I was teaching at Marshall, High School, English. Five periods a day, every day.

When I was at Longfellow, Elementary, teaching Fifth Grade, I’d stay in at lunch and sit with the students and teach them how to play chess. They got good at it, created a tournament, invited other schools, and won almost everything.

In High School, more students, five periods of fifty minutes intensity, and by lunch time I needed a break. Later, after school, I’d meet with students to discuss their papers and how to improve them.

I ate lunch in the cafeteria. The Teachers’ Room. The Lunch Ladies gave me extra because I was a regular, we liked each other, and they knew how I loved food.

There were other regulars from different Departments with the same lunch schedule, and we shared the room.

Substitute teachers came and went. Long-term subs stayed longer. One I want to talk about because I got to know him
and he opened up. At first, he was a stranger in a strange school, knew no one, hadn’t yet found friends, did his job, went home at the end of the day. Because he was long-term, he was adjunct, became almost a regular, and sat at my table.

I guess I was the Ambassador of Welcome. To me I was just eating my lunch, being friendly.

Probably because I didn’t reject him. He was non-descript, easily overlooked, unnoticed, nothing to write home about. But I was friendly, welcoming as I almost always am, so he sat at my table, and again the next day, and the next.

He was approximately middle age or just passing through it. He had features you wouldn’t remember. But he had a life, and when he opened a little to test my response, found my silent “Go on, tell me more,” he opened enough to share himself and his life and his family.

It was like a dam that breaks and the water rushes forth in the joy of release and floods and flows, day after day, at lunch, in the cafeteria, at my table, our trays of parallel food. Usually turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy and probably some kind of vegetable.

I could see that he knew who he was, no one special, had no illusions, but was constantly astounded by the amazement that he had found a woman who could marry him and love him and give him a life and a family and a son. He seemed to say to himself, “Me! She chose me! She chose me!” He wanted to shout to the world, “I have a son!”

He manifested the uncertainties of employment, the substitute teacher, like a day laborer, who might not be called to work because no one was sick, and lose the day’s pay. No job security, just enough income to get by, lowering the standard of what was enough.

People don’t usually think of teachers as having jeopardized jobs, or as ordinary people with daily lives and the struggles everyone faces. Here was a man, with no dependable income, who had made peace with himself and his lot, who managed a life he could come home to.

He had the shy joy and pride of sharing his son with the world.
“He’s really something, my boy! I come home from work, tired, frustrated, and he says, ‘It’s all good.’ I guess that’s what they’re saying these days, kids, ‘It’s all good.’ “

He chuckled to himself, and said it again, tasting the words, savoring them, sharing what his son had taught him.

I took the words and applied them to my own life, thanking him for sharing the secret of joy.

And I say them today, remember the source, repeat the joy.

“It’s all good.”