I am going to have to interrupt the much neglected Chronicle of the Ever-Expanding Purple Easter Bunny to send a note to my 11th grade English teacher - a note I should have sent a long time ago.
Dear Coach Kelly,
It might surprise you that I live in Alaska now. Of late, our claim to fame has been giving this nation a very questionable VP candidate. I figured that once you learned I live in the Last Frontier, you'd ask me all kinds of questions, like what I really think of our lipsticked pitbull and how many hours of darkness we get in the winter.
But I find out today that you won't be asking me any of those questions. A quick Google search finds you in memoriam. I know I've gotten old in the last fifteen years, but has that much time passed? You were just about the fittest high school teacher I knew. I assumed that leading packs of cross-country teenage runners would lead to some kind of Fountain of Youth and eternal life. But it looks like I am a bit late in sending this letter.
I remember the very first paper I wrote in your class, I got a C+. It was an essay about Herman Melville's "Billy Budd," and as a fifteen year old overachiever who flinched at A minuses, I can tell you that receiving this grade was nothing short of an earth-splitting catastrophe. I am certain I wanted to drop out of school at that very moment and wondered how I was ever let into honors English in the first place. You also had this curious habit of scribbling, "see me," in your dreaded red ink, when your criticism could not be comprehensively communicated in words scribbled in the margin. I had one such "see me" in that Billy Budd paper. So I went and saw you.
I can't remember exactly how you explained why I got a C+ on my paper, but the gist of it was that I didn't seem to have found my own "voice." Many of us in your class had been schooled by the maniacal 10th grade English teacher who spent most of his days yelling poetry at us and telling us kayaking stories. During those yelling sessions, he pounded into us tenets of writing which now seem rather boilerplate. We grew used to what he wanted to hear, and likely, I was trying to mimic that style when I handed in that Billy Budd paper.
Your comment (and that C+) have stayed with me all those years. It was a turning point in my writing efforts. I know that both of us felt great satisfaction when weeks later I turned in my Arthur Dimmesdale - Two Sides of Sin paper. The Beginning of a Voice. And it was that voice that catulpulted me into writing an essay about idealism, one that took me to Japan, which was about as thrilling as a fifteen year old life gets.
And it is that voice that I still use today. My voice, the one you helped me find. Today in my professional capacity, I use this voice to help win cases, to persuade and achieve outcomes. Personally, I use this voice to rant, to experience vegetarianism, and to chronicle Easter Bunnies. At times, this voice has made people laugh, cry, and connect.
So I thank you for that C+. And I wish you could "see me" now.
Sincerely yours,
MOA
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