“Hey I'm just an old chunk of coal
But I'm gonna be a diamond someday
I'm gonna grow and glow till I'm so blue pure perfect
I'm gonna put a smile on everybody's face”

            -Billy Joe Shaver

 

I am inspired by stories of people rising up from difficult circumstances, perhaps from poverty or a troubled childhood; people who make their own way in the world, their spirits blossoming in unique ways.  I more or less stumbled into adulthood, tripping over every boulder in the river of life.  Perhaps I had that option, having loving parents and a stable childhood, never coming close to crossing the point of no return. 

Now that I think about it, it’s remarkable I came to be the person I am, because I wasn’t always like this.  As an adolescent I was insecure, which definitely colored my interactions with others at school.  I lived off a rutted red dirt section road and went to a rural high school.  I don’t think I read a book all the way through until I was in high school.  Insecurity and fear led me to mask my true self by cutting-up and otherwise being a pain in the ass in school.    

I was particularly tough on one teacher named Miss Sweetin.  She had wild graying hair and was different from the other teachers in our small rural school.  She seemed to bear the brunt of the nastiness from many of the boys who were “too cool for school”, myself included.  I was a devil in her class to the point of making her cry several times.  But I believe she could see through me.  Because she stuck with me, perhaps sensing some potential behind my phony façade.  She FORCED me to read The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger.  And so I did. And it was cathartic, to become lost in a story, to know there are other realities and experiences outside my tiny rural existence.    

Although I was still a very average student and remained a cut-up, by the end of the semester I represented the school at the scholastic meet.  And surprisingly I placed third.  This experience in a large part set me on a course of self-realization and better achievement. 

Many years later I bumped into Miss Sweetin at the Red Earth Indian Festival in Oklahoma City.  I saw her standing quietly in a corner, laying hands on a large buffalo sculpture by a well-known Seminole artist, something I envisioned myself doing.  To this day I am surprised I went up to her, but I did.  I told her that I was sorry for the disruption and pain I caused in her class.  I told her that she had changed my life by sticking with me, showing me a little grace, pointing me towards an alternative way of looking at the world.  I told her that I was really the boy she knew I was, having graduated top of my class at the university, my life being full of adventure and good things.   

We both embraced and wept for a little while, and then I left.   

I think about her every once in a while.  But especially on days like today, as I sit here on the patio with my nine year old daughter as she types out a story about a girl named Wichita Smoke from Muskogee.  She has such a gift for language and reading and even writing short stories on an old typewriter.  I have no doubt that Miss Sweetin’s spirit will continue to flow through me like water down through the generations. 

 

 

I wish I knew where Miss S. is today, because I’d like to write to her.  I have a lot more to say.    

Perhaps that’s why underpaid and underappreciated teachers do what they do . . . they find that one child needing to be found and transform them from a lump of coal into a diamond.  That’s what happened to me . . .

Billy Joe Shaver’s “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSU_l-4QbE