miss dolly remembered.

Miss Dolly Has Passed

        Miss Dolly has passed away or at least I am pretty sure she has and will always be remembered by myself as having an influence on me even though I never had the privilege of being in her class. I did get the opportunity to meet her once and it was Miss Dolly that introduced me to the class system of society  at a very young age of six years old .

     My older brothers I believe both had her as a teacher at Mineral City school as a second grade teacher and had nothing but praise for her, so one day while standing in front of my first grade teacher Mrs. Armstrong at Mineral City grade school where I went to first grade at, it was Mrs. Armstrong who introduced me to the famous Miss Dolly.

    This article is by no means meant to discredit Miss Dolly as I have heard nothing but praise for the woman and it was only fitting that news of her death was broadcast on the same bulletin board that used to display notes about her reading of stories to little ones at the local public library. Even my supposedly sage older brothers had nothing but praise for her when they would describe her and nothing but horror stories of the teachers on up the grades from there , as if I would be  lucky enough to have Miss Dolly for a teacher , then I better appreciate it , because they don’t make them like her any more.

    But my experience with meeting Miss Dolly had given me an unsettling experience and part of that was brought on  by my brother and his tales of how we were and also of our family situation of which I knew wasn’t the best even back then.

      By the time I started to school my first dad was a drunk and had beat my mom in front of us kids several times and it was these experiences of seeing your mom being beat and the unrest associated  with this behavior at my young age, and the fact he had deserted us and left us to fend for ourselves at a time when you couldn’t get food stamps and there was no support for mom and four kids, except grandma and grandpa. All of this has an effect on a young child like me. We never wanted for food so much as mom always raised a garden and there was plenty of milk because mom milked six cows twice daily by hand,  on the farm and separated the cream and put the milk in cans to be sold to the local dairy. This money along with the money that grandma and grandpa would help out with was used to raise us kids.

     Our bellies were full and we wanted not so much for things, and had been somewhat accustomed to doing without, but it was tough on us, even at six I was aware of how things were. Then my brother refused to wear a shirt and passed it down to me. I considered anything used as a badge of honor then , that my brothers would give me to me. Heck if it wasn’t for hand me downs I believe I would have been running around naked half the time. Oh wait I was. At least in the summertime I was.

        But this one particular shirt my brother gave me was a print of patches and the reason my brother refused to wear it was because some kid had rudely made fun of him wearing a patchwork print shirt and that he must be poor as that was all he could afford to wear. Well that was the reason I ended up with it.  My brother made me aware of the reason of why he had given it to me , but I still didn’t understand this poor thing everyone was talking about and how it had affected me .

    We were neither poor nor rich I felt as we were just family and doing things a family does , I knew little of money except you needed it to buy your lunch at school which I always cherished as it was always different from the food mom made , it wasn’t creamed tomatoes and green beans. My brother’s refusal to wear the shirt because we would look poor and this reflected on me also, as if being poor was a bad thing to be. Heck, if wearing used clothes made you poor then maybe we were.

     It wasn’t until I met Miss Dolly though that I determined we must be poor because as Mrs. Armstrong introduced me to Miss dolly as being one of the Davis boys of whom she had taught, and of course  I had heard so much from my brothers about her, and it was her firsthand knowledge of us, and all that went on in our family that made her utter these  first words to me and that was.

     “Why you poor child. “

    There it was proof positive we must be poor. I thought at the time. Surely if Miss Dolly thought it then it must be true. I kinda just stood there in shock till Mrs. Armstrong sent me on my way.

    I misunderstood her feelings of sympathy for words that cut right through me and affirmed all I had been feeling all along. We were different. We were poor.

    This lesson in the double standards’ of meaning of how people react to words uttered, should be a reminder to us all how fragile a mind can be and how much of an impact words can have on a person’s soul. It wasn’t all that long before I recovered and understood the meaning of what she was really trying to say. But to say the least as I stood in front of Miss Dolly that day it seemed like poor was wrote across my face and that was the fate I needed to accept . It was all spelled out for me as surely as Miss Dolly could see it.

    She probably never understood what it meant to me and her deeds and actions as a teacher were beyond most of her profession and I agree with the billboard announcing her passing, as I too will always remember Miss Madge Dolly.