Back in 1934, Thomas Wolfe wrote a book, You Can’t Go Home Again. It is a book that has haunted me in some ways for many years wondering if, as its title suggests, it could possibly be true. Is it really true that you cannot go back home and find life much as you knew it or remembered it?
I never knew the answer until one day I realized that you could never really go back, because of death. Death ultimately, permanently changed the landscape of what I had once known and cherished, however much I did not appreciate that at the time.
Death has once again changed my landscape. It has made it even more impossible to go back home, because one of the giants of my life is now gone. My 5th grade teacher, my most favorite teacher. A teacher that nourished me, and fed me, and praised me, and encouraged me. A teacher who never had a discouraging word, but who rather would stand on the sidelines and cheer me on to enter into a journey of my own self-discovery—education in the very truest sense—leading out that which is within.
Mrs. Yates is gone.
Oh, she is not really gone. Her physical body has died. But she is still very much alive. And not in some hallucinatory way through some group memory recall. I will one day meet up with her again. Of that I am positive. But man, what an impact she had on my life in this physical sphere.
* * *
I remember early on she wanted us to write a paper about some experience we had had on vacation or one we had had the summer previous to entering the 5th grade. I wrote about being on the farm of my 5th cousins—Monty & Karen Diew—up in Nauvoo, Illinois. I remember writing about how Monty and I got on the roof of a little chicken coop early in the morning and with a BB gun started shooting at the tin water pail from which the chickens were drinking and how they would run and flap from being scared and how much Monty and I laughed at that. I also remember writing how their water was so mineral laden that it tasted like poison to me, and I really emphasized that terrible stench of a taste. She just loved my budding writing talents and gave me an A.
* * *
I remember Jon Seaux. I had always interpreted him as a quasi miscreant from the other side of the tracks who knew how to draw bawdy pictures that with a few lines could be turned into something innocuous on Miss Rogers’s black board at James Bowie Junior High School when she was out of the room. Jon Seaux had a wicked smile, an impish grin. Who knew how to just barely stay on the right side of respectability, but whom you never wanted to cross. And that is the way he was etched into my mind, until one day, many years later, I was talking to Mrs. Yates.
As she and I began to sift through halcyon memories of old, she asked me if I remembered him.
Well, of course I did, but I was shocked he would even stand out to her.
She reminded me of a time when one of my classmates, and thankfully the mists of time through these 50 years has blotted out his identity, had had an accident in class with respect to bladder control. Of course that misfortune was the object of snickers and eye-rolling. But what was Jon’s response? Without being prompted, Jon went to the janitor’s closet, and got a bucket and a mop and proceeded to clean up the accident in silence as we all watched in wonder. He moved some desks to do a better job, and when he had finished, he looked us all in the eye and said, "This could have happened to any of us sitting here. I don’t ever want you to remind him of what happened, nor should you ever speak of it again." And with that, Jon left the room to return the janitor’s tools to their closet.
Mrs. Yates said, "I was so proud of Jon that day. He was years ahead of his time in maturity."
I had never stopped to contemplate what that action meant—the compassion, the initiative, the sensitivity of Jon Seaux until Mrs. Yates interpreted it for me.
Way before his time, before he ever graduated from high school, Jon died of a brain tumor.
* * *
And then there was her beloved husband, Reed. Oh how she loved to talk of his mischief, and how different they were from each other, and yet how so very much she loved him and his ways.
* * *
It had been rumored that when she was a girl, Mrs. Yates had read every book in the Tyrrell Public Library on the second floor. She was a voracious reader. She would read to us from time to time. She knew how to interpret and inflect and put in pregnant pauses.
I remember one book she read, whose name I have forgotten about a man who supposedly hated the United States back in the early 19th century. His punishment was to be put on a ship where he would never again be allowed back into the country.
But it was only in the later years of his sentence that he began to understand how wonderful of a country the United States of America was, and that he was so hungry for any scraps of information as to what was happening to our great land. Finally someone drew a map for him of how the country had expanded to the west, and his eyes were wide with surprise and shock and he cried for having missed out on some of the greatest adventures and dream making ever given to any country in the world.
* * *
Mrs. Yates could fire your imagination with a very ignited illustration that would burn in your mind. One day she said to us kids, "And what would you do if a madman with a machine gun came in at our door and started firing?" I never forgot that image, for it frightened me. It scared me. I did not know what I would do. I did not want to think about death.
* * *
From time to time she would pass out supplemental hardback readers for us to read from. In the front of the book, there was the template like there were on those of the standard issue books in which you were to sign your name to the textbook you were to study from all year. Except in these temporary texts, books of years gone by, I started to sign in ink mind you, every time one was given to me, even though I knew that within an hour we would be handing them all back in.
One day Mrs. Yates opened her text and saw my name, written in ink much to her surprise, and then she asked the class to all turn to the very front of their texts. She then asked "How many of you have Allison Cambre’s name in your book?" Probably ¾ of the class raised their hands. I was shocked and embarrassed. "Allison Cambre why have you done this?"
I had no answer.
She said, "You have got to get some ink eradicator and remove your name from these books."
I broke out in a cold sweat. I had no idea what that word meant, nor did I want to tell my parents the trouble I was in. So out in the garage that night I had my name written several times on a piece of paper and tried all sorts of solvents and chemicals to see if any of them might magically remove the ink. Much to my astonishment, I discovered that bleach would do the trick. And so the next day I brought a vial of bleach to school to undo the damage I had done.
* * *
I remember the time of her telling back in the late 40's or early 50's that she had broken her leg. She started crying not because of the pain, but rather because she had ruined some expensive silk stocking hose that she was wearing. None of us boys could possibly understand that.
* * *
Mrs. Yates said she used to smoke. And as a kid I had a hard time believing that! I mean she was like a high, benevolent priestess to me. And priestesses don’t smoke!
* * *
I remember the day I inadvertently saw Mrs. Yates’s letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal. She was hanging up her hat from teaching. She, many years later, had left the 5th grade environs of Eugene Field Elementary School, to go across the street to French High School to teach English. How I wish I could have had her for that course! But what disgusted her was the ignorance of some of the faculty with whom she taught referring to the Civil War as the Silver War, etc. She had had enough.
* * *
Imagine to my surprise that one day, I discovered that her own brother, Jeff, like me, was a clergyman. I just could not believe it. I got to meet him one time before he died. I went to a gathering knowing that he was in this room with over 100 people, and I began to look around for someone who looked like Mrs. Yates in the face. I found that someone, and I approached him by asking, "Did you ever live in Beaumont, Texas?"
* * *
Well . . . maybe you get the picture. Many of these memories are 50 years old, but they shine as bright for me as the very day I experienced them the first time.
Mildred Campbell Yates. Her passing means that Beaumont is forever, inextricably changed. I thank God that our paths crossed, and I thank God for the beneficent impact she had on me. There will never again be anyone like her in my life.
