It was a happy year: 1930. I was 7. I say it was a happy year because that year was about the last of the early-year forming period in which a boy-child really gets his legs under him.
I got my legs under me, you could say, largely thanks to one influential teacher.
Mary Curley had the form and grace of a scrub woman. Her family was what old American gentry used to call “lace-curtain Irish.”
She rose above impoverished beginnings. She put herself through two years of required “normal school” to earn herself a teaching certificate, eventually finding a position as an English teacher in a small town south of Boston. Miss Curley was my first really good teacher.
Now that the years have passed, I can see that she was first in excellence then, and stands among the few best teachers in my formal school years.
We were all savages in Miss Curley’s early classes. She knew that the potential for academic success was already there, that the potential for poetic and academic creativity was inborn and needed the right prodding to produce it.
Miss Curley had several props for us to lean on as she cultivated our interests. She was the first to teach the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer.
Being Catholic, she may have had an ulterior motive. She knew we remembered all the words by heart, so she used the prayer to show how prose may also be poetry. Separation of church and state has come to take away use of these valuables that should be part and parcel of education.
In the course of one year, we were given a choice of fairly long poems to commit to memory. A couple of my school pals elected as I did, to learn “To a Waterfowl,” by William Cullen Bryant. This poem created an awakening in the most savage of us.
It had an immediate effect upon our appreciation of outdoor life. Even though still callow youngsters, we all were wholly caught up in the references to wild creatures that were impressed in Bryant’s sensitive lines.
One of the girls chose to memorize Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” I remember her blushing at the stanza “A tree whose hungry mouth is prest / Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast.”
At that time, we were as intrigued and puzzled by the development of our bodies as youngsters are today. Miss Curley, long before sex education got its own room and its instructor, tactfully and easily gave us an oblique look at ourselves, teaching us more about ourselves, our physical selves, than even Kilmer planned when he penned his “Trees.”
Like nature’s child celebrated in Bryan’s “Waterfowl,” Miss Curley has long since been taken up by the heavens, but not forgotten. Her two years in “normal school” never gave her the education she had; she was self-made.
Not having singled out one poet to absorb the whole thrust of her scholarly inquiries, she discovered many of them. She was not a Shakespearean, yet she introduced us well to the Bard. We all learned the dagger scene from “Macbeth.”
At her best, Miss Curley was a living anthology of American and English verse, able to translate lyrical obscurities when necessary, and was always able to transmit, through her own love of learning, enthusiasm for learning on a broad scale.
Youngsters today carry in mind the lyrics of contemporary music. Themes may be different, but they show that memorization has not passed.
“Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime,/And, departing, leave behind us/Footprints on the sands of time.”
Paul Seamans is a permanent resident of the Charlene Manor nursing home. Some of his columns have been previously published.