From My Notebooks

 Plumbing one of my writing notebooks today. Advice from writing guru Natalie Goldberg is to avoid reading what you've written for at least a year. I filled this notebook before I began to add the date at the top of the page but it's from this prompt: A favorite teacher ... ready, set go, write for ten minutes, keep the hand moving, no good, no bad.

Always my mind goes to Mrs. Austin, third grade, Charlotte's Web, the green hall. The smells of third graders - their lunch boxes and their mother's laundry soap and the chalk and the textbooks and the stuff the teacher sprinkled on the throw-up before the janitor got there.

She read to us every morning just after attendance was taken and milk money handed in. It was my favorite time of the school day. I was lost in the story right at school, at my desk. Toby Tyler who ran away to work in the circus; wonderful Wilbur and patient Charlotte and her babies and Fern, who leaned on the fence to watch and listen.

Mrs. Austin's voice was a little gravely and now I know it as a smoker's voice. She was slender and not as tall as Miss Edwards next door. She wore cardigans and wool skirts and sensible shoes and glasses with little wings on the brows.

She promised us she'd stand on her head if we all got our spelling words correct. This was a problem for me. I couldn't bear to think of her upended, skirt falling over her head and exposing her underpants.

At the beginning of the school year, it seemed impossible for there were always the kids who missed two or three words every time. But in the spring, spelling had improved or the words were easier and I began to worry again. I solved the problem by making sure I missed one word each time to save my dear teacher the embarrassment of exposure.