The Hunt - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/20/from-a-distance

There have been people that I've admired from a distance, people tat I've even found out about and acted like I knew so much about them but didn't have a single thing, but the one that gets me on this, the one situation that I can agree with, is the idea of hunting a person down that played some part of your life.

School is all you know early on in your life, and those people, the friends and the teachers, are things that sit with you for a long time. I've tried to hunt down some of the long lost people that I haven't heard from since sixth grade, third grade, or anything else, but that's nothing more than searching for them on facebook, there are two instances, and only two that I hunted, one semi-sucsessful and the other. . . not so much, and both of them were teachers.

In middle school I hunted back in time for my second grade teacher. The reason why? She was the teacher that sticks with me, to this day, about what makes a great teacher. The best part, the older I get, is just how hardcore she was. She went through a divorce with us as her students, and not once did she change who she was or how the classroom was held. Mrs. Alvarez, or Miss. Hodler, was the force behind me learning to love English, way, way, way back in the day.

We were the only 2nd grade class that were doing research papers. YES! Research papers. They were lame, and they weren't exactly professional, but we wrote a LOT in that class, then we also read. Every morning, we'd put the date on the calender (each month there was a different pattern of what the date was printed on, in October it would be something like pumpkin, pumpkin, skeleton, pumpkin, pumpkin, skeleton, and then in November it'd be pilgrim, pilgrim, indian, indian, pilgrim, pilgrim, indian, indian) and then she would read us one chapter out of a chapter book like The Boxcar Kids, or Indian in the Cubbard series. Some days, when the story was good, or the chapters were short, we'd get her to read more than just one chapter out of the book that morning.

She was also the person who pushed us on vocabulary. To this day I fear spelling the word aquarium because in second grade, for extra credit, it was one of our spelling/vocabulary words. For the longest time the furthest I could get into it was A-Q-U-A. . . . . and then my brain would stop. To this day I find a bit of joy in my life when I do find an excuse to use aquarium in a sentence and there's no red squiggly line under it.

The other thing that Ms. Hodler plays in my life is that I was the weird kid that would stay after school. I don't know why it started, and I don't know why I kept doing it, but most days after school I would stay in her class, read, play, or just be me. I can't even remember what I was doing, but I remember that it was her classroom that I was in where announcements would come over the PA telling me that my mom had called the school and I needed to go home. I simply liked it in her class, and even after being in her class I would drop by her classroom after school to say hi, to give her some new fish (she had a fish tank, my fish constantly had babies, it was meant to be) and then I'd go home.

Around middle school I tried to thank her. It was rough, it was full of lies when I tried to hunt her down, but the extent of my hunting went to going to the grade school, asking the secretary and telling her I had a paper to write for a middle school class, and getting Ms. Hodler's information.

After a phone call, we set up a time for me to come and talk to her, at her home.

I think about this meeting any time that I think about meeting a person that I've known from my past, or have hyped up in my mind - it was so anti-climatic that it was horrible. It was nice being able to tell her thank you, and tell her that what she did had stuck with me, but it was a big pile of 'meh'. I don't know what I was trying to get from that moment, and I don't really know where I was going with it, but it was the time when I learned that sometimes the people that you've made up in your mind, those that seem to be something more than just a normal person, end up being just a normal person. It's that awkward moment when you watch a person from a distance, that when you see them up close that things get ruined.

That actually fits with the second person that I tried to hunt down. When I graduated from college, I tried to hunt down my English teacher that motivated me to write and really got me on the path towards Brit Lit. Mrs. Smith (yet another teacher, and yet another person who changed her name between years, she got married the summer between when she first came to the school, and when I had her as a teacher). After hunting around, talking to her former co-workers and digging around the school, I got an email. So, I sent a thank you email. Explained who I was, explained how I knew her, and then said thank you. I don't know what I was expecting, but she didn't respond.

It hurt that she didn't respond, but at the same point, I'm sort of happy that she didn't respond because it keeps her at that distance. Nothing ruined, nothing changed, she's still Mrs. Smith how I remember her, and I can still make her be the amazing teacher that she was/is.

Keep the distance from the people that you follow, you get too close and you start to realize that they're human.