On the first day of school, we walked into class and saw Mr. Weston
standing there, hands in his pockets, a corduroy tie looped loosely
around his neck. He gave us a nod and a toothy smile. The worn creases
of his face folded in when he smiled. The seats in the back of class
filled up first, as they always did in eighth grade classes, and the
stragglers came in after the bell and were forced up front.
“Alright, you all sit down and let me try to get your names.” He
got our names, smiled at each one of us, and tossed his clipboard
on the desk.
“Alright, you see me in this tie?” he said, pulling up the tie from
his belly, eyeing it like a dog noticing its tail. “Well, kids, take
a look now, ‘cause you aren’t gonna see this here too often. I’m retiring
this year, ya see. No more ties. And I won’t lie to you, kids – I
think about those North Carolina golf courses a lot.” He grinned wide
and rapped his knuckles on his desk, laughing. “You see my little
contraption here.” He pointed down, where a couple meters of green
turf lay sprawled across the floor in the front of the room. A paper
Dixie cup lay on its side at the end of the turf. “This is where I
do a lot of my practicing,” he said. “Sometime here I’ll show you
kids how to do a clean putt. But, alright, I can’t do all the talking.
Now I heard something about all you already from your brothers, sisters,
pals, parents, grandparents – you name ‘em, I know, I know ‘em.” He
smiled. “But why don’t you all tell me a little bit about yourselves
anyway. I get good feelings sometimes. I gotta feeling you’re another
good batch. So, hey, tell me what you guys are all about. Michelle
and Dave’s son – you start...”
After the first day of class, the stragglers who came in after the
bell were forced to the back of the room. Mr. Weston might have been
turning into an old man, but he was the newest thing we’d seen in
awhile. Born and bred in Spencer, New York, Mr. Weston was a veteran
of our town. He’d seen thirty-seven years of SVE High School as a
teacher and thirteen as a student, and in a town as small as Spencer,
he knew everybody’s story, just like he said. He knew more about the
genealogy behind each of us eighth-graders than we knew ourselves.
Granted, sometimes Mr. Weston wouldn’t tell any stories at all. Usually
those days were Tuesday, the day Mr. Weston snatched up the brand
new Sports Illustrated from the library, taking it back to his room
where he would lean back in his chair and study it for hours on end.
Those Tuesdays he’d pass out a worksheet and turn on a baseball, football,
or hockey bloopers video for the class to watch, just to show he really
didn’t care if we did the worksheet or not. No, Tuesdays weren’t fun.
But there were days other than Tuesday he didn’t tell stories, either.
Every so often, he’d haul over all the change from his laundromat
(did I tell you he owned a laundromat?), and he’d sit behind his desk
rolling quarters all day. Those days we’d usually have a quiz. After
we finished picking between the A, B, C, and D’s, Mr. Weston would
give answer keys to a few of us trustworthy ones. We graded the quizzes
while he kept counting quarters. If Mrs. Dolloway tried pulling an
operation like that with us, I’ll tell you, we might have been fired
up enough to go crying child labor to the principal. With Mr. Weston
it was just different. With him, we felt like we were helping out
the business. “You’re good kids,” he told us every time we handed
over the graded quizzes. “Hey – here, take a couple quarters and go
get yourself a soda.” He tossed us quarters, and our hands dived around
trying to catch them. We smiled; he smiled.
Some days Mr. Weston left the room and nobody knew where he went.
One he was gone we had a Mercy tournament. Mercy’s a game where you
try and slap the backs of a person’s hands so they can’t slap yours.
That day I went to the nurse’s office after class because I’d held
out a game with Nathan Emery until the bell rang, and my hands were
purple and trembling because of it. Don’t blame me for not yelling
mercy, though. Girls were there. I couldn’t yell mercy in front of
them.
When Mr. Weston reloaded his stock of sports information for the
week, when he was all out of quarters to count, and when he was actually
there, it was then Mr. Weston was back to his freewheeling old self.
We’d come into class and he’d joke around with us, pulling a kid or
two up from their seats each day to join him in a putting competition.
Any of us who got the ball in the Dixie cup won a Snickers bar. One
day, Mr. Weston organized a push-up contest between us guys and him.
It didn’t surprise any of us that he won that one. He might have been
old, he might have been small, but he was a strong man. He’d wrestled
back in high school, and he spent his time outside of school working
outdoor jobs. For one thing, he owned the Christmas tree farm up on
East Hill, and he was always cutting and carrying Christmas trees
somewhere for the old people that dropped by wanting a tree.
