Love Note to a Teacher

Ione Craig was not just your regular, run-of-the-mill kindergarten teacher.  She defined kindergarten teacher.  And our daughter Suzanne was fortunate enough to have her.  Ione with laughing eyes and smile in her voice made every day an adventure in learning colors or numbers or letters or sounds....

In the fall there was the adventure of gathering leaves of gold and scarlet and orange.  There were gourds and pumpkins to paint and line up around the room and songs about the leaves falling down to sing to the rhythm of shakers and tambourines and triangles. There was the taste of fresh apple cider and caramel corn.

At Christmas there were bells to make and to spell and to ring. There was the wooden nativity to set up and cotton balls to paste onto the beards of the cut-out Santas.  When the big Indiana snows came, there were new words to write and to spell like s-n-o-w and i-c-e and c-o-l-d. There were icicles to cut from white manilla paper and hang from silver cord across the ceiling. There were new ways to fold and cut paper with newly acquired scissor skills that, when unfolded, made magical snowflakes to tape on the big wall of windows that looked out on the drifts of snow outside.

One winter day when I went to pick Suzanne up from school, there were twenty small bumps and one large round bump in the snowy school yard.  Turned out it was Mrs. Craig in her snowmobile suite teaching her kindergarten children to make snow angels in the drifts! 

Then there was the day that Suzanne came out with a big smile on her face, waving a very large sheet of fingerpainting paper. She carefully manipulated the paper into the front seat of my car and said, ‘Mom, we fingerpainted today, and guess what we used for paint—chocolate pudding! Mrs. Craig said we could paint with our fingers or our elbows or even our toes, if we wanted to, as long as we licked it off when we got done!”  I still have that painting in one of the early scrapbooks I kept for Suzanne, and she still grins when she looks at it.

There were days when I wasn’t able to make the school-run, and Bill was on duty. Invariably, it seemed, just as he was leaving for the school an important phone call would come into the office or an interview would run overtime, making him a bit late to get to the pick-up line.  (These were the days before portable cell phones.) By the time he got there, Mrs. Craig had taken Suzanne back inside to wait. About the third time this happened, Suzanne came out with a big note attached to her sweater with a safety pin that said MR. GAITHER on the front.  When Bill unpinned the note and read it, it said.

 Mr. Gaither:
Kindergarten lets out at 11:30. It is very distressing
to your child when you are not here when she gets
out.  I will expect you here at 11:30 from now on.

                          Ione Craig

It didn’t matter to this teacher whether Mr. Gaither was president of the School Board or President of the United States; she expected him to never distress one of her little students again.  When Bill got home that day with our daughter, he said, “What a great teacher!  You have to love a teacher whose top priority is the joy and well-being of her kids.” (You may be sure he was never late again.)

We got to know Ione Craig that year and found there were many iconic stories about her around town from the three generations of students who had her as a teacher.  But the best story was one she told on herself.  She said that by February kindergarteners had learned to write and to spell enough words to write a love note on Valentine’s Day.  They could use scissors well enough to cut out red construction paper hearts and could paste well enough to glue lacey paper doilies to the red hearts to make a pretty Valentine.

So Mrs. Craig’s project the second week of February was for the students to make a Valentine for a very special person in their lives.  To her surprise and delight, one of the little boys came up at the end of the morning and gave his Valentine to his teacher.  Mrs. Craig expressed her gratitude to her student and tucked the treasure into her purse to take home to show her husband.  When they opened the Valentine, it read: 

After reading this, Armond Craig laughed out loud and said, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with the kid’s spelling.  He just can’t count.”

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The Easter Grinch

“What day is this?” my friend asked as she popped in to drop off some supplies and mail.  I thought for a minute.  “Wednesday, I think...does it matter?”

Since we have all been sheltering in place and social distancing due to closures and cancellations with no schedule to section off our day, no appointments to keep, no meetings to attend, the days are seeming to run together.  Or maybe I should say the days have a new rhythm and, certainly, a new set of priorities.

In the mail were eight spring catalogs of new party dresses, sandals, bathing suits, and jewelry.  There were also flyers about vacation spots and resort deals.   My cell phone kept dinging with notifications of reduced rates on airline tickets and rental cars.  “Does it matter?” I thought as I shuffled through the mail. I found myself looking for actual letters and birthday cards for Bill.  The tone for text-waiting from our kids, relatives, and friends checking on us and sending funny posts to make us laugh, forwards of meaningful reads, and pictures of the grandkids took precedence over everything else.

One friend sent a recommendation of a great must-read book; another sent a link to good new song he thought I’d enjoy.  Somehow in these weeks of staying home for the common good a new set of priorities have moved into the place of “important” meetings, check-up appointments, and spring shopping sales.

Our little daughter-in-law (who is a great organizer) sent the schedule she made out for their family.

One young mom posted a comment from her little child whose school and activities had been cancelled or taken on line: “I LIKE CORONAVIRUS”.  The mom went on to say that their family had gotten closer since the quarantine had made homeschooling a family project, and they’d actually been cooking and enjoying meals together around the family table.

Some of the phone conversations I’ve received were discussions about how neighborhoods had gotten creative about helping each other, like a sharing gazebo of DVDs, puzzles, games, great books for adults and children, and extra packets of garden seeds. The outpost eventually turned into a place to leave extra canned goods, cake mixes, and basic supplies for those who had run out. The teachers in one of our schools here organized a drive-by through the neighborhoods where most of their young students live, because they were missing the kids so. The kids stood on the sidewalks outside their houses with love notes to their teachers written on posters with big magic markers.

