A few weeks ago my second grade teacher got in touch to say that he was coming through the city. Could we meet? I hadn't seen or heard from him since second grade, so I was very surprised and really delighted. I remember him as tall, stern, demanding, authoritative; someone who would give a lot if you worked hard. I learned a great deal under his tutelage, but most importantly, he introduced me to the chronicles of Narnia. I had read the Little House in the Big Woods books, and many Nancy Drew books, and The Secret Garden (twice), and possibly The Little Princess (or maybe that was later?), and Bambi and Bambi's Children, and Mr. Popper's Penguins, and I loved all those, but Narnia was the world I lived in through the next few years.
He said he hadn't changed much in appearance, and this was true; he's still tall and physically imposing, and though he doesn't have a moustache anymore his face was as I remembered it. I hadn't noticed in second grade what a westerner he is — the drawl, the wide-brimmed hat which he never took off. But the biggest surprises had nothing to do with appearance. He said, for example, that he had learned a great deal in his year with us. At the time I thought he knew everything! He said he had been in awe of us, our parents, and the city. I have to confess that it was hard to hear this — one doesn't want an admired teacher to admit weakness, even years after the fact. On the other hand, everyone's human. He called himself a "farm boy," and in his case it's not a figure of speech — he had to miss several months of school every year to help out on his family's farm. There was only one book in his parents' house, the Bible, and nobody ever read that. Little by little, through his twenties, he challenged himself to read harder books — this the man who helped me so much as a reader when I was seven! If only he had had himself as a teacher.
As we spoke I couldn't help thinking of Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes: "In the first years of the nineteenth century, shepherds in the Cheviot Hills maintained a kind of circulating library, leaving books they had read in designated crannies in boundary walls. The next shepherd who came that way could borrow it and leave another in its place, so that each volume was gradually carried through a circuit of 30 to 40 miles, on which the shepherds only occasionally met." They "drew inspiration from a whole subgenre of self-improving literature[, including] G.L. Craik's The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties (1830-31)."