The keynote speaker from Sophies graduation that morning, the man Heather had practically begged to come to the party, walked across the patio and pulled a worn little first-grade reader out of his jacket pocket.
Sophie had tapped her glass and said, Mom, since you mentioned teachers, our speaker asked if he could say something about one of them.
He held up the little reader. The cover was soft with age. He said, this book belonged to a first-grade classroom in Spokane, and the woman who taught out of it taught me to read when everyone else had given up on me. I could not read a word in September. By Christmas, because of her, I could read anything. I became a writer. Then a professor. Today I gave a commencement address. And I never forgot her name.
He turned to me. Mrs Lund, he said. Hello again.
Heather said kids today do not need teachers, they need mentors, people who actually made something of themselves. The man who made the most of himself was standing there because of a first-grade teacher.
Heather, the life coach with forty thousand followers, set down her mimosa very slowly.
He told the party he had kept that reader for forty years, and that there were hundreds like him, a whole generation of that town who learned to read in my classroom, and that teaching first grade was not wiping noses. It was building the foundation everything else in a life gets stacked on.
I taught first grade in Spokane for thirty-eight years. I never made much money. I never had forty thousand followers. But I taught a town to read, and one of them came back to say so at my granddaughters graduation party, with the proof in his pocket.
Sophie hugged me and whispered, I want to be a teacher, Grandma. I told her it is the best job there is. I have the worn little reader on my shelf now to prove it.