All Good Things ...

My wife dallied, uncharacteristically, at the checkout station, even after the bill was paid and the groceries sacked and the basket loaded for the push to the car. I couldn’t make out the low-toned conversation between her and the young woman at the register, but quizzed her about it, on the way out to the parking lot.

“I asked if she’d ever gone to Desert Sage,” she said. Desert Sage was the elementary school where my wife taught, during her first 17 years as an educator.

“Yes,” the young woman had replied.

“Were you ever in Mrs. Potts’ class?”

“Yes …” the young woman said, frowning with the slow realization of where this was going.

“I’m Mrs. Potts.”

The young woman’s eyebrows inverted in recognition. She and my wife looked at each other, both smiling shyly, across 20 years or so.

“It’s good to see you,” the young woman said.

I’ve seen my wife in several moments like that, through the years. More often, it’s the former student who recognizes her, but, either way, there’s always that funny moment, when she finds herself standing with someone she's delighted to see – a person who associates her with happy memories and a formative time.

But a person, too, whose relationship with my wife is mostly limited to one specific year, and one specific location … so there’s only a little, in the end, to say. She smiles, ask a few polite questions, and then both go on their way.

Those days, though, will soon be coming to an end. My wife retires this week, after 33 years, three schools, and close to a thousand students. In a few months, she’ll be moving to another state, on the other side of the country, where the odds against experiencing more of those sweet, chance encounters are considerably longer.

Artists have their handiwork to gaze on. Athletes have their records, maybe a few videos of the big games they played in. Businessmen have their profit ledgers; lawyers and doctors their professional esteem and some plaques, perhaps, on the wall.

Teachers, though, cast their bread upon the water, never really to know what has become of all those young hearts in which they’ve invested the best years of their lives.

Did the lessons land, the learning sink in? Did any impressionable minds absorb something more … of how to think critically, maybe, or to stand and present to their peers, or to discipline themselves to keep working on a frustrating math problem ?

Did some love of reading take hold, amid all the book reports? Did any of those snatches of conversation – on a busy playground, in the cafeteria line, on the field trip bus – translate into something lasting or meaningful?

Did a kind word … a patient listening to a breathless story … an understanding smile or a gentle hug … make any deeper impact on a child’s tender soul and fragile psyche?

For the most part – no matter how much she cares – a teacher never knows. Each child, with so much potential. Each one, struggling already under unseen burdens: a learning disability, a mesmerizing shyness, a broken home. Teacher and students spend their crowded nine months or so together, the gradebooks close, the classroom empties … and what’s left is an empty, where all that giggling excitement and breathless wonder used to be.

More than anything, the best teachers deal in wonder. In opening worlds … in channeling passions … in showing their young ones, eager and otherwise, to the doorways of discovery, and then leaving them there, to choose their way.

My wife is not the only one saying goodbye. This weekend, my father will go to his last service at the church he’s attended – with only occasional exceptions – every Sunday for nearly 53 years.

He came there, the week of his 36th birthday, as the church’s new minister of youth and recreation. The youth work he eventually passed on to younger men, but he stayed with the recreation program for decades, offering sports and craft opportunities for people who might not want to attend a church service … but would go anyway, if they’d found a friend on the church basketball court, or in a Tuesday pottery class, or amid a lively summer camp adventure.

When his days as a staff member ended, he found more ways to serve: as a teacher, as a deacon, as a welcoming face with a ready hug for the many youth he’d served, who had somehow grown to become parents, then grandparents, themselves.

I have lived to see the man who once ran out to ballfields and up and down courts hobble, as best he can, on bad ankles and a good cane. But he has never lost his love for the church that called him far across country, from family and friends, to minister in the desert to the families of others. He still wakes up praying for them, and goes to sleep the same way, and like my wife will never know, this side of glory, how many lives those prayers and his long years of humble service have impacted for eternity.

All good things, they say, come to an end. I suppose that, in time, bad things do, too. The pains of old age, and the loneliness that comes with leaving our posts, and setting aside the talents we have honed for a lifetime. With walking away from the people and institutions we’ve believed in, and honored with the best God placed within us.

Comes the realization that the wisdom and insights we’ve accumulated, through long toil and hard-earned experience, will now be set aside, too easily, to make way for the enthusiasm and energies of youth. Some of those youth, perhaps, will come to the same wisdom and the same insights, and like us, will fold them away one day, into quiet corners of their hearts, and memories.

God bless them on their way. And those, too, who led them to wide doors of discovery.