Preconceptions

A view from flat on my back and thirty years later…

“Gosh, it sure is cold Mr. Martin. My grandma says it’s cold enough to get frostbite!”

“Yeah…” I said a bit absent mindedly. As usual, I was listening to what Hazel was saying with divided attention. I had recess duty and was scanning the treeless brown rectangle of frozen ground for trouble spots. And as usual, Hazel had waited a polite three minutes before approaching me to talk.

Hazel. It was an old-fashioned name. My impression was that she’d probably lived with her grandmother for as long as she could remember. Maybe her grandma had named her.

“David – David!” I hollered.

I excused myself. “Sorry about that Hazel…”

“That’s OK Mr. Martin!”

I walked over to where David, one of two students who was emotionally disturbed as well as cognitively disabled, was bending to pick up another rock.

“David, you know the rule about throwing rocks…” He dropped the stone, glared at me, and headed off in another direction. I headed back for the center of the playground where I could maintain a full three hundred sixty-degree view of events. As I returned to my place, I noticed Hazel approaching from the corner of my eye.

She was fourteen or fifteen. I was twenty-six and an assistant teacher in her self-contained special education program. As someone who’d grown up prior to special ed and who in childhood had only heard “retard” used as a pejorative, this position was an eye-opener for me.

The kids’ personalities were as diverse as that of any other group of people, and they had a wide range of cognitive abilities. While some of them would clearly never be able to live independently, a few, like Hazel, had IQs in the upper seventies and had just missed the cut-off of eighty for a low-average IQ score. For them, the future appeared uncertain and the possibilities disconcerting. Most of their families were poor. While they were capable of work, they weren’t going to be climbing any career ladders.

“I’m having so much trouble with fractions!” Hazel exclaimed, looking up at me with her light, clear eyes as I looked down from scanning the playground. “They’re complicated!” She stomped her feet in a gesture that was one part frustration and one part trying to keep warm on a cold January morning in New Hampshire. Recess could get uncomfortable, but it was also refreshing to get outdoors away from the stale air of the school’s two prefabricated buildings.

“I know,” I replied. “Fractions were complicated for me too.”

“Complicated” was a word that Hazel used a lot for things she found difficult. Hazel herself was not complicated. She was outgoing and friendly, and although she seemed a little insecure – you could see her making an effort to reach out – there was a transparency to her face and demeanor. You could see at a glance that she was honest, trustworthy, and kind.

It also hadn’t taken more than a glance early in the school year to see that she had a crush on me. When she looked at me her eyes lit up with I like looking at you! I like talking to you! Though I assisted in her classroom, she didn’t happen to be assigned to any of the small groups I taught. Playground duty was our only chance to talk.


“That Hazel…” Claire, the other assistant teacher in our classroom, began. It was after school and she and I happened to be alone in the classroom. “A fella sure could do worse than Hazel.”

“That’s true...” I replied with careful disinterest.

This was the second time that Claire had dropped this kind of hint. Each time my unspoken reaction had been Are you out of your mind?

Hazel was obviously a sweet girl, but wasn’t it equally obvious that she and I were a complete mismatch – intellectually and in terms of where we were headed in life? How could a middle-aged woman possibly not understand this? The year before I’d received a master’s from the University of Chicago Divinity School. I’d started writing seriously. I had plans. And it didn’t help that Hazel was attractive to me. Her crush was staring me in the face every day. I was twenty-six and single and I really didn’t need someone pointing out that an underage girl liked me.

But I always ended up being more discomfited than irritated at these remarks from Claire. She seemed unaware of their inappropriateness and completely well meaning. Besides puzzlement, I felt some sympathy for her. She was an unattractive woman with a cleft palate, single, in her mid-forties, and working at a low-paying job. Maybe her thoughts about me and Hazel were vicariously meeting a need for romance in her own life? I had no idea. Too complicated...


It’s nearly thirty years later. Severely disabled and mostly bedridden, I’m thinking about all this – one of the numerous walks down memory lane that someone in my position takes. And I remember something that I might never have thought of again if it wasn’t for spending so much time staring at the ceiling every day.

At the end of that year working in Hazel’s classroom, I’d found a better-paying position for the following year teaching English as a Second Language. And it had been a couple years after that, with Hazel now in her late teens and me in my late twenties, that the principal had invited me to her class’s graduation ceremony.

I remember only a few things about it. First, I’d felt awkward about going. I’d been teaching in a different school district and meanwhile had had no contact with my former employer or any of the students. I felt obligated to go, but had the feeling that with the passage of so much time I’d find myself irrelevant even to the several kids who’d seemed to particularly like me.

Second, I think I arrived late. I don’t recall anything about the ceremony itself and see myself arriving on the grounds of the school afterward, not far from the playground that I’d once supervised. Students, family, and staff were already milling about and intermingling. I felt out of place and wondered who I’d run into. I recall a brief, perfunctory exchange with a tall student named Gary and seeing him in profile as he walked away toward people who now held more significance for him.

Next thing I knew, Hazel had stopped a few yards away from me. I hadn’t seen her coming and was only beginning to realize who it was in the same fraction of a second that I heard her calling to me. I saw that she’d turned toward me to speak and yet – it seemed a little odd – was keeping her distance.

“I had a baby, in case you didn’t know…”

I just stared back for an instant. I had to replay the sentence in order to process it. This definitely wasn’t being delivered as good news. There was an edge to Hazel’s voice that I’d never heard before. She spoke heatedly, fiercely, apparently indicating that this was something that I, in particular, ought to be aware of. After firing off her statement she paused just long enough to take in my uncomfortable congratulatory platitude, then disappeared back into the crowd.