then a little boy came out of the school and she yelled at him to get into the car. He told her he had to hunt for something in the lost and found, so she accompanied him into the office. I followed her.

Something about that little boy made me angry. I knew him to be a very intelligent, shy and sensitive child. His mother, to say the least, was embarrassing him nearly to death. When the mother and son got into the office, I closed the door behind them so that no one else would come in. This surprised the principal and a couple of secretaries who looked up and then goggled at the woman in horror. The little boy asked for his item from the lost and found and the principal led him around the corner to find whatever it was for himself. With the child out of the way, I took a deep breath and told that woman exactly what I was thinking. Then I asked her to go wait in the rest room. I went to the lost and found where the boy still hunted for his lost item. I grabbed the first big pair of sweat pants and first big sweat shirt I could find and took them to the woman in the restroom. A few minutes later, if her son was surprised to see his mother wearing kid's clothes, he didn't say so.

The oddest part of that story was that the next semester, the little boy was put into my room at his mother's request. When conference time rolled around, I wondered how awkward it was going to be to face this woman. Not awkward at all. She couldn't have been nicer. To judge by her behavior, she didn't remember the bad day at all.

Third war story...

One afternoon at dismissal time I followed a group of kids downstairs toward the main exits. Directly in front of me was an unusually big boy whom I did not recognize. I was just deciding that he had to be a new kid when he lifted a pile of books high over his head and brought them down hard on the head of the boy in front of him. I helped the injured boy to a seat in the office, asked the secretary to call the kid's mother to come and pick him up. Then I turned to the offender whom I had told to accompany us, asked for his home phone number, directed him to sit down, and called his house. His mother answered. I told her what I had seen. Naturally, she seemed to be upset. Then it turned out that she was angry with me and not angry with her son. She said, "You stay right there. My husband is coming over there, lady!"

In just a few minutes both parents came into the office. Father was falling down drunk. Mother had her hair in curlers but otherwise seemed to be firing on all eight cylinders. Both parents were loud and belligerent. I asked them into a side office where we could talk without drawing a crowd.

From my point of view, I didn't understand why they were so angry with me. They didn't seem to be the least bit upset with their son but they were so mad at me, I worried one of them was going to beat me up. Come to find out it was all about the word BIG. On the phone with the mother I had said, "You know, your son is a very big boy and so when he hit someone's head with all those books, he's lucky not to have killed the kid." All she heard was BIG.

They'd just moved up north from a rural area in the deep south and even there where educational standards were low, the son had failed at least four times. So he should have been a junior in high school. They were extremely embarrassed about this. Not because he'd failed, not because he was dumb as a box of rocks, but because he looked so big compared to others in his grade. Both parents were shouting at me, "Don't you CALL him BIG. You don't ever say BIG to MY boy. Lady, you better right now apologize to my boy if you said BIG about him....on and on, blahblahblah big big big."

The principal hearing their shouts, came in and asked what was going on. They hollered and carried on about how I said BIG about their boy. By now, the father was kind of fading into the carpet, lying so low in his chair that he was nearly horizontal, but he could still make some noise, passing-out drunk or not. Eyes closed, he chimed in with his wife. Everything she said, he repeated the last few words. If anything he said included the word BIG, he'd open his eyes and glare at me venomously while saying it.

The principal suspended the boy and walked the parents out of the building, then went back toward the office scratching his head, muttering, "BIG! BIG! BIG!" to himself.

One more war story...

I had a very lively, intelligent, but annoying and deliberately disobedient little boy in my class. He wanted to talk all the time and if told to be quiet, he became rude and surly. Finally, in desperation, I began to write his name on the board each time I was forced to hush him up. That got his attention for a little while, then that, too, wasn't enough, so I made a rule that for each time his name went on the board, he'd need to stay after school for five minutes. Angrily, he intentionally ran up 35 minutes of detention in less than the next ten minutes of class time.

That night at dismissal time, I reminded him that he'd sentenced himself to some detention. He boo-hooed and cried and blubbered and carried on but finally admitted that he had brought this thing upon himself. Then he said that he would have to go outside and tell his mother. I said that he could tell her and go on home, but he'd need to serve the detention the next day...giving him time so his mother would have notice of when to pick him up. He got his things and left, only to return immediately, his mother alongside. He looked smug and smirky. She looked like a woman who was about to give me an earful.

She asked why her son was going to have detention and I explained. As I talked, she got madder and madder at me. When I finished talking, she stood up...we'd been seated at my request. She stormed across the space between us and stood over me so closely that my face was less than an inch from her dress. Then she went into the best rant I've ever heard. Since I was seated in kind of an angled space, she had me trapped. Couldn't get away from her. For over an hour and a half, she roared an almost seamless stream of abuse at me. Once in a while she made sort of fake slashes at my face with her long curved finernails, like a tiger. Finally a fellow teacher walked into the room to ask about an upcoming school event. Shocked at what she saw, she got on the phone and called down to the office for help. The principal literally ran upstairs and took over for me. I grabbed my purse and left the building.

Next morning the principal called me down to the office and sent someone up to cover my class for a while. The woman and her husband and son were with the principal in his office. The husband was very big and very quiet. He said to me, "My wife would like to apologize to you, but she's embarrassed. She made a fool of herself yesterday and set a terrible example for our son. I'm pastor of the local Baptist Church and as such both I and my family have a responsibility to model the best possible behavior for our congregation as well as for the community. My wife has done this kind of thing before but I didn't insist that she apologize so she felt safe to repeat the mistake. To make a terrible, irrational display of bad temper like she did is not only rude, it's probably legally actionable as assault. It just cannot happen again. That's why we are going to sit here until she makes a satisfactory apology, embarrassed or not. Then after that happens, she and I are going home and this afternoon my son will serve his perfectly reasonable detention. If that doesn't succeed in making him more mannerly, please call me because I do believe in applying the board of education to the seat of understanding. I've never actually done it, but it's a possibility. Well, honey?"

It was quiet for a while. Then she started apologizing and did it quite abjectly. She told about how she had longed for children, was told she couldn't have any, gave up and then was so thrilled to find herself pregnant. How she loved her son so much but she knew she was ruining him. She couldn't tolerate any criticism of his bratty behavior. Knew she was wrong, but couldn't get herself under control. Hoped that the humiliation she had brought on herself would be a deterrent to any future outbursts. She cried and cried. The boy made as if to get up and go to his mother, but his father gave him a look.

When she finished, I accepted her apology and went back to class with the boy. He did his detention and made fewer mistakes as time went on. Watching his mother clean up her act had been therapeutic.

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