"Serious Talk"

Today I drove from College Place to Marrowstone Island and back. Twelve hours of driving to attend a funeral. The woman who died was the mother of two girls who sat for four years in my one-room school – my first teaching appointment. Today would have been the mother’s 53rd birthday.

The long drive was worth it. Five former students attended the simple service in the Nordland Garden Club. “Going home” to this island school community brought up powerful memories of the students, their families, and my efforts.

One young mother introduced me to her husband saying, “Honey, this is the man who is the reason I am what I am today.”

He shook my hand and with mock concern said to me, “Well then, you and I need to have a serious talk!” We all laughed.

I enjoyed seeing these former students again; some of them for the first time in 21 years. Interestingly, the students – though now older than I was when I went to teach them – are virtually unchanged. They’ve grown tall and beautiful. They know more. They have traveled life’s bumpy road and learned some things the hard way.

But they are still the same people I knew back then. Their gestures are the same. They receive and process new information with the same direct focus, or the same tilt of the head, or the same smiling nod. They have the same individual levels of energy, curiosity, humor, or doubt that they had 21 years ago. The jokes they didn’t get then, they still don’t get today.

I drove away feeling that I had seen the souls of these girls. I could see each one, somehow, stripped of age, accomplishments, and acquisitions. I could sense that unchanging piece that makes each one unique and irreplaceable. It made me value the years I was privileged to be with them. God couldn’t have blessed me with a more colorful first group of students.

Driving back into sleepy College Place I realized that I am again surrounded with a colorful collection of once-in-eternity characters. Each child, each parent, each teacher is unique and irreplaceable. “Lord, help my eyes stay open to the inestimable value of each soul.”