There she is. Yeah, it’s definitely her.
I haven’t seen her in years. She’s standing in the produce aisle of the supermarket, scooping mixed walnuts and pecans into a bag.
Nat King Cole Christmas music plays overhead. It smells like Santa Claus’ aftershave in this grocery store.
She couldn’t possibly remember me. I was the quiet man in the rear of her speech class. I was one of her adult community-college students who lurked in the back rows.
Like most in her class, I was petrified of public speaking. So were my peers.
My first speech was one I’d like to forget. I delivered a torturous five-minute monologue on the proper way to prepare Pop Tarts.
When I finished, she gave a smile that seemed to say, “I hate my life.”
I was an adult male with two jobs, a wife, and a back surgery. I tried my best in her class. And she rewarded me for it.
I’ll never forget her for that.
My classmate, Gary, was a lot like me. He worked menial jobs, he had daughters, bills. We complained
in the breezeway before classes together.
Gary had a stutter—a crippling condition that embarrassed him. Simple conversation was difficult, sometimes almost impossible. Finishing a sentence could take ten minutes.
And when she paired students for final projects, she placed us together.
We worked on our speeches one evening at a sports bar. We set up shop in a booth on a Saturday night and watched the Alabama-Georgia game while scribbling speech notes on paper.
Gary purposed we make our speeches on the crisis facing modern paternity in a national economic holocaust.
“Yawn,” said I. “Let’s speak about baseball, America’s greatest pastime, or stock-car racing, or the ever-elusive, yet highly-documented and indisputably-real Bigfoot.”
We finally agreed on writing about our parents. I don’t remember much else that night, except that our notebooks had beer-stains.
And: Alabama lost to Georgia,…