Mr. Saari
This is about the year of interruption.
Kathy Peterson, the neighborhood leader, was going to public junior high. Her parents were good Catholics but they used kindness and reason to speak of their faith, not sanctimony and rules.
So maybe it was because what Kathy did, Shelagh did, and what Shelagh did, I did.
Or maybe it was because my dad had lost his job, was “let go.” Nobody said it was because of drinking, though I think that probably was the case. I remember one dark Sunday afternoon as I crept down the stairs, hearing long-winded Mr. O’Farrell saying to my Uncle Winkie when my Dad had left the room for a minute, “My God, what kind of man calls another man’s wife to tell him to stop drinking, boss or no boss!”
So Shelagh was going to Meany Junior high, and I was going by myself to the elementary school.
But I was the youngest in my family, and in the youngest class in a school that was gradually becoming a high school by closing the elementary class each year that my grade completed it. For the first time in my life I was going to be in the oldest class, the highest class in school.
I assumed that authority came with position, not an attitude. I was always the youngest, so I never had any authority. Now, in public school, as a sixth-grader, I would be accorded a dignity and authority I’d never known. Just by going to a different school.
On my block of 60 kids there was only one other kid who went to the public school -- Lynette Haines. Lynette’s dad was a trucker and sat at the dining table in his undershirt. He scared me. Lynette’s mom said things like “your hair goes down to your butt.” That was also scary. Lynette’s sister Geraldine -- Gerry -- had a boyfriend that she entertained in her bedroom.
But Lynette was a neighbor, there was nothing to be afraid of. I left my home, at 11 years old the only one in the house at 8 o’clock in the morning, and walked half a block to Lynette’s house.
Then we walked to school.
There were two classes for each grade, and I was glad I wasn’t assigned to strict, tough, athletic Mr. Lagreid’s class. I had the new teacher, Mr. Saari.
I’m glad we didn’t have the words “geek” and “nerd’ then. Mr. Saari was young (though as an adult, he was automatically old to me). He was tall and pale, with a small gap between his teeth, and he wore black-rimmed glasses. He was Finnish, and he had a slight accent.
The black boys dominated the classroom with their sheer energy. There was Freddy, who was handsome, Eugene, who was dark, the clown. Sylvester who was big and heavy and slow and shy. There was Ray who was small and heavy and sophisticated, cool at eleven years old.
Ray scared me deeply, even though I think I knew even then it was bravado in his mixed-up boyish mind, when he leaned over my shoulder and said quietly to me, “We’re going to rape you, Margaret.”
In that school, in that class, I was known as Margaret, my full formal name. Nobody knew that I was really Margie, that I hadn’t been called Margaret since the day I was baptized. I can’t remember the Sisters ever calling me by name except when I’d been ordered to leave the classroom in first grade, and when report cards were given out, and that was a formal ceremony.
I hated Margaret. I hated her shyness, her love for authority, her ugliness, her unlikeability, her desire to be a princess, instead of a tough girl, her prissiness, her inability to pull off a joke.
When I said at the Tobin’s lunch table, “…like I need to get in bad with some more nuns,” no one laughed. Later Rissa Tobin asked me why I’d said “…like I need to get in bed with someone” right in front of her mother. But I didn’t say that! That was what they heard, and now Mrs. Tobin thought I was immoral and smart-alecky. Mrs. Tobin, who hefted her breasts one at a time to see which one had more milk to nurse her latest baby.
But at Stevens Elementary I was Margaret, beginning to realize I was cute and smart, but still Margaret.
And Mr. Saari was Wilho.
When the black boys learned his name was Wilho, they mocked him with that. “Wil-HO!” they’d yell gleefully as they came into the classroom, and “Sor-ry! Mr. SOR-RY!” Not knowing what else to do, Mr. Saari smiled.
Mr. Saari patiently smiled and plowed through classes that year. Geography, English, history, arithmetic, social studies, but when it came to music, Mr. Saari beamed.
He loved the Negro spirituals and that classroom would jump with joy and unrestrained, impersonal humanity when we sang. “It’s me O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer” and “Swing low, sweet chariot.”
Everybody liked Mr. Saari then. Everybody liked everybody else. Everybody liked me, I thought and sang happily away, carefree for the only time that winter.
At the end of the school year, as we “graduated” to junior high, Mr. Saari’s wife came to school. If I didn’t fit in to that urban, hip, tough culture, if Mr. Saari didn’t fit in, his wife was the most alien individual you could imagine in an inner-city, struggling school in 1961.
She was dainty, small and beautiful, frail, blond, with huge blue eyes conveying simple goodness, innocence and trust. She was a good girl who’d been nurtured into goodness, into trust, into believing that she had need of no other ambition than to support her husband and be there for him when he came home. She was fine with that, she was content with that. They were young and starting life together and it was scary and rough, this school, but it didn’t threaten her the way it did me.
