Mrs. Fender was my first-grade teacher. She was an older lady and almost ready to retire. In fact, I believe my class was the last one she taught before retirement. There in rural western North Carolina, Appalachia, she very much fit the description of a schoolmarm and would have almost fit better in a Laura Ingalls Wilder story than this one from the 1970s. She was always dressed in a jacket and skirt. The jacket was always complete with a lapel pin and her skirt was typically paired with what I now hear ladies call “pumps”. I don’t think her hairstyle was tall enough to call it a “beehive”, but it was always carefully “blued” and arranged with quite a bit of volume on top. It was undoubtedly held in place with a liberal dose of White Rain or Aqua Net. She was by no means abusive or hateful or unfriendly. But, I suppose years of teaching first-graders had taught her the advantages of order and discipline in her classroom and she was not one for tolerating much foolishness, at least the way I remember it.
On this particular day I was pretty excited because on the previous afternoon I had caught a tree frog. It was green and slimy with knobby toes and bug-eyes that made it look like an alien life form. It was the kind of thing that just had to be held captive in a mason jar filled with wet moss and covered with a lid punched full of airholes. I must have shown it to my parents and probably even enlisted their help to find the mason jar, but I don’t remember discussing the possibility of taking it to school with me the next day. Yet, it had traveled with me to school in my backpack all the way to Mrs. Fender’s room.
Based on my description of Mrs. Fender, you might imagine the type of reaction she had when I showed up with a frog in a jar. I could tell from her expression that she didn’t have the same level of enthusiasm as my classmates and me. In the end she asked me to leave the frog on a shelf in the coat corner and promised that we all could come back and check on it after spelling or reading or whatever our first subject happened to be.
By the time break time rolled around and I made it back to the coat corner to peek into the jar, the lid was off and the frog was missing. Still to this day I don’t know which of my classmates took the lid off. I don’t think Mrs. Fender did either because I don’t remember anybody being blamed or punished for it. I do suspect Eric Fletcher. I never did have any hard evidence, but Eric had proven himself an agent of chaos in kindergarten and it seemed like exactly the kind of master stroke he would devise. Anyway, the frog had escaped and Mrs. Fender’s hopes for a timely and orderly return to schoolwork were dashed as we searched for it. We shook out all our rain jackets and coats and shoes and looked behind everything that could be moved, but we didn’t find the frog.
The campus of Fleