I Wish You Were Dead (Number 24)

There is no update on my daughter’s vision as of right now.   She’s in the car seat, reclined totally back, yelling at us because she doesn’t understand how headphones work yet.   She’s asking us about each of the songs playing on the iPad.    Between answering questions about the music selection I added to the playlist I’m going to try and get a blog post written.

I’m in the way back time machine for this post, going all the way back to my sophomore year in high school.   I was taking chemistry from a teacher who was very old.   He was a kindly man, I now can envision, but as a high school student I just thought he was old and strange and fairly out of it.    I don’t think any of us we trying to be mean (well my friends weren’t) but he was not well-liked. 

He had some peculiarities that I think I realized later were accommodations based on his age and memory.   He had us sit in seats in alphabetical order by last name.   When he would take roll for each class he would call out numbers.   I. for example, was number twenty-four.   My last name started with ‘SP’ and was close to the end of the roster and therefore in the back of the classroom. 

When he called out roll he would say the numbers out loudly, hardly looking up from his roster book and if you didn’t answer, “here” or “present” or “yes” he’d call out the number again.   A lack of response twice meant you were marked absent.    

I don’t remember much about the lessons, but I could tell he was passionate about chemistry.    At the end of the class he would say, “next time…” and explain the homework or thing we should expect the following class.   He had gotten caught by the students several times saying, “tomorrow” when it was Friday.   Using the phrase, “next time” got around that challenge.  

He wasn’t in good health, but I didn’t know it at the time.   One day after class he dropped his pill container.   A lot of pills spilled on the floor and I helped him pick them up.   There were a lot of little white pills so thin I thought they were hole punch holes, but they were nitroglycerine pills for his heart I believe.  

One day after possibly an arduous assignment for homework I remember running into my best friend in the hall.   Our teacher was standoffish and could be sometimes grumpy and that day wasn’t a good day I suppose.   My friend said, “I wish he were dead.”   Now she’s not the kind to say that or feel that way, but youth makes us brash.  

The next day (or “next time” as he would have called it) we found out he had had a heart attack and died.    We felt awful.  

I think of him from time to time though because it was from that class that I decided twenty-four was my favorite number.   Not a “lucky number,” a subject on which I won’t share my thoughts about in this post, but the number I liked more than all other numbers.   Mathematically, there are a lot of neat things about twenty-four, some I had no idea about until I went to read about it just now. 

Sometimes I think about my high school chemistry teacher.   I can remember being number twenty-four in his class, I just can’t remember his name.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son was doing some sort of grabbing motion with his hand towards me the other day.   He said, “I’m doing the neck thing.”   I asked him what thing he was talking about.   He said, “the Darth Vader thing!”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   As we’re driving to Detroit today my daughter suddenly said, “are we in a tunnel?”  Yes, we were in fact in a tunnel.   Shortly afterwards she asked, “are we out of the tunnel?”  And yes, we had just left.   I wanted to see if she’d tell me it sounded different so I asked her, “how did you know?”   She replied.  “I know everything.   I just know everything.”