Well after a long hiatus I'm back. Been busy fixing up the house, taking care of the zoo, and working on new cover art for THE EIGHTH DAY, which I'm very excited about. It's coming together nicely, and I look forward to sharing it soon. Also, some of my college friends also got me into a text-based roleplaying game, so I'm writing creatively again, and very happy about it! So much fun to write a story when you have little idea where it's going and only have limited say.
And so ends the happy part of this post.
There are no two groups of people who foster the love of reading and writing in kids more than parents and teachers. Nearly every writer will cite some teacher as the one who sparked their interest in writing, or recognized their talent and pushed them to hone it. I was very fortunate, I had not one teacher but many who helped along the way. Heck, even my publisher was one of my professors in college. No man is an island. If I ever find commercial success as an author, I'll have a long list of people to thank for helping me get there, and that list will be populated with teachers from 1st grade onward.
My ninth grade Honors English teacher was Tracey Williams, a spirited younger woman who had a pretty good sense of humor. She needed it too, we certainly kept her on her toes. She was the victim of an endless series of practical jokes, from the classic hand lotion-on-the-door-handle gag to reorienting her desk (or the whole classroom), or just putting some necessary object on top of a cabinet where her short stature would prevent her from easily reaching it. Her height also got her the moniker "Willow", a play on her last name and a reference to the movie character. She took it all in stride, and it kept the class enjoyable. She made learning enjoyable, even the classics we had to plod through (for my feelings on Dickens see my previous post, "A Tale of Two (Gotham) Cities"). Sixth period English was the most memorable part of any given day, heck, it's about all I really remember from my freshmen year. Corralling a bunch of rowdy, hormonal teenagers and getting them to pay attention to what Dickens was getting at through his nigh-impenetrable prose is no small feat for anyone. There is no higher praise one can give to an educator than to say they cared about their students, and made their students care about the subject matter, and Mrs. Williams certainly did. The class discussions were as lively as she was.
Not that we didn't make her pay for making us pay close attention. In To Kill a Mockingbird, there as a bit character named Zeebo. He's a janitor who appears in maybe all of two pages in the book. But some of her previous students had seized upon his awesome-sounding name and created a legend out of him, which they proceeded to memorialize in comic-book form. Zeebo, when he wasn't janitoring, had quiet the secret life. He dated the Statue of Liberty and fought in both WWII and Vietnam, killing both Hitler and Ho Chi Minh, among his other exploits. Mrs. Williams was mortified to discover this legend (and comic book) was then passed down to my class (and we kept it going, I passed it on to my brother and his friends). To this day a copy of it resides somewhere in my box of school papers up in the attic.
But there will be no more future generations of Mrs. Williams' classes to pass it on to. On Wednesday she lost her battle with cancer.
Well, that's not quite accurate. By all accounts she was kicking cancer's ass. She had finished treatment and gone back to doing what she does best, fostering a love of reading and writing in young people. But the treatments had made her heart weak and she suffered a sudden and unexpected heart attack. She leaves behind a husband and three children of her own, and all of us whose lives she touched.
I haven't been back to my home town in a few years; my parents have moved and so has nearly everyone else I knew from back home. But from what I gather from official and social media, the whole town is reeling. She was far too young, and we all thought she would make it out of this. She was too tough, too feisty to succumb to a bunch of cells in the prime of life.
Yet, being a teacher, a good one at least, grants one a certain special kind of immortality. What an educator does in life; echoes in eternity. Their influence spreads like falling dominoes through the ages. Decades ago, a young girl sat in a classroom in England, and some teacher who may very well also have since departed this world sparked something in her imagination. Years later she would sit at a cafe and start jotting down a story, about a little orphan boy who discovers something extraordinary about himself. A story that would go on to help instill a love of reading in millions of children around the world, a story about a boy named Harry Potter.
The year after ninth grade I started writing my first novel, in which I decided to pay a tongue-in-cheek homage to her. One of the F-16 drivers in my novel, First Lieutenant William "Willow" Henry, was named in her honor, and while I definitely drew character inspiration from lots of people, she was the only one who got a character named for her. At first glance one might think it odd to associate an English teacher with a fighter pilot, and it wasn't really intentional, I just saw the opportunity with the nickname/call sign. But in retrospect I think it was fitting. Her sunny optimism, courage, and fighting spirit would not be out of place in a squadron ready room, and when cancer appeared she definitely went "fangs out" with it.
I don't know if she knows it or not. If she or anyone else picked up on the reference, they never told me. I'm sorry I won't get the chance to tell her.
She may have been taken from us far too soon, but her legacy will live on forever. My classmates are all starting families now. We will read to our children, teach them to read. Tell them why they need to read Shakespeare and Dickens along with Rowling and Meyer.
And someday, tell them of the great legend of a man named Zeebo.
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