Certified

I just renewed my teaching certificate for the eighth time, which means I've had nine certificates, with this newest one being good through 2016, for a total of 45 years of teaching certification. In the state of Georgia, you must be certified in order to teach in all public schools and most of the private ones. A certificate is good for five years and, at the end of every five years, you have to renew it. The requirements for re-certification usually include evidence of staff development and that you haven’t done anything dastardly to a kid.

But this story isn’t so much about my teaching. It’s about my life. My nine certificates, so far, have spanned 40 years, my entire adult life, and thinking about each one takes me back.

My first certificate arrived in 1971, along with my 21st birthday, my college diploma, and my marriage license. I thought I would teach for a few years until my children came along, and then I would morph into a full-time mom, baking and ironing and donning high heels when hubby came home from work. I remember my mother telling me that I needed to have a college degree in case my husband died and I had to support myself. For that first year after we married, Gary was finishing up Pharmacy School at the University of Georgia and I taught first grade in Barrow County.

In 1976, I renewed my certificate for the first time. By then, Gary and I had moved to Greenville, South Carolina, where we'd had our first born, Melissa, and had then moved back to his home town of Warner Robins, Georgia because his father wasn’t doing well and his mother had just died. We couldn’t sell our house in Greenville, so we lived with Gary’s daddy for about six months. It was during that time that I became pregnant with Billy, which I remember as being a big surprise.  Now, I'm also a little surprised that I bothered to renew my certificate at all,  since what I was intent on at the time was birthing babies and decorating nurseries.  I do remember Gary looking at me in the grocery line one day and saying he didn't know how we were going to make it financially if I didn't go back to teaching.  That's about the time I realized the rules for women had changed from when my mother had given me her college-degree advice, and so I began to re-think my life plan.

My first day teaching after having kids.  Notice the open window.  It was late August with no air conditioning in the schools.

In 1981, during the time of my next renewal, I was teaching full time, I’d just finished my Master’s Degree, and I could tell that something had shifted in me. I was no longer a mother who happened to be a teacher. I was a professional woman who also happened to be a mother. That was also about the time I decided I wanted to go to law school, so I took the LSAT and did quite well, leading me to apply to law school at Mercer University. I was accepted but ultimately decided not to go. I didn’t really want to be a lawyer; I just wanted to have the opportunity to keep on going to school.

 This pretty much sums up my educational philosophy both then and now.

My son, Billy, was in this kindergarten class.

Five years later in 1986, I received my fourth certificate in the midst of working on my Specialist’s Degree and just before my third child’s second birthday. Molly had been a bit of a surprise when she'd arrived, but, although I was certainly happy to have her and loved her just as dearly as I loved the first two, her wonderfulness didn't stop me from my commitment to moving up within my profession.  She probably wouldn't have survived if Barbara, our neighbor, hadn't stepped in to be my much better suited stand-in.  Then, in 1987, I was offered my first out-of-classroom assignment, a job that had me traveling all over the state, training teachers in an early childhood program.  I was pretty full of myself by then and it was wearing on my marriage.

The professional woman juggling work, kids, Molly's blanket, and a cat.

By 1991 when  my fifth certificate arrived in the mail, I was in the midst of a divorce and a doctoral program.  I wasn't traveling as much with my job, but my degree quest had me engaging in a 240 mile round trip to the University of Georgia at least one evening a week.  In 1993, I became an elementary principal, a position I kept for five years.

In 1997, one year after I received my sixth certificate, I finished my Doctorate in Educational Leadership and started my quest to see what my next job would be.  The Dean of Education at Georgia Southwestern State University called and asked if I wanted to join the faculty there.  I did,  and so I left a job paying $80,000 a year for one paying about $52,000.  Although my life as a college professor was much less grueling than my life as a principal, the pay sucked and at some point I realized I'd educated myself into a much lower paying job.

Year 2001 brought an attack on America and my seventh certificate.  I was still at the college and enjoying it, but I worried that my relatively low salary would affect my retirement benefits, so I checked around to see if I could find a job with better pay.  That came with the Department of Education and a move to Atlanta in 2005.  I loved Atlanta but wasn't crazy about the job and what I really wanted was to teach children again before I hung up my professional hat..

By 2006, I had a new job teaching second graders in a wonderful school in Buckhead, which brought renewed meaning to my seventh renewal and my eighth certificate.  I'd come full circle and was back doing what I'd set out to do back in 1971.

So, here I am to now, with my ninth certificate, which came to me the same week as my 61st birthday.  For the first time, it wasn't mailed.  Instead, I had to download it from the Professional Standards Commission website before I could print it.  One of my young teacher friends seemed perplexed as to why I needed to print it at all since it was safely stored on the PSC website.  She didn't know about the other eight, safely kept in a drawer in my living room, evidence of a well-lived (or at least well-intended) life.

I've been contemplating retirement of late, but I'm now thinking I  might stay on a while longer since I still enjoy my job (most days). 

After all, I'm certified for five more years.

How could you not love working with people this size all day?

Making a Life

Over the last few days, I’ve run into some folks who have reminded me that people come in all sizes, shapes, colors, dispositions, disabilities, and talents.

The first example came to me because I had reserved a rental car to use when my friend, Allison, flew in from Atlanta for a short visit. As I was walking into the Enterprise office to pick it up, I noticed two older women talking in an animated fashion to the agent. One of the women was dressed in African attire while the other was in typical middle-aged western-hemisphere woman garb, AKA the pantsuit. I have to say I was a little annoyed because they were standing in the doorway and didn’t notice I was trying to get through. Pantsuit Woman was talking very loudly while African Lady was mostly looking on in relative docility.

Because I am a natural voyeur, I listened in as the ladies took their places in line ahead of me and talked at length with the rental agent. At that point, I noted that the loud talking Pantsuit Woman had a rather strong accent; one which, I was pretty sure, emanated from an African nation and not Waycross, Georgia. Docile African Lady was still letting Pantsuit Woman do all the loud accented talking. Then I noticed that Pantsuit Woman had a hearing aid and was also gesturing to African Lady in a way that helped me realize they both were deaf, or at least hard of hearing. So, with that information, my brain began cataloging those two human beings: female, old, African, and hearing disabled. At that point,I started thinking about how difficult it must be to live in another country, a country with a different language; furthermore, how difficult it must be to be deaf in another country, a country with a different language; and furthermost, how difficult it must be to be old and deaf in another country, a country with a different language.

It was only after more creepily voyeuristic, albeit flawlessly nonchalant, watching and listening to the ladies that I came to believe that they were a couple. It wasn’t just the clichéd notion of one of them in feminine attire and the other in a pantsuit so much as the way they interacted with each other, like any old married couple. I could be absolutely wrong about the type of relationship they had, but it was definitely close and familiar. So, then I thought: good for them! They had found each other and made a life and lived long enough and well enough to barge in front of me and annoy me at a rental car checkout counter as they hammered out the best deal they could so they could go on with their trip and their life together (whatever that life was).

The second example came a few days later. My daughter, Melissa, and I were walking back from dinner when an older man came tooling down the sidewalk in one of those motorized chair/cart things. Before long, he had engaged us in a conversation which pretty quickly led to the information that he was an Elvis impersonator. After a couple of songs (Hound Dog and Heartbreak Hotel) and more than a modicum of jokes, he offered us his business card, which we, of course, asked him to autograph. In the midst of writing his Elvis on the back of the card, attempting to use his knee as a portable desk, the man suddenly looked up in feigned horror, imploring, “Where’d my leg go?” At that point, we realized he was missing an appendage incredibly vital to anyone who wants or needs to emulate Elvis, the King of Pelvic Gyrations.

Melissa was acquainted with the man, whose real name was Les Small. Known around the neighborhood as Elv-Les, he'd been a general greeter/helper at the local Safeway Store, but she hadn’t seen him since he’d lost his leg. Using the information on his business card, we later looked him up online and read his bio, finding that he'd been an Elvis impersonator for years, even back in the days when he'd worked at his day job as a tree trimmer. His website showed a couple of photos of Elv-Les with what appeared to be a full set of extremities, but said nothing about his current lack of leg.

In thinking back about the two great examples of flourishing personhood I'd recently run into, I was reminded that most people do the best they can in this life with the cards they've been dealt, and that we not only get a life, in many ways, we make a life, which is something I need to remember as I go about making my life.

And so, the next time I don't want to take part in something fun because my feet hurt or my back aches, I'm going to think about Les Small, the one-legged Elvis impersonator, who doesn't let his disability keep him from doing what he loves in the life he's made. And when I want to complain when people mumble over the phone or bemoan the fact that I can no longer negotiate interstate highways like I used to, I'm going to remind myself of African Lady and Pantsuit Woman, who must navigate their lives in a world where they are most likely often misunderstood.

With that, I'm also going to try to remember that life's best lessons are often presented in unusual gift bags, packaging that, at first glance, might disguise the prize inside. Some, I've found, even come with a pretty good rendition of "Heartbreak Hotel."*

You can find out more about Les Small on http://elvisnostalgia.com/

The Road to Americus

I’ve often thought I’d like a roadmap of my life, an old-fashioned paper map with creases and wrinkles and pencil markings of all the places I’ve been. It would include the happy spaces and the sad places, the places I never should have been to begin with, the wrong turns, the dead ends, the uh ohs and the oh wows, the just-glad-to-be-there safe havens, and the home sweet homes. Some of the roads would have only a couple of lines, the getting there and the getting back marks, others would’ve been penciled in so many times there would just be a torn space where the graphite had once been.

The road from Warner Robins to Americus, Georgia would be one of those torn lines, a dogleg tattered groove starting in the middle of the state and then heading south and finally west.

I’d never thought much about Americus until I landed in Warner Robins as a young wife, mother, and teacher. That’s when my work friends told me about little Georgia Southwestern College, a good and relatively close place to get a Master’s Degree. After eschewing the tiny school as being beneath me, even with my less-than-stellar transcript from the University of Georgia, I decided to matriculate. The first pencil line on my map to Americus would have been dated early June of 1977 when I drove down the rural highway to register for classes. During the next ten summers or so, I traveled that road twice a week, earning two graduate degrees and coming to appreciate all a small college could offer.

It’s one of those quirky tricks of fate that Americus’ claim to fame not only included Georgia Southwestern College but also Magnolia Manor, with its retirement center and nursing home, the place where both of my parents would eventually live and die. Good Methodists that they were, my mother and father believed you just couldn’t get to heaven without at least stopping by Magnolia Manor on your way out the door. I hadn't paid much attention to conversations about Magnolia Manor when I was growing up, never believing in my adolescent mind that anyone I really cared about would ever end up in a place like that.

Of course, as with many youthful beliefs, life proved mine wrong. A few years after I’d finished my last class at GSW, my daddy became too ill for my mother to care for him in their home on the Georgia Coast, so he was moved into the nursing home in the same small town at the other end of that southwest Georgia road I’d driven for ten years.

Daddy wasn’t too happy about being in a nursing home, partly because he couldn’t get a decent haircut, so he called and told me I needed to get a razor and drive down to shave his head. I was horrified at the thought of taking a blade to my daddy’s scalp so I stopped at Walmart on my way into town and bought an electric hair trimmer. When I’d finished with the buzz cut I’d attempted, Daddy looked like he’d just finished a fight with a bobcat, with the bobcat being the paws-down winner. I, on the other hand, was proud he at least still had his ears. During the three years Daddy lived at the nursing home at Magnolia Manor, he never did ask me for a haircut again.

Daddy died in 1994 when I was in the midst of getting my doctorate at the University of Georgia by way of another well-traveled road. When I completed that degree, I was offered a teaching position at none other than Georgia Southwestern State University, the new name signifying my old school's advancement within the university system. I accepted in spite of the pay cut, believing that the lifestyle and the Dr. Mayo status would make up for the lack of money.

Never thinking I would stay as long as I did, I decided to continue living in Warner Robins where Molly was still in school and to commute to Amercius. During the seven years I worked full time for GSW, I made the 120 mile round trip an average of four days a week year round, 600 miles per week. Most of those trips were work related, but some were to visit my mother and take her to lunch, as she, too, had made her way to Magnolia Manor at that point, first in assisted living, finally in the nursing home.

Although the trip itself quickly became perfunctory and mundane, lots happened on that road to and from Americus throughout those seven years. I watched the crops come and go each season and enjoyed some beautiful sunsets. I laughed at the crazy whirling dog who greeted me most mornings as he dirvished himself way too close to the highway for my driving comfort. I mourned the dead deer who apparently weren't as smart as the dog, and tried my best to dodge the turnips that would truly fall off the backs of old farm trucks. I worried about my kids, worried about money, and worried about my future. Then on one trip on a September day in 2001, I learned of the horrific events that would change everything and then I worried about us all.

During that time, I also wrote my three crazy books in my head as I drove, thinking up fictional roles for Macon State Prison, the old Manhattan Shirt Factory, and Debra, my first real friend who happened to be black, as I daydreamed my way to and from work. And there was that Friday evening, driving home after seeing Mama look so bad, and then turning around and going back the next day, marginally functioning in a state of disbelief after getting the call letting me know she was gone.

Now that I live in Atlanta, I don't go to Americus very often, but just this week, I added a couple more pencil marks to my mind map when my friend, YeVette, asked me to teach a class while she was out of town. Because the trip was no longer commonplace, I spent the time appreciating the countryside and awash in memories. The drive was still gorgeous, with its pristine Mennonite farms, verdant pecan orchards, and corn and cotton crops, but it was the pictures in my head that kept me most occupied: Daddy and his hair cut, Mama and her favorite lunch spots, my teachers, students, and friends from my GSW days, and that crazy dog.

But what I thought about most was the life I've lived during the thirty-three years since my first trip on the road to Americus, and all the other roads I've traveled. And, even though my life map is pretty full, I feel relatively confident I'm not finished yet. I'm looking forward to seeing what I'll pencil in next. I just hope it's not one of those places I never should have been to begin with. I do hope those trips are over.