So, as serious as this pandemic is and as important as it is that we obey the health officials to protect each other, wouldn’t it be great if relationships could deepen?  What if neighbors faithfully checked on each other and shared what they have on hand?  What if actual board games and puzzles came out of the craft closet and became a lot more fun than video games. because we are playing with actual people with actual laughter and actual conversations?

I began thinking about the Grinch who stole Christmas, and about the coronavirus, and about what it can steal and what it can’t. And I’m wondering, if it even took our old schedules and our meetings and our frantic lives and even our jobs and our I-Step scores and our promotions, might it bring some new fresh sprouts of creativity and life?

Bill and I are in the “most vulnerable” age group for being endangered by this virus.  We are staying home like we’ve been told to do.  We read and talk about the good books that some of our friends have recommended as well as those we promised ourselves to read “someday”. We cook and have long conversations with friends through texts, emails, and the phone—yes, that invention through which we can actually hear the tone and inflection of real voices (no emojis needed). 

Because of some of the closures and changes, our daughter is home from N. Y., our son-in-law from the university  (he now teaches and grades on line), and our grandson from the military academy where he is a high school senior.  He will finish the year on line as well, and maybe even graduate virtually.  They all self-quarantined for the required days, before we finally got together for dinner the first time.  It was an especially sweet evening.

One of our university graduate grandsons is using the time to compose music; both of our daughters and our son are working on writing and recording projects at home.  I am writing this blog to share with you.  Bill selected from our archives a playlist of 35 songs of hope and encouragement for you to listen to alone or with your family.  Little Mia is painting.

Mia (10) painted this last night.

My daffodils are starting to bloom, even though it snowed again.  The white swan are nesting on the peninsula, and the wrens are building a nest in the bark bird house by the back door.  When I went out for the newspaper this morning, they were singing their little heads off.

Oh, I know for sure our sweet Lord was crucified.  I know the earth shuddered so hard at this terrible cosmic injustice that the ground split in two and the veil that kept regular people like me from the fearsome presence of the Almighty tore right down the middle. I know He was Roman-sealed in a tomb, hollowed out of the hardest stone.  But the enemy couldn’t steal Easter.  No, it came just the same.  And whether we live or die, death cannot stop the surge of the eternal from starting to move in our veins, and stone or no, virus or no, we will live again!  We can know life eternal, now.  It is these lasting things we must value now.  It is recognizing the essential from the non-essentials now and in embracing the eternal, releasing the joy, now!  Does it matter? Yes! This is what matters, now.

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I Wish You

It was Suzanne’s college graduation party.  Family friends and relatives, schoolmates and old teachers all sipped punch and ate raspberry cake under the willow trees beside the gazebo at the creek.  She had played there as a child – fishing for catfish and catching turtles and garter snakes.  Memories raced across the green hillside and peeped out from behind the apple trees in the orchard. 

Friend Angela, Amy, Grandma Gaither, Suzanne, cousin Lisa at graduation party at the creek

I listened as our friends wished her success as a writer, fame as a lyricist, fortune in her chosen work, and honor in grad school.  What would we wish her, Bill and I later asked as we sat in the yard swing apart from the others.  It wouldn’t be wealth, we decided, or notoriety.  And success would be awfully hard to define.  What we would wish her would be some grand times and some hard times, some wins and some losses, some sunshine and some rain. We would wish her growth…and vision…and the ability to feel what others feel who are hurt or left out or lonely.

As we had done so many times before, we found ourselves drawn that night to the passage of scripture that has been read probably more often in our home than any other, for it stated so well what we wished then for Suzanne and for all our children as they face life’s shifts and changes.

May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love; and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God’s children should, how long, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience that love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God himself. (Eph. 3:17b-19 NLB)

From this graduation experience came the song “I Wish You”. Soon we will watch a new class of graduates walk down the aisle to get their diplomas. One of those graduates will be our beautiful granddaughter, Madeleine. And this will be our wish for her as it was for her mother and her Aunt Suzanne her Uncle Benjy and for her brother Lee, and cousins Will and Jesse who have come before her.

I wish you some springtime
Some “bird on the wing time”
For blooming and sending out shoots;
I wish you some test time,
Some winter and rest time
For growing and putting down roots.

I wish you some summer
For you’re a becomer
With blue skies and flowers and dew;
For there is a reason
God sends every season;
He’s planted His image in you.

I wish you some laughter,
Some “happy thereafter”
To give you a frame for your dreams;
But I wish you some sorrows,
Some rainy tomorrows,
Some clouds with some sun in between.

I wish you some crosses,
I wish you some losses,
For only in losing you win;
I wish you some growing,
I wish you some knowing,
There’s always a place to begin.

We’d like to collect you
And shield and protect you
And save you from hurts if we could;
But we must let you grow tall,
To learn and to know all
That God has in mind for your good.

We never could own you,
For God only loaned you
To widen our world and our hearts.
So, we wish you His freedom,
Knowing where He is leading,
There is nothing can tear us apart.

William J. Gaither and Gloria Gaither
© 1977 Hanna Street Music (BMI). All rights reserved.

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