An open letter to a history teacher, and a teacher of life

I know him as “Mr. Curtis”, but he is now “Pastor Curtis”. He was one of the very best teachers I have ever had. Considering my education—public school; summer school at Yale; a B. A.; an M. Ed.; and post-graduate work at Harvard, ODU, and WIlliam and Mary—and considering how very many instructors I have had, that is a bold claim. It is also the truth.

I was knitting while watching a documentary on the nature of the Resurrection, and was suddenly moved to search for him, to seek him out. How appropriate, then, that I found his church’s site online, with a photograph of his wearing clerical robes. I signed his guestbook with a rather long note, and I want to reproduce it here, because I owe so very much to Mr. Curtis, the history teacher:

Pastor Curtis,

I was a student of yours, as Carla Pettigrew, in the 10th grade at South Meck (World History AP) and in the 12th as a member of the 1st graduating class at Providence (European History AP). Your classes are some of the few shining points of my high school career. Thank you for the knowledge and love of knowledge that you shared with me. I want to apologize for not living up to my full potential in your courses—I knew I wasn’t, you knew it, and you knew I knew, and I have always wanted to say that. I am sorry.

You taught me well, though. Instead of taking the easy route for my undergrad literature requirements, I took Shakespeare and Ancient Literature (where I “met” Gaius Valerius Catullus—what a gift!)

I have told my husband about your passion for this life, and all it can teach us, of how we spent an entire month of Euro on Art History—God bless you for that incredible gift!
I will visit your church with him as soon as I can, next time I visit my parents. I would love to learn from your resonant voice once again.

Until then, as my husband is fond of saying, thank you for existing.

O:) Carla

today let the bells ring out

For some, today is Easter. For others, it’s a new spring day. Either day, there is hopefully a freshness to the air, and the sense that

All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

–St. Julian of Norwich¹

In that vein, I share with you some unusually uplifting, hopeful writing from Poe²–his poem The Bells. It’s meant to be read aloud; one can literally hear the bells’ cadence in the speaker’s voice.

Hear the sledges with the bells,
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars, that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation³ that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells–
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

words, words, words, words, words

(title meant to be emphasized and chanted aloud, much like Poe’s “Bells“)

1. confusingwords.com
Wonderful resource, devoted to confusing context (affect v. effect) and confusing similar/related definitions (nauseated v. nauseous).

2. thanks to NuclearMoose, I now know a juicy net word: octothorpe.

Weird Words: Another name for the telephone handset symbol #
…seems mostly to be jargon of the North American telephone business. But it is one of the few such words with a documented history…Bell Labs introduced two special keys on the then new touch-tone telephone handsets in the early 1960s, both of them now standard. One of these is the symbol *, usually known as the asterisk but which Bell Labs decided to call the star key. The other was the # symbol. This was more of a problem, as there are lots of names for it…
…a Bell Labs engineer, Don Macpherson, went to instruct their first client, the Mayo Clinic, in the use of the new system. He felt the need for a fresh and unambiguous name for the # symbol. His reasoning that led to the new word was roughly that it had eight points, so ought to start with octoâ“. He was apparently at that time active in a group that was trying to get the Olympic medals of the athlete Jim Thorpe returned from Sweden, so he decided to add thorpe to the end.
Thorpe is, of course, also the Old Norse word for a hamlet, village or farm…Another story of its origin is that the sign was thought to look like a group of eight fields surrounding a village…

This tidbit of word trivia is also interesting to me because my dad is a career BellSouth engineer (recently retired). That’s right; I’m the daughter of a corporate mucky-muck , and proud of it.
I blame his career for my inability to type or say “Bellsouth” before beginning the old name, “Southern Bell”. I still believe this particular “Baby Bell” changed their name because they received so many bill payment check that were delightfully written to “Southern Belle“.
The writer at worldwidewords.org (and, therefore, of the above etymology) is Michael Quinion, the author of Ologies and Isms and Port Out, Starboard Home: And Other Language Myths (aka Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds), and contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary.