Story of the Month: Nova Scotia

It’s quiet in the fifth-grade classroom in the basement of Ralph Waldo Emerson Elementary School.  All our heads are bent over our papers as we write.  Our windows are high up in the wall, and when I raise my eyes now and then, I see wind-blown brown leaves leaning against the panes and tufts of frost-stiffened grass in the yard beyond.  Sometimes when I look up from my paper, I encounter the upturned face of another student who has also paused to think.  We quickly avert our gazes from each other, as if we’re committing some small infraction.  There’s no rule against occasionally looking around while working, but we all know, instinctively, that what we’re engaged in — the writing process — needs to be protected, even from a casual exchange of glances between classmates.

Imagine yourself an inanimate object, our teacher, Miss Jordan, has said; imagine yourself an animal; imagine, imagine.  And write.  And, later, stand up and read it aloud.  It’s Miss Jordan’s first year in our school.  I think it is, indeed, her first year teaching.  She is young and glamorous.  She doesn’t look like any of the other teachers, nor like any of the housewives of my 1950’s suburban neighborhood.  Her short, boyish hair shows off large, gleaming clip earrings.  She wears stylish sack dresses, and her make-up is smooth and perfect.  She’s tall and is on her feet most of the time, yet she wears spike heels.  Our principal also wears spike heels, but she spends her day sitting behind a desk.  I see her there when I pass in the hall because she keeps her door open, the better, I think, to keep an eye out for mischief.  Our principal is an intimidating figure, though why I feel that way I don’t know.  I’ve never had a direct interaction with her.  Perhaps it’s just the aura of her office and her business suits.  And those high heels.  But though Miss Jordan’s shoes make her tower above us, she isn’t intimidating.  She’s regal.

 Miss Jordan has told us she grew up in Nova Scotia.  I know nothing at all about Nova Scotia, except where it sits on the map, but to me, it’s the height of exotic.  My godmother is Venezuelan and lives across the bridge in New York City and speaks with a soft accent, but somehow, she doesn’t have Miss Jordan’s allure.  My godmother has given me a little silver pin from Venezuela, and she’s described the huge moths and other alarming insects that live there, but I’ve never thought about Venezuela as a real place, never considered that some day somehow I could visit there if I wished.  We go to Long Island to see my cousins, and to the Jersey shore for an annual summer trip, and into Manhattan to see the Christmas lights.  I never yearned for more.  But simply by hailing from Nova Scotia, Miss Jordan has stirred a new awareness in me, the sense of other places as three-dimensional, vibrant locations where lives are being lived contemporaneous with mine, where lives had been lived before mine.  I decide that some day I will go to Nova Scotia.

I am the oldest in my family.  My sisters and brothers will all follow me through Emerson School.  The sister right after me, coming only two years behind, will be compared to me by some teachers.  She and I are very different, I bookish and serious and dark, she athletic and blonde.  She will not fit the comparing teachers’ expectations, but I don’t worry about that, I won’t know about that.  My mother and her sisters also went to Emerson School, but, of course, that was too long ago for comparisons.  In any case, Miss Jordan is all mine.  I bring my first drafts to her desk as solemnly as if I were approaching an altar.  Once, I dispute with her when she says I misspelled “sincerely.”  I’m a natural speller.  I never get words wrong.  But, of course, she is correct. 

When my brother is born in January, my father brings a photograph of him home from the hospital, and I proudly take it to school to show Miss Jordan.  He’s my second brother and my mother’s fifth child.  He will become my favorite sibling.  Though I liked my earlier teachers, I had never shared anything personal with them.  But I know Miss Jordan will be interested in the picture of my new brother, because she’s interested in all of us, in what we think and know and how we express it.  Miss Jordan has taught us that expressing ourselves is important.  She didn’t tell us that, she let us find out for ourselves.  By giving us the opportunity to write and the opportunity to listen.  By giving us enough time.  In my memory, all of our class time was spent on creative writing.  I don’t remember lessons in math or reading or history.  I don’t remember tests or homework assignments or even books.  I remember writing.

I would have become a writer even if I hadn’t had Miss Jordan as a teacher.  My mother’s love of reading and writing was a big influence, and my own love of stories, and my inclination for observation and analysis.  But Miss Jordan helped me on my way.  She let me know that writing matters and that it can take you down avenues worth exploring.  I have yet to go to Nova Scotia.  Now that I am a seasoned traveler, Nova Scotia doesn’t shimmer as enticingly on my horizon as it did in 1957, yet it’s still on my list of places to see.  But perhaps I won’t go.  Maybe I will keep it safe from reality.  Maybe it should remain Miss Jordan’s mysterious homeland, just as that fifth-grade class remains exclusively an endless writing workshop in a brightly lit, overheated basement room on a blustery New Jersey afternoon.