the doozer

This morning, I left the house at far too early an hour to head to my office under the auspices of making the final edits to my master's thesis. The tale of this work has its own series of twists and turns, and will certainly be the subject of another (or several) posts. But now is not the time for that. Now is the time for the doozer.

* * *

I have taken to drinking fully-caffeinated, full-fat coffees when I let myself indulge. And this morning, I knew I would need this comfort as a nestled down in my office to expand on the "Uncontrolled Epidemic," the dominate discourse emerging from press coverage of sex crime and sex offenders during the 1940s. That's my thesis. Bam.

Off to unnamed coffee shop. Fattest latte you have. Thank you. No, I don't want a scone. And yes, I'm having a fine day. Two women walk into the coffee shop, venturing the wrong way into the line. There's a very specific way in which one is supposed to get in line at this place, and these women started to crash it. Up went my heckles, ready to let them know what for. I hate bottlenecks. But they corrected themselves. Civilized, I thought.

I'm now at the little waity place at the end of the counter when one of the potentially line-budging women walks slowly and somewhat uncertainly to take her place behind me, so as not to disrupt the order of the coffee-waiting universe. And I recognize her. It's my fourth grade teacher: the doozer.

My folks sent my sister and I to Catholic school for two years. Never mind the fact that we are not, nor have we ever been, Catholic. But mom likes nuns. I went for third and fourth grade where I had the doozer. The doozer was also central to the music program at the school, so I can't think of a xylophone without thinking of her.

I should probably explain what a doozer is.

During my time in the fourth grade or then abouts, we watched a lot of Fraggle Rock at home. The fraggles: sweet, peaceful hippie muppets that lived in a symbiotic relationship with the doozers. The doozers: tiny construction-worker muppets who just liked to build for the sake of it. And the fraggles liked to eat what the doozers built, and the doozers were ok with this because they just wanted to keep building. So the fraggles would eat, and the doozers would build. And my parents, in the most affectionate of all intentions, called my teacher "the doozer" because of her resemblance to these mini things constructed of green felt.

So there was the doozer. With her partner. I remembered hearing that not long after I left the school, the doozer left, too. And I remember there being talk about her being gay, and about this having an impact on her decision to leave. Or on her leaving, anyway. I remember hearing that she cried when she talked to her classes about leaving. And, at the time, I remember not thinking or feeling much at all.

But there at the coffee shop, in about 30 seconds, I was overwhelmed by the sight of her. From my judgment of her as a line crasher to the rumored judgment of her at our school. From where I would be minutes later, working on my thesis, to where I was over 20 years earlier, in her class, singing about how the Lord would find me no matter where I went. Singing songs about the facets of a God I didn't understand and don't believe in. Not that way. She looked exactly the same.

I stopped her and asked her if she was a teacher. She said she used to be. I said she had been my fourth grade teacher, and gave her my name. She said she remembered me because of my hair. Her partner laughed with amazement, and said they hadn't been stopped in so long: "It used to happen all the time, but it hasn't happened in years." We chatted for a couple minutes about what we were up to (both still in education). I told her I was off to make some final edits to my master's thesis, feeling sheepish and nearly fraudulent, as though I should explain that I had been working on the same damn paper for nearly a decade.

Our coffees came and so did our time to part, as happens when the natural order of life interrupts perfectly good conversations. And she said, "Well...maybe I'll see you someday. You never know." And I felt an overwhelming surge of emotion. Truly, a desire to tell her how we had affectionately named her being after a sweet little muppet. But instead I said, "My parents really like you. We've talked about you over the years." And she smiled and said that was nice. And we said good-bye.

What's the meaning here. There is the one obvious thing: thank your teachers. Bless them. Praise them. They're not all good, to be sure. But the ones that are good are so because they care deeply and tremendously about helping people grow up to be ok in the world. So there's some meaning. And, of course, don't assume the worst. I feel pangs of horribleness when I think about how prepared I was to be nasty to the doozer for line-jumping. People are just people. Most of the time, anyway.

But there's another meaning here for me, I think. It's the sense that those people or moments that happen in life, around which you create memories, will arise again throughout your journey. The doozer has been part of the language of my crawl to adulthood, so it seems so logical that I would meet her again someday. Maybe even destined that it would be on the day that I was on my way to scribble out the last few words of something that has been so hard for me to finish. As though telling her it was going to happen meant that it had to, that I have to finish or I'll be lying. It makes me think of other bits of my life and how they will greet me in the days to come. I hope when they do, it's much like this. Something just perfect for the moment, to give me resounding perspective, however fleeting. I might even call it a glimpse of grace.