Teachers

Kefir with müsli, and a side order of sliced blood orange, thank you. This is the breakfast of my youth. The kefir that I like most in the States, is a little thinner than the filmjölk I grew up with, but still just so good!

When I think back on my youth, I marvel at the lack of mentors I had. I always hear people talk about mentors, and it makes me wish I could say I’d had one (or two) myself.

On the other hand I had a great many lackluster teachers.

Woodwork and textile teachers specifically come to mind. The woodwork teachers, men all of them, smelled of wet tobacco and were in general silent types with occasional flares of anger whenever some student chose the wrong sandpaper grit for something. I suppose they had been carpenters in another life. I doubt they’d ever received any kind of training in how to teach kids. The textile teachers were a homey bunch of insipid women in long wool skirts, sturdy clogs and blouses they’d sewn on their Singers after patterns they’d themselves constructed. Blouses in stiff floral unfashionable fabrics. During lessons in textile (which, incidentally, were mandatory) I embroidered and macraméed without complaint, but my insides were seething at the teachers’ blatant lack of style and intellect.

Worth recalling is my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Johansson (he had curly strawberry blonde hair and a long, witty mouth) who “saw something” in me and sent me to a film director for a screen test. Unfortunately, the film director didn’t share Mr. Johansson’s enthusiasm, but I can go very far on the slightest hint of encouragement, and the very fact that my teacher had seen something in me, made fifth grade nearly magical.

In high school we found out that our gym teacher and our biology teacher were an item. To say this was a shock is to put it mildly. Much time was spent brooding over and discussing this “partnership”. It was difficult picturing them together. Did they actually sleep together? It seemed impossible. What were they wearing at the breakfast table? Did they discuss us, their students? They were known as “nature freaks”, who enjoyed long walks clutching their binoculars, passionately seeking out amphibians and dragonflies in the reeds. Both of them had hair as luminous as a van Gogh wheat field, and tiny, energetic bodies. He wore Russian inspired workman’s shirts in a stripey, woven material, the kinds with a banded collar. She wore soft velveteen pants that bunched at the ankles. She had a slight underbite and he, in spite of his blondness, had eyebrows like Ayatollah Khomeini.

The only teacher who excited us was our Swedish and English teacher, Mrs. Knutsson. She was a beautiful, slightly older lady, sort of reminiscent of Lauren Bacall. Mrs Knutsson had something none of the others had and that was GLAMOUR. She wore stylish, creased wool pants and a beige trench coat that she carelessly sort of threw over her arm on her walk from the parking space to the school building. Her honey-colored hair was carefully coiffed in waves, her lipstick and nail polish always matched, and she wore high heels. She taught us the difference between adjectives and adverbs, but more importantly she taught me about blouses and cuffs. Whenever Mrs Knutsson wore blouses, or shirts rather, she would leave the cuffs nonchalantly unbuttoned and push, rather than roll, up the sleeves in a quick, elegant maneuver. I sat transfixed at my desk. Later, when I came home, I tried to copy her movement in front of the mirror. I still cannot pull it off. Mrs. Knutsson’s elegance was innate.

I sometimes wonder if it is too much to ask of teachers to also be inspiring? Perhaps it is. Perhaps most of them try. I don’t know about my classmates, but waiting for a teacher to enter through the door to the classroom was a moment of great excitement for me. Some teachers entered quietly with their heads down and a bunch of books clasped to their bosoms. Others burst onto the scene uncombed and out of breath with leather shoulder bags overflowing with ungraded papers. Still others were already waiting in the classroom when we, the students, moseyed in, sitting there like cobras about to strike. Only Mrs. Knutsson entered like a star about to greet a highly cultivated audience. Is it any wonder we loved her?