She was a bubbly, idealistic English teacher fresh out of college, and I was a smartass, high school junior who happened to be in her inaugural class, and who slowly drove her so close to the borders of sanity that she was left flailing her arms wildly trying to regain her balance and keep from falling over the edge.

She had a sing-song lilt in her voice when she addressed students congregated in her classroom, a voice more appropriate to kindergarteners than high school students, and she had a Greenpeace bumper sticker slapped on the back of her Volvo (which was, at the time, the I'd-like-to-buy-the-world-a-Coke hippie vehicle of choice). She always looked a little nervous and fidgeted when she spoke in casual conversation.

She wore beads and flowing paisley gypsy dresses and had a touchy-feely air about her so thick that a room would instantly smell of patchouli oil the moment she walked through the door. She was a romantic, at heart, and sometimes drifted off into a glassy-eyed stupor in mid-sentence when speaking of things she adored, returning only after heaving a wistful sigh to ask a startled, "Oh, what was I just saying?"

Her greatest anxiety, the one trait upon which I capitalized to make her question her entire existence, was that she might inadvertently stifle a young mind's creativity and kill it in its tracks.

The problem, however, was that she wouldn't have known creativity if it bit her on the face.

She didn't know what to make of me. One moment, I could have her ripping her hair out by the fistful to the point of near-baldness, and the next, she'd be so moved by a creative writing assignment I'd handed in that she'd read it aloud to the class and get teary halfway through and remark that it was the most moving thing she'd ever read (The secret, I learned, was to have a loveable little puppy or an innocent child die a tragic death, or to have young lovers torn apart by fate, and she'd be reduced to uncontrollable sobbing - I shudder to think what her reaction might have been had she read The Bridges of Madison County, but I assume it would have been nearly fatal).

Maybe she thought it was some kind of idiot-savant thing, and reasoned that every creative genius in history had some terrible personality trait that could be forgiven if great works of art flowed freely from them like blood from a wound. I don't know.

Whatever it might have been, I got away with many misdeeds I shouldn't have, like the time I was too lazy to write a short in-class essay on the symbolism of the whale in Moby Dick, and instead wrote an off-color haiku offering a hypothesis as to how the sperm whale got its name and stapled the paper to the bottom of a classmate's shoe (and, no, I don't remember how the haiku went, but I do recall that it used the name "Dick" in the vernacular).

Instead of chastizing me for my obvious laziness, she spent a great deal of effort pondering the dual meaning of the famous fictional cetacean's name and the significance of my euphemistic use of the term, and offered some wildly speculative explanations of the symbolism inherent in my stapling it to someone's foot. Instead of being sent to wherever I should have been sent, I was roundly lauded as the most imaginative person she'd ever known.

The kid whose footwear had been adorned with the brief verse did not share her opinion, particularly because the soles of his shoes were not of sufficient thickness to defend against hostile staples and his foot suffered what appeared to be an attack by a miniscule vampire, and when he complained to the administration, she was advised not to be quite so enthusiastic where blood was shed in the name of literature.

Some of these alleged attempts at "creativity" weren't quite as opaque, but still I managed to hide beneath the cloak of innovative and inventive thought.

She also served as the theatre teacher and made the mistake of casting her artistic star as Romeo across from his lusty girlfriend as Juliet, and - well, let's just say that it's not a good idea to let a guy like me have an onstage makeout session with his girlfriend while he's wearing tights and then have him turn and face an audience composed mainly of high school parents and grandparents, especially if his friends are all seated together in the back row emitting hoots of delight at the sight of the show's hero clearly excited about playing the part.

She was criticized for her casting choices and her inability to contain the enthusiasm of her thespians, and though she was removed from any supervisory authority over the theatre, she came (reluctantly) to my defense when I was called upon the carpet to answer for my disrespectful treatment of Shakespeare's greatest triumph.

"He's a teenager! What do you expect from someone at an age at which hormones dictate (yes, she used that exact word!) most of their behavior?" she argued.

"Exactly," they said, and promptly removed her for lacking the foresight to anticipate what might arise (no pun) under the circumstances.

She developed a small, but noticeable facial tic in the aftermath.

There was also the time she invited her police officer "guy friend" (as she called him) to come and speak to her students about drugs. How she ever got hooked up with a cop, I would have never understood had I not seen him and realized he was just as goofy and air-headed as she was.

During his demonstration, Officer Guy Friend held aloft a plastic baggie with the same theatrical gusto one could envision him employing to display a smoking gun with the defendant's fingerprints all over it to a jury. He announced that it contained four "marijuana cigarettes, or what the druggies call 'joints'" (to use his exact wording), and then told us that he was going to pass the baggie around the room so that we could see what they looked like up close, presumably so we could easily identify them and run screaming from the room if we ever encountered them in the wild.

Before he handed over the evidence, however, he told us very carefully that when the baggie came back to him, all four joints had best still remain in the baggie or he'd call in the drug dogs to sniff us all down and haul the perpetrator off to prison. Then he passed the baggie to a member of the audience and resumed his little dog and pony show while it made the rounds.

When the bag came back, there were five joints in it.

He turned three different shades of red, and when he turned to our teacher and showed her, she turned every color in the visible spectrum, and though she may never be able to prove it, I have a feeling she has a pretty good idea who was responsible. She and her "guy friend" parted ways a few days later, and for the few weeks that followed, her voice had lost the kindergarten lilt.

Enough of history. There's much more, but this post has already become unweildy. Let us instead flash forward to the modern day.

For the past few months, I've been considering going back to school to pursue a graduate degree in creative writing. I've ordered academic catalogs from all the schools I'd consider attending and they've been arriving in the mail here and there for the past few weeks.

Today, I received another, this one from the school I'd most like to attend, and when I opened it up and thumbed through its pages, I learned what has become of my former English teacher since I last saw her. She has, it appears, pursued her own education and is now employed as an Assistant Professor teaching creative writing at the very same repository of higher learning to which I am most considering applying.

I haven't yet made a final decision as to whether I'll return to school, but it would almost be worth it just to see the look on her face when she walks into the lecture hall on the first day of class and sees me smiling broadly in the front row.

Related stores? Go here and here.

An interesting meme offered by chosha. Normally, I don't do memes, but this one's interesting enough for me to make an exception. Here's how it works:

1. The first random article on wikipedia.org is your band name (click the "Random Article" link in the left sidebar).
2. The last part of the last quotation here is your album title.
3. The third picture here is your album cover art.

Here's mine:

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I predict a wildly successful album tour.

Chosha didn't specify the tag rules, so I'll throw it out to whomever wishes to try it. And kudos to anyone old enough to know the reference in the title to this post. See ya at the Grammys!

Why Parisians detest Americans...

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