I don't remember much about school throughout the years. My first real memory is my first day of first grade and being rebuked for not knowing my own name when called out. In all fairness, with the exception of one grandmother, everyone called me Marmar or Marci, not Marcia, so when the teacher went searching for Marcia, I helped with the search. Anyway I don't remember her name but I do remember the name of my third grade teacher. That was the seemingly perpetually scowling, no nonsense Miss Anna Werner, who appeared to have the superhero capability of staring right through you. She really wasn't as mean as she looked and when you raised your hand with the correct answer we were sometimes even rewarded with a brief smile. She was the first teacher who really lit a fire in my belly for Grammar and Spelling and all things related, which in spite of everything, those embers burned unnoticed below. That is until I stumbled into Mrs. Attili's 9th grade English class. She was short, pert, cute and blended in with the schoolkids, but her reputation for being tough and no nonsense preceded her and I was in no mood for a teacher who was going to expect me to work in or out of class. But then I didn't count on Mary Attili. Don't ask me how but she immediately found some glimmer of potential in the slouchy miserable dark teen who tried desperately to fade into the woodwork, but she glimpsed it somewhere, grabbed it and refused to let go. At first I fought; I would not do any more work than possible to get by, not in any other class and not certainly in a class about Reading and Writing. I could do that just fine. But that was not enough for Mary. She talked to me like she really cared, like she was honestly interested in what I had to say and encouraged me to put it on paper. I had no choice so I did, but when I did, it was transformative. It opened up a world bigger than all the books I had read. It opened up the book to me.
Life moved quickly after that. There was marriage, kids, and one day while going through my old things, I came across a few of those high school compositions I was forced to write, I was surprised that they were actually good, for a kid anyway. The stories renewed my passion for writing and before long, with the trauma of high school behind me, I finally enrolled in and graduated from college while raising a family and operating a business that I created during a class project. After college I wrote a weekly column or two for a local weekly entertainment mag called, All Around The Town and assisted in writing and rewriting plays for Entourage Productions but eventually all of that fell by the wayside because there weren't enough hours in the day for everything. I never saw Mary Attili after that, no not even once. That is until Facebook. She joined Facebook and we were both speaking with a mutual friend, her favorite student ever, Retired Editor Paul Baker, and we friended. It wasn't long until she actually insisted she would be interested in catching up so we agreed to meet for lunch. After catching up she told me how much she enjoyed my daily musings on life and told me she thought I should start a blog. How ridiculous I thought, but I said I'd think about it. So when we met again a month later she pressed me on it. Did you start? NO! Well I didn't yell it but come on. Still, later I thought of this generous praise and encouragement from someone so so intelligent, educated, so gifted, so successful in her field telling me I have potential, and the advice was just too significant to pass off and so I agreed to give it a shot. So here I am thanks to an incredibly kind and generous educator who never stopped educating even after she gave up her chair at the university where she finished her amazing career. There's something about Mary, and anybody who knows her will tell you so. <3 #Mary #MaryAttili #SomethingaboutMary
Comments