Her voice, when she spoke to us from the doorway, was strange.
I was in 3rd Grade. Our teacher went away for a few minutes, then came back, crying. She was a tough public school teacher of the old school, the kind my father’s friends would have called “an old bat.”
She was not like the young pretty teacher on The Little Rascals films that played at 7:00 am on local TV on Saturday mornings. She was like all the other teachers in those Little Rascals films. The mean ones, with arms like rolling pins.
I wish I could remember her name. Miss Ball, let us say.
We feared her. In the classroom, on any normal day, she reigned with an iron will. She could halt our mayhem in three seconds or less, with a blast on the coach’s whistle that hung from her neck. But there was never just one blast. “People!” she would shout when pushed beyond endurance by one of us not knowing the answer to a homework question. “People!”—her face red.
That’s what she did on normal days.
That was her as we had known her.
We had never seen her show any feeling besides anger, impatience with our shortcomings, or a withering disdain for the entire Cosmos, whose failures I am sure she catalogued daily.
Yet here she stood, shoulders drooping, fists clenched pointlessly, raccoon rings forming where her mascara, her single concession to the strict appearance standards of the time, had begun to run.
Her voice, when she spoke to us from the doorway, was strange:
“Oh, you poor children,” she said. “President Kennedy has been shot.”
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