as if you could kill time without injuring eternity
Posted on | 1 year, 3 months ago, in the wee hours | No Comments
I learned of this late. But some of my long-time readers may recognize the name Wilma McClarty; I’ve blogged about her before, back when I was in Tennessee and still saw her from time to time.
In the fall of 1994 my freshman comp teacher was this tiny woman, maybe an inch or two shorter than me and about a hundred pounds, soaking wet with rocks in her pockets. Everything she wore matched. Everything. From her makeup down to her shoes. She always looked spiffy and she never stopped moving. She fidgeted, paced, gestured, and pointed — impish and restless, quick and excitable.
Halfway through the semester, I handed in a paper about how to poison people (no shit), under the guise of an “instructional essay.” She loved it. Called it “dark and delicious,” and demanded that I submit it to the school’s student publication (where the editors declined to do so, probably while making the universal swirly-finger gesture for “crazy” behind Dr. Mac’s back). This made her the first teacher who ever told me that something I’d written ought to be published.
She collected signed things, so long after I graduated and left SAU, I tried to always send her a signed copy of the things I had published. If I could hand-deliver them, she’d squee at me and talk about her Signed Things Shelves. If I couldn’t, I’d drop them in the mail. I sent her notes when I got cool new publishing news, and she was always tickled pink for me. As recently as a year or two ago, following just such an exchange, she told me that she hoped I’d leave her name and number on my resume as a reference, “indefinitely and forever.” (I was pretty much okay until I remembered that, and thought about deleting her and her contact info from that sheet. Now I have a glass of wine, and am utterly maudlin.)
She had a Walden brick, which is kind of a long story; but if you knew her, you laughed just now to read that. She was the first adult I ever knew who had no moral qualms whatsoever with trespassing in abandoned places (a fact which is not altogether unrelated to that long story). But she wasn’t a vandal. She was an (urban, and suburban, and rural) explorer (like me).
She was enthusiasm personified, and cheer leader, and support system, and wise woman, and sneaky little fink who once fought me for a pair of shoes we both reached for in The Gap. She won. They fit her better anyway, and they looked great with her new suit. So I was pretty sure she’d live forever, you know?
I feel like a door has closed somewhere, but I can’t find it — even to rattle the handle.