Mr. Weston’s outdoor jobs left him marked. He held up his right hand
one day and told us the story behind it. We’d wondered about that
hand for a long time. “You know who did this to me?” he asked. He
shook his head and smiled. “Ol’ Rook.” We couldn’t believe it. We
just couldn’t. Rook (a man that school documents and the local newspaper
knew as James Cronkhite) was our Dean of Students. We always knew
Mr. Weston and Rook were buddies, but we never thought Rook took his
finger off. It turns out Rook was up at the Weston’s tree farm one
winter, and the two went to work fixing an old tractor. “Alright,
Rook, I got my hand in here. Don’t you dare turn on the –“ and just
like that, the conveyor belt snapped Mr. Weston’s pointer finger off.
Rook picked the finger off the ground and started crying. Mr. Weston
said all he could do himself was yell like hell. But when he thinks
about it now, he told us, it’s pretty funny that Rook was the one
crying about his finger.
Lucky for us, Mr. Weston had a lot more stories than he had lost
fingers. He knew all the teenage girls that had been “knocked up”
in Spencer’s past thirty years, and he never hesitated to tell their
stories in the name of health class. A few years back, Mr. Weston’s
teenage son actually impregnated SVE’s head cheerleader. Mr. Weston
wasn’t embarrassed to tell that story, either. He wasn’t embarrassed
about his son; it wasn’t that at all. He told the story like his son
was a recovered alcoholic, except with sex, and that that baby calmed
him down and made a decent man out him. Everyone seemed to like that
story. In eighth grade, when the whole world is in front of you and
you haven’t even made a dent in it yet, it’s nice knowing you can
make big mistakes and still find happiness.
When it came to the topic of sex, though, Mr. Weston kept a strict
game plan: “Alright kids, I’m gonna give you each a notecard, and
you’re gonna write two questions about sex that you want the answer
to. Then you’re gonna watch bloopers while I look them over. On Monday,
you’ll come in. I’ll go over all the questions then. Then on Tuesday
we’ll work on a respiratory system sheet.” That Monday, Mr. Weston
systematically hit one question after another, just as matter-of-factly
as can be. The terms he used were nothing new to us. But the fact
that those terms actually meant something – wow, did they mean something
– had girls looking at boys and boys looking at girls in entirely
different ways. And in forty-three minutes, sex education for that
year was done.
Eighth grade was something else, alright. That winter, a dating phenomena
struck my class. No couples saw each other much outside of school
(no cars, no licenses yet, and all us kids scattered along the countryside).
It was inside our school that eighth grade couples did their things.
They’d pick on each other in the hallways, save each other seats at
lunch, make-out when they were safely away from the teacher’s sight,
and sometimes the boy would sneak the girl somewhere dark and secret,
seeing if he could steal second base before gym.
About half of us had relationships while the other half didn’t.
I was in the half that didn’t. My best friend had three different
girlfriends that year. He didn’t have any the year before, but this
year he cut off his ponytail and girls started giggling as he passed
through the hallway. One of the girls he dated was a sophomore. My
friend spent all his time with her. I always told kids she was a pervert
and a cradle-robber. She wasn’t, though. She was a nice girl, really
nice.
One day, Mr. Weston was telling some story or another, and somehow
he went off on a tangent about how he’d met his wife in our high school,
back in the day. He got quiet for a moment. He folded some papers
into a neat little pile on his desk He stopped smiling. “Alright,”
he said, “now this is the thing you guys gotta understand…” He told
us about how he’d met his wife his junior year, and they’d been going
ever since. But then he talked some more, telling us about how some
people believe there’s one perfect person for everyone, and that when
love’s involved, the stars line up just right and everything’s meant
to be. Well, Mr. Weston thought those people were full of it. “Now
my wife and I went to this here same high school,” he said, looking
at the floor. “That’s some coincidence, isn’t it? Look, kids, I love
my wife, but let’s face it, there’s plenty of great women out there.”
Suddenly, Mr. Weston went quiet. He seemed shocked by what he’d just
said. The class sat still, all of us looking forward. Mr. Weston’s
wife was SVE’s Chemistry teacher. She was right upstairs, probably
teaching a fifth period class. But Mr. Weston didn’t go any further
into his marriage from there. He did something good for me, instead.
“The thing you gotta remember,” he said, speaking slowly, “is that
you don’t have to be perfect for each other to love each other. If
you don’t end up with Mary Something, there’s Maggie Something out
there who will do just fine and make you happy.” He got quiet again,
this time a little longer than the last. And then he said, “What I’m
saying is you kids don’t have to worry about finding someone. For
every Jack there’s a Jill. You’ll find somebody – don’t worry about
it.”
After he said those words, Mr. Weston gave us free time. Everyone
seemed happy, but of course I really couldn’t say if they were. When
you’re happy, everything seems happy. It’s a good feeling. “For every
Jack there’s a Jill,” Mr. Weston said. That meant something. Especially
in eighth grade, that meant something.
