Five Word Monologue

Here's my five words for the week. Inspired by Ginger and her epistle poem, I've tried it myself. In eighth grade, the public schools in my parish were in disarray, so my parents sent me to the only private school option in our town for a year until things weren't so volatile: Tioga Baptist Acadamy. I learned about the history of the Reformation and how to diagram sentences. I went to chapel every morning, played on the basketball team, and was introduced to algebra under the best math teacher I've ever had: Mrs. Lonez.

To Mrs. Lonez:
(Pulverize, Shoals, Cauldron, Sovereign, Forfeit)

I.
Dear Linda,
Do you mind if I call you ‘Linda’?
I would like to think you wouldn’t.
I imagine us sitting down for tea
and laughing about old times.
You – an elderly woman now.
And me – older than you that year.
Maybe you wouldn’t find it so funny,
though. We were brutal little beasts and
you were just trying to do your job. I may
have forfeited the privilege to use your
first name.
So be it. I’m sorry.
Mrs. Lonez, then.

II.
You struck fear in our eighth-grade hearts,
pulverizing us with sharp words and a
sarcastic manner. Now I know it was
just a way of protecting yourself from
our mean ways. We told each other you
looked like a witch and drew pictures at
break on the blackboard of you stirring a
cauldron, a black cat perched your shoulder,
a hairy wart on your chin. You would come
in, short and dumpy, disheveled in a
polyester flower print dress and bark
out a sharp laugh, wipe off the board,
and send me – closest to the door –
to beat out the erasers. I watched the
chalk dust fly into the wind, imagining
it was smoke rising from your evil brew.

III.
But of all my teachers
through all the years,
I remember you most.
You introduced me to the wonderful
constancy of numbers,
taught me how to manipulate them,
bring them into submission.
You taught me control.
You were the first to speak of the
mysterious and unknown x, how
numbers and letters could happily
coexist. You showed me how to take
equations and batter them against the
rocky shores of mathematical rules,
then how to dig among the shoals
for the one and only
true answer.

IV.
I remember the day you took the
number eight and said, “Watch this.”
You laid it on its side and introduced
me to God’s time, to infinity.
“No beginning and no end,” you said.
“Just like God.”
At that moment I started a journey
I’m still traveling today, of trying
to understand the vocabulary
I was hearing in chapel every morning:
Ominous and Omnipotent,
Sovereignty and Justice,
All-Powerful
and Loving.
And here I am,
still shifting pebbles on the shore,
blessedly finding pieces
of the One and Only
True Answer.

V.
So, thank you, Mrs. Lonez.
Thank you for the firm foundation
in math you gave me –
solid enough to later support
differential equations and
three dimensional calculus,
vectors and matrices,
integrals and numerical analysis.
But thank you, too, for being the
first person to stand beside me at
time's window and pull back
the curtains so I could
peer into
eternity.