Memoir from Junior High -- Miss Blue and Water Girl

Incredible what I dream. Last night, a semi-erotic dream about my junior high school English teacher! The last dealings I had with this old maid occurred over fifty years ago -- that's half a century -- and she has been dead for at least a quarter of a century.

Said erotic sentiments had to do with a tenderness I now feel for a sweet human being who happened to be female, one whose saintly qualities I did not appreciate until she was gone from this earth. I came to sorely regret that I was mean to her, as were all of us demonic little bastards when we were in her classes way in hell back then.

This lady was, as I say, an old maid, and conventional wisdom is that old maids are a miserable lot. Wrong: studies show that, in an analysis by sex vs. marital status, the order from least to most happy is like this: (4) single males; (3) married females; (2) married males; and (1) single females. So, although Miss Blue might have seemed sort of wistful to us, she was probably happier than most.

The dream I had was harmless enough. I helped her across a dangerously busy street in Los Angeles and had tender feelings -- rescue fantasies, I believe the Freudian term was. My classmates would find any attraction to her in the wildest of dreams to be ludicrous, and I suppose they are. She had been an attractive woman fresh out of college but she was ancient by our standards, probably fifty when we had her as our teacher in the early 1950s, a dried-up, ate-up, withered old hag. (Not true!)

Miss Blue was overqualified to teach English to us, having a master's degree in her subject matter then, much more learning than she could impart to us half-literate (and determined to stay so) little hillbillies. The poor dear had one fatal flaw, though: she was no disciplinarian. We were terribly mean to her and she had not a clue as to what to do about it.

My peccadillo was writing a doggerel poem about her flatulence and circulating it to my friends during one of her classes. (It was funny because we could hardly imagine this dignified person going to the bathroom, let alone cutting the cheese.) A fellow rogue showed the poem to her and she discreetly feigned incomprehension.

One crazy day we were sitting in that class of hers. It was a warm, gentle spring day and we had the windows open. She was reading poetry to us or something and we were dozing off, gazing out the windows, passing notes, picking our noses, whispering and giggling, experiencing erections, etc.

Then we heard it: unmistakably, a stream, running on to the floor, somewhere in the room. Everybody in the room was alerted and in a matter of seconds every eye and ear had located the source: a large puddle was accumulating on the floor under the desk of Phyllis Neely. She was sitting right there, PEEING HER PANTS! We sat and watched and listened in horror as that poor girl sat there and peed and peed. And peed! And then, face red as fire, she put her head down on her desk, buried in her arms. That was many minutes before the class ended and we sat there in a state of shock. Miss Blue kept on reading, kept on, valiantly, to the end of that class. I guess all of us kept on too. As for the poem, it could have been my doggerel.

I have talked to friends in that class since then -- never to Phyllis! -- and we all had the same reaction: we wanted to die with embarrassment for her, we wanted to crawl under our desks, we wanted to have the earth open up and swallow us.

It was close to the end of the school year -- back then we quit before Memorial Day and didn't come back until after Labor Day -- and Phyllis did not come back to school. She was said to have "measles." The next year, a class wag made a list of nicknames for all of us and hers was "Water Girl." By then we laughed in surprise because we had forgotten about the incident.

I recall the last social situation I had with Phyllis, a Christmas party when she was now a young woman, in a becoming frock, and we were all drinking and she got drunk and was funny and cute and charming. She went to college and married a college professor and had babies and no doubt has many grandchildren now and we are all old, far older than Miss Blue was then.

But I recall walking home on that day that Phyllis peed her pants in class and I saw Miss Blue driving Phyllis home, to spare that child any further humiliation. The adult was solemn and resolute and charitable and compassionate. Dignified lady in a dignified car, black , I think, an unadorned Plymouth. We mean little shits made fun of Miss Blue. But she was so far above us that we had no clue.