BY STEVEN RAY BOWEN
Body
Welcome to the “Front-Porch.”
As I write, the amazin’ blonde and I are stationed at Coca-Cola and Glory’s house off of the Roanoke Road in my hometown.
As you who have followed our musings, writings, and storytelling for a quarter of a century know, our trips back home are frequent and necessary. Perhaps it is the images of the tall pines embedded in that deep red Georgia clay that requires it, or the accents at every turn that are sweeter than the sweet tea that sits on the table at every meal, or seeing the people who knew you when they measured where you came up to to a grasshopper, or all of the above. It is a reset, and things seem to stay set until the next time.
Sometimes it is just the driving around and taking in the scenes as if you were eight going on nine again. As Coca-Cola and I drove around one afternoon, we drove past Southwest Elementary School where I first began to show the world an amazing display of scholarship and charisma.
At first sight of that two-story brick building stationed up on a hill a mile up from the Murphy Avenue church where we attended and Preacher Miller resided, ah, how the memories started flooding over me like sea billows roll, and like chills that come over you when you walk out into freezing icy weather, which, by the way, would describe my third-grade teacher Ms. Goforth to a tee.
Despite my rare scholarship, I cannot remember a great deal from that inauspicious year because it is all blocked out by one dark, gloomy, terrible-horrible-no good day.
It was the day that Ms. Goforth enjoyed my blessed presence so much that she decided for some reason that she would extend it to the after-school hours. The bell that rang to signal the end of school was merely the bell that the poet wrote about and Mr. Hemingway imitated, which posed that dark-clouded question, “For whom does the bell toll? It tolls for thee,” and did it ever.
All my joyous classmates hit the door like it was lunchtime – Tony, Sandy, Robin, Chris, and the rest – were gone in a flash, leaving behind their favorite scholar and gentleman with nothing but a “Have fun Stevie Wonder,” and a laugh.
You learn real early in life who your friends are, and that day, I didn’t have a single one. I would’ve sold all of them down the river for a nickel and felt I overpaid.
You probably wonder what such a nice, behaving young man with nine years of excellence on his ledger could’ve done to deserve such unusual and cruel punishment from this clearly eccentric and misguided teacher.
Truth is, I don’t remember, but, like you, I cannot imagine anything that would be deserving of such punishment.
Now to be fair, I did do a couple of things in my highly decorated elementary years that warranted a lick or two with the paddle. I remember one was simply doing a chin up on the ledge between two staircases leading down to the lunchroom. While I thought I was showing my athleticism, the second-grade teacher took exception to it and led me straight down to the room and laid two licks on me that caused me to have flashbacks every time I passed that ledge going down to lunch.
Maybe another time Tony Pippen and I were sliding across the floor in the bathroom and got caught – or I got caught and I ended up taking the heat for the both of us, literally, right across the back side of my anatomy.
Both of those cases were clearly undeserving – and I told my high school students the same thing one day, and even they agreed.
But I paid both of those teachers back by promptly forgetting their names, although, being the scholar I was then, I am sure they remember me well and probably read everything we write and think, “I knew he was going to be something special way back then,” conveniently forgetting how they slapped two or three good ones on me for absolutely no good reason and brought salty tears to a nice young man’s eyes.
However, to their credit, what they did truly was merciful in comparison to what old Ms. Goforth did. She kept her star pupil after school on a bright and beautiful fall afternoon, but that was not all: She kept the star basketball player after school, and that was the bad part. Our young man’s scholarship ended promptly at 3:30 p.m., and his career as a star basketball player took the controls and kept them until the next morning at a torturous and dark-clouded 8 a.m.
Ah, that afternoon’s incarceration was as painful as a skint knee from a bad slide on the bicycle. Oh, how I would have welcomed a dozen licks like I got from those two before-mentioned wardens. The game started at promptly 4:30 at the old Y which was about a mile’s bicycle ride to the east, a ride I eventually would take that day and break all kinds of speed records and even challenged the sound barrier, I am sure, all of those things that I was courteous enough to remember from science class for which I got absolutely no credit for, only a weak C- on the report card.
“My alone-time with mean, old Ms. Goforth was torturous, ladies and gentlemen,” I often would tell my own perfect, never-to-throw-a-paper-wad or doze-off-in-class students. Even they gave me little sympathy.
The little hand on the clock on the wall ticked like a time bomb, with each tick as loud as thunder and as slow as Ms. Goforth’s walk to my desk when she was unhappy with something her star pupil did that may have been as simple as flipping a pencil in the air and seeing if he could catch it behind his back with his eyes closed.
Oh, no, there was never a warden like Ms. Goforth. And, did she even understand the concept of early release, or parole for good behavior? Aw, no, not even in her two-story dictionary she would pull out on a whim to prove the meaning of a word. But the word “mercy” never found its way in Webster’s book, making me wonder what kind of man he was, too.
It was well after tip-off that she unshackled me and released me to the bright sun of the outside world. I hit the door running, my arms lifted high and my voice raised to the sky. The only thing missing was a white prison bus, and maybe a few friends and family waiting outside waving signs, “You know he was innocent the whole time.”
The star player made it to the game, but, alas, the game was half over, and – without the proper mental preparation a star needs – his performance was inauspicious at the very best, and the beaten soldier rode home on his bike with the weight of failure on his shoulders, yet, through many tears, sought to find a way to forgive Ms. Goforth for it all.
Our young man was able to forgive much in his Southwest Elementary School days, even those licks to the seat of the pants that only hurt for a couple of days. But it was hard forgiving Ms. Goforth, and I wouldn’t until she smiled and said “Good job, Stevie Wonder” the next day.
Still, I bet she thought she had made a lasting impression on her prized pupil and that he would never forget the impact she made on his life.
Hmm – how wrong can you be? I mean, I barely even remember her name, much less how she deprived me of what surely would have been one of the greatest and storied basketball performances the old Y there had ever seen.
Coach Steven Ray Bowen served as a teacher and basketball coach at Red Oak High from 1998-2012 and recently came out of retirement twice for teaching tours at Ferris and Waxahachie High Schools. He and his wife Marilyn (the “amazin’ blonde”) have slowed down some of their travels and reconvened in their evangelistic work with the Church of Christ of Red Oak at Uhl/Ovilla Roads, in addition to Coach’s work as a writer and author, including the working to publish “Crossing The Georgia Line” that ran in the Ellis County Press. Call or text (972) 824-5197, email coachbowen1984@gmail.com, and see frontporchgospel.com.
