Magic: Part 2

The summer before my first professional teaching job, I spent most of my nights going to bars with friends and most of my days struggling to wake up by 7:55 to hurriedly shower and, fingers crossed, make it to my job as a preschool teacher’s aide by 8 AM. I was subleasing an apartment situated right next to the preschool, so to get to work I just had to walk across the shared parking lot, but you’d be surprised at how little the benefit of that tiny commute did to help me actually make it to work on time.

I had just graduated from college and quit working at Walmart, the job I’d known and loved the past five years, to focus more on my future career in education.  (Yes, you read that correctly.  It took me 5 years to graduate college with a teaching degree—and a minor in Spanish, let’s not forget—but only because I always go above and beyond and I just wanted to make sure I was really smart before I left.)

[Side note:  Working at Walmart was so fun. Although I wasn’t the most gorgeous softlines sales clerk in the world, I was a ton of fun, a ball of carefree, drunken positive energy, and I was known for getting asked out by both customers and co-workers alike right there “on the floor” (as we in the biz liked to call it) as I was folding t-shirts or spacing hangers. “She has a great personality, at least” was a compliment I heard all the time when people were talking about me and didn’t realize I was listening.

Beggars can’t be choosers so I said yes to everyone which didn’t always end well because really you’d be surprised how often people return to Walmart to buy stuff and inadvertently (or sometimes very vertently) get all up in someone’s biz and find out that you’re dating 15 people at the same time.

Anyway.]

The owner of the preschool was a jolly woman in her 50’s who adored me and never cared that I was at least 15 minutes late every day despite living 20 medium-sized strides away.  She would laugh as I strolled past her office, hair still damp from the shower, the scent of rum oozing from my pores and forming a trail that followed me into the classroom I was assigned.  “I wasn’t sure if you were even coming in today!” she might say.  “Glad to see your happy face!”

Miracle of miracles, the preschool teacher I worked with felt the exact same way about me.

What can I say? It’s a gift.

Although it gives me cold trickles of anxious sweat to even think of living that way now (the 46-year-old version of me hates being late and I VERY RARELLLLLY AMMMMMM)—

*Please read the previous line in the obnoxious tone of the braying beast that I wrote about in this post*

--well, it seemed to work for me back then.

So that summer, I breezed through life like I normally did while all around me, my peers who had just graduated with me from Mizzou’s College of Education stressed so hard about finding teaching jobs that they would literally cry into their beers some nights.  “Wheatzie, doesn’t it bother you to not have a real job lined up for the fall?” they would ask.  I would take a guzzle of my drink and shrug.  “Why would that bother me?  I’m sure something will fall into my lap.”

I couldn’t reassure them the same way I could myself, however, because I had begun to notice that not everyone was as lucky as I was.  So I might follow that up with a little shoulder raise and say “Good luck” or something, because honestly, it was the end of July and they didn’t have a teaching job lined up?  Lol what were they going to do?

Me? I got a call early August from a school in a small city about 20 minutes from Columbia. The principal wanted me to come in for an interview, he said, to be a 6^th grade math teacher.

“Oh, no thank you,” I laughed into the phone.  “I hate math.”

The phone was halfway back to its cradle when I heard him chuckle on the other end of the line.  “That’s okay,” he explained.  “I’d still like to chat with you if you have the time.”

I put the phone back up to my ear. “I guess so…” I acquiesced.

The night before the interview, I was having drinks with friends and it was getting late.  “Don’t you want to head home, get a good night’s rest before your interview tomorrow?” one of them asked.

“Nah,” I said.  “It’s for a math position and I hate math.  I probably won’t even go to the interview.”

They all laughed in an “Oh, that’s just Wheatzie” sitcom kind of way and we went on with our night.

I did end up going to the interview, but I didn’t try very hard with my outfit or anything. I was just there to humor the principal, who had seemed like a really nice guy on the phone when I talked to him. When I arrived, he sat me down at a big conference table and pulled my application from a file folder. This was back in 2000 when people still spoke on land lines (see above, cradle) and applied by hard copy sent through the mail in a big brown manila envelope.

“So you hate math,” the principal started, and once again I heard that jovial chuckle. 

I gave a quick, affirmative nod and a smile.  “I hate math.  You’d be better off hiring a chimpanzee to teach it to your 6^th graders.”

That earned me a big guffaw from the other side of the table.  When the principal’s laughter died down a few moments later, he studied my application, which he was holding in his hand.  In all honesty I could hardly remember filling the thing out.

“You wrote here on the Hobbies and Interests section that you love to read and to write…”

Now it was my turn to laugh, but it was inward.  People actually paid attention to the Hobbies and Interests sections of a resume? I had only filled it out because I like talking about myself.

--TANGENT--
I once had a boyfriend who wore thick coke-bottle glasses, had the most crooked teeth you’ve ever seen, was about a foot shorter than I was, and liked to spend his evenings spooning with his dog.  (Listen, like I said, I wasn’t quite the looker back then that I am now. I wasn’t afforded the luxury of being picky.)

One time when my older sister’s boyfriend was telling a story, he cut him off by looking right at him, holding up his hand to make a jaw-flapping gesture, and saying, “Blah blah blah, not about me.  Moving on!” and launching into a story about himself.  I broke up with him a few short months after we started dating (a fun personality can only make up for so much), but I will be forever grateful to him for that saying, which I have used hundreds of times in the 25 years or so since then.  It always gets the best, most disbelieving laughs from people.

As I wrote the preceding paragraph, I remembered that I once penned a blog post in which I attributed that saying to myself. And now I really can’t remember if he was the one who came up with it or I was the one who came up with it, but either way, one of us copied the other and then I broke up with him—that much I do remember.  But it was only because I gave him an ultimatum one day when he tried to cancel established family plans with me so he could “spend some quality time with my dog.”  In a family like mine, you don’t hear the end of it when a guy—especially a guy who looked like this one—chooses a date with a dog over a date with you, so I dumped him and instead of telling my family the truth, I told them it was because he was ugly.  They all shrugged their shoulders and nodded in understanding, like, “Yeah, he was pretty ugly.”

--BACK TO THE STORY--
“I love reading and writing,” I gushed to the principal.  “I also consider traveling, working out, and coffee to be other passions of mine--“ I cleared my throat and prepared to spring into a whole monologue about myself, thinking I had an attentive audience, when he cut me off before I could get any more words out.

“I could move a few people around,” he mused, his brow furrowed as he pulled another piece of paper from a different file folder and scanned it.  “In fact, some of the other teachers were telling me they’d like to try new positions…”

He looked up at me. “Would you like to teach 6^th grade language arts?”

I felt my heart soar.  Even after all of the things that had come so easily to me in life, surely getting a professional teaching job—especially after I’d been so flippant about it—couldn’t be this easy, right?

Right??

Oh, but it was. The principal talked to the superintendent and called me early the next day to offer me the job. Thus began my (so-far) 25-year career as a middle school English teacher, a job that has blessed me a gazillion times over.  I have never once dreaded going into work—never once—and instead look forward to going back each day. 

I tell my boys: Find a career that you love as much as I love mine, and you’ll be happy for the rest of your life.

You might have noticed that the title of this post includes a "Part 2."  It's part of a series I'm working on about how great things just happened for me during the first 20-30 years of my life. If you're interested in Part 1, you can find it here.