The Longest Ride

It is impossible for you to even open the boxes these days.”

This is true. “Perhaps I should call someone,” I say. “I could hang different ones on the walls. Like you used to do.”

“Yes, but when I did it, I knew how to arrange them to their best effect. Your taste is not so good. You simply had workers hang them in every open spot.”

“I like the eclectic feel.”

“It is not eclectic. It is tacky and cluttered and it is a fire hazard.”

I smirk. “It’s a good thing no one comes to visit, then.”

“No,” she says. “This is not good. You might have been shy, but you always drew strength from people.”

“I drew strength from you,” I say.

Though it’s dark in the car, I see her roll her eyes.

“I am talking about your customers. You always had a special way with them. This is why they remained customers. And it is why the shop failed after you sold it. Because the new owners were more interested in money than in providing service.”

Ruth might be right about this, but I sometimes wonder if the changing marketplace had more to do with it. Even before I retired, the shop had been drawing fewer customers for years. There were larger stores, with more selection, opening in other areas of Greensboro, while people began to flee the city for the suburbs and businesses downtown began to struggle. I warned the new owner about this, but he was intent on moving ahead, and I walked away knowing I had given him a fair deal. Even though the shop was no longer mine, I felt a strong pang of regret when I realized it was going out of business after more than ninety years. The old haberdasheries, the kind I ran for decades, have gone the way of covered wagons, buggy whips, and rotary-dial phones.

“My job was never like yours, though,” I finally say. “I didn’t love it the way you loved yours.”

“I could take whole summers off.”

I shake my head. Or rather, I imagine that I do. “It was because of the children,” I say. “You may have inspired them, but they also inspired you. As memorable as our summers were, by the end, you were always excited at the thought of being back in the classroom. Because you missed the children. You missed their laughter and their curiosity and the innocent way they saw the world.”

She looks at me, her eyebrow raised. “And how would you know this?”

“Because,” I say, “you told me.”
     

     
    Ruth was a third-grade teacher, and to her, it was one of the key educational periods in a student’s life. Most of the students were eight or nine years old, an age she always considered an educational turning point. At that age, students are old enough to understand concepts that would have been foreign to them only a year earlier, but they are still young enough to accept guidance from adults with a near-unquestioning trust.

It was also, in Ruth’s opinion, the first year in which students really began to differentiate academically. Some students began to excel while others fell behind; although there were countless reasons for this, in that particular school, in that era, many of her students – and their parents – simply didn’t care. The students would attend school until the eighth or ninth grade, then drop out to work on the farm full-time. Even for Ruth, this was a challenge that was difficult to overcome. These were the kids that kept Ruth awake at night, the ones she worried endlessly about, and she tinkered with her lesson plan for years, searching for ways to get through to them and their parents. She would have them plant seeds in Dixie cups and label them in an effort to encourage them to read; she would have the students catch bugs and name those as well, hoping to spark intellectual curiosity about the natural world. Tests in mathematics always included something about the farm or money: If Joe gathered four baskets of peaches from each tree, and there were five trees in each of the six rows, how many baskets of peaches will Joe be able to sell? Or: If you have $200 and you buy seed that costs $120, how much money do you have left? This was a world the students understood to be important – and more often than not, she got through to them. While some still ended up dropping out, they would sometimes come to visit her in later years, to thank her for teaching them how to read and write and perform the basic math necessary to figure out their purchases at the store.

She was proud of this – and proud of the students who