Short in stature; tall in brilliance

    Mrs. Loggins taught English at a high school in rural North Carolina where I grew up. If she had stood on her tiptoes, she might have barely stretched past the five-feet mark on a door jamb. She was pleasingly plump and wore her dark hair in a cute pixie cut. As one of the younger teachers, she connected well with 16-year-olds. I had the luck and privilege of being one of her tenth-grade students.

    Mostly I remember her brilliance. When she led our class through a reading of Shakespeare's Macbeth, I sat on the edge of my seat, waiting for the next interpretation to spill out of her mouth. Clearly now, I see her at the front of the classroom, rubbing her palms together, exclaiming, "Out, damn spot!" When she instructed our class to write a short story, she sealed my future. I could not wait to go home and write the first sentence, as moans erupted from my classmates.

    I titled the story A Night of Horror and wrote about a young girl, much like me, who departed on a sea voyage with her family. Due to circumstances I cannot recall, for the story has long been lost by adolescent hands, the entire family became stranded in a Gilligan's Island scenario. 

    While marooned on the island, one of the family members went scouring for food and returned with a basket full of berries, which everone ate, except the young girl much like me. After all of the fruit had been eaten, each person became deathly ill. Unbeknownst to any of them, the berries were poisonous.

    In a very dismal ending, everyone died, except the young girl much like me, who then found herself in a state of hopelessness without even the breath of another human anywhere to be found. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that I poured the real-life despair of my mother's death into that fictional character and across those handwritten pages.

    Mrs. Loggins promised to read the best story to the class, and one morning, she picked up papers from a pile on her desk and said, "The title of this story is A Night of Horror. I was so embarrassed, I felt my cheeks light up like a furnace. As she continued reading the words I had written, I could feel my face flush with every shade of red in Picasso's palette. In spite of my embarrassment, Mrs. Loggins had given me the confidence and encouragement to write.

    Through the many years after high school, I thought of Mrs. Loggins almost as often as I thought about someday becoming a writer. About a decade ago, I met with former classmates for a hash of high school memories, and I began thinking about Mrs. Loggins even more. So I decided to write an old-fashioned letter to her about the impression she had made on my soul.

    As I often do in such matters, I procrastinated. Glowing words of praise floated around in my head but never landed on paper until one day, I opened an email and read that Mrs. Loggins passed away. I wished I had taken the time to reconnect with her. 

    To somewhat compensate for that failure, I will use this so-called "platform" to tell a handful of people that of all of my teachers, short Mrs. Loggins stood taller than anyone else. I could not wait to sit down in her class. For about an hour every day, her literary excellence and easy smiles not only enticed, inspired and intrigued, but also rescued me from the troubles and rubbles of my youth.

Copyright © 2023 by Mary Long Mobley