Welcome to November!

I don’t know if you remember your 6^th grade teacher; mine was Mrs. Searles, Alice Searles.  She lived on a farm a mile outside our little rural village and she was always frantically moving about in seven different directions at once — two or three of them unfocused and misdirected, the other four or five compensating unceasingly and completely for the misdirection, if messily so.  I can only assume she was regularly in trouble with her principal, though her students would have scarcely known about it and would have never cared.  She was hardly ever on time to class and personal inhibitions were something she had probably never considered.  Class often started with what for most teachers would have been a final crescendo, but for her was simply a random place from which to begin – and then she naturally reached new crescendos theretofore unimagined.  On Halloween her entire room was redecorated, floor to ceiling, with pumpkin guts — the result of various educational and recreational activities.

She was just there – day after day – and she filled the room with her presence; far from perfect, but a fabulous, memorable teacher.  She taught us about birds, one of her great passions.  To this day I love the birds — their plumage, their flight, their songs, their eating and nesting habits.  There is no reason in the world I would love – or even know about – the birds if it weren’t for Mrs. Searles.  In 6^th grade she simply and unceremoniously enrolled all thirty of us as ornithologists.  We didn’t vote to do this, it wasn’t an outside club or an interest group, she simply proclaimed it by her frantic sense of urgency.  Anyone observing would have concluded bird watching was a state of emergency.  We received bird identification books, personal record keeping documents, audio recordings to memorize sounds, lumber and tools to build bird houses, and daily quizzes to motivate our research and memorization.  Many of us soon knew every single bird indigenous to Southeastern Minnesota.  Around the perimeter of the room, above the blackboard, where most teachers featured the Palmer handwriting samples, she mounted a large flash card to introduce a new bird daily.  By the end of the year, though I don’t recall precisely, there must have been more than 150 of them — and we could identify every single one by its seasonal plumage, its shadow profile, flight, and song.  Though my memory is somewhat blurred, I think there were days during peak autumn and spring migration seasons when she took the whole class out to the woods back of school for the entire length of the school day – and then those of us who wanted to stay longer, to possibly catch a glimpse of one more bird for our growing lifetime list, we’d stay out until dusk, somehow eventually finding our way back home.

There are a couple points here.  The first is the cumulative way in which you get better when you’re already pretty good.  In the past few years I’ve added several new birds to my lifetime list:  Sandhill Crane, Redstart, Pileated Woodpecker (I’ve seen it several times now; such a delight!), Trumpeter Swan, Western Bluebird (what gorgeous color!), Puffin, and Yellow Bellied Woodpecker.  My personal lifetime list is somewhere around 150 – but it stayed at or near 135 for many, many years following 6^th grade.  As you get better and better – and as you reach closer and closer to your goals – progress toward those goals is less discernible, but I would suggest exponential in importance.  It’s what you learn after you already know it all that really counts!

The second lesson for me from this little story about Mrs. Searles is simply the word, passion.  She had it, she wore it on her sleeve – and when she wielded a saw and hammer building bird houses.  Short and simple:  If you don’t have it, dig down deep and find it.  We all have it – or we’re dead and we’ve just forgotten to lie down.