Aside from a description of her cheery appearance, Lynette
is best explained in one brief fact that somehow encapsulates her whole person:
she is a woman with a trunk full, yes full, of teddy bears.
Some espresso brown, some ashen beige, some the color of
fresh snow. Several pink, at least one blue. All of them the softer than the
foamy soap from a perfect bubble bath, with kind eyes that love you effortlessly.
How one person came to own quite so many of these bears
remains a whimsical curiosity, but what she does with them might actually be
more adorable than their expressive little faces.
Lynette spent her 30’s and 40’s as a sixth grade teacher at
Parkview Lane Elementary School downtown. This school wasn’t well known for its
teachers, its test scores, or anything else a school might get attention for.
There were no mathletes. There was no soccer team. There was no budget. There
was just Lynette and her heart of gold and her indelible dimples, who loved
each of these unruly kids as if they were the only kid in the world. Most of
them weren’t breakthrough stories. Few of them even finished high school. Only
three or four of them remember how much she mattered. One in particular, named
Jamie, will remember Lynette, or “Miss J,” for the rest of her life.
Jamie never told Miss J this, but she was completely
homeless and without a family. Her parents left for different reasons at
different times, telling their mature-for-her-age daughter she’d be fine and
she’d find her way. She had nothing to fill her days other than school, and
nowhere else to get a good solid lunch—so she went. Every day, she went. She
did her homework in the train station. She showed up early for school. She
stayed late helping Miss J with the classroom, a fact that didn’t go unnoticed
but was presumed by the teacher to be a simple miracle. What did go unnoticed
for quite some time was that Jamie often waited for her teacher to leave for
the day, then slipped in behind her and stayed in the classroom.
Lynette left the school one evening exhausted from several
extra hours of test grading, bleary-eyed and wanting little else than to get
home to catch her favorite show before she fell asleep on the couch. Once at
her car, she stood any stared at it in utter disbelief that she’d left her
purse back in the classroom. She trudged all the way back to room 213 and
opened the door as uncarefully as she’d ever done anything in her life. The
stark shaft of light from the hallway shot across the room at an angle to the
opposite corner where she’d set up a small reading corner. She wasn’t sure, but
it looked like there was something on the fuzzy orange beanbag chair. Propping
the door open, Lynette made her way across the room gently, and looked down to
see Jaime curled up like a kitten, wrapped around a small stuffed bear that
lived in the reading corner.
Stepping back. A moment of consideration. A small internal
conference—what does one do in these situations?
Half a breath before a decision was made to let the girl
sleep, her eyes popped open and she gasped deeply, rattled with fear. No, there
was no fear that Miss J would punish her. Never. But Jamie was so unprepared to
explain herself—she’d never had to before. Lynette vaguely gestured as if to
calm her student, but unsurprisingly it didn’t help. Jamie fumbled to her feet
on the way out the door, faster than a teacher in her 40’s could manage, and
was gone.
Jamie wasn’t in school the next day, but she did come in on
Friday to find the small bear sitting at her desk. When she looked up and saw
Miss J looking right at her, she could see that her ocean-blue eyes were shimmering
with tenuous tears. Jamie had told her nothing, and somehow she knew. There was
a silent conversation between teacher and student in an instant.
Jamie spent a few nights a week sleeping in the reading
corner with J.K. Rowling, Mark Twain, Suzanne Collins, and Shel Silverstein
watching over her and the small bear she clutched. When the year was over, Miss
J wouldn’t think of accepting the bear in return. He was Jamie’s now. As was
the bedroom on the left at the end of the hallway at her friend Alisha’s house—the
room with the purple curtains and the old roll-top desk. Jamie’s life changed
and it was because of a small bear with the face of an angel.
So now the retired sixth grade school teacher keeps her
trunk comically full of teddy bears of all shapes and sizes, and when she sees
a young girl asking for money, or walking with her whole life in a backpack, or
curled up at the train station, she hands her a bear. Their names are Hope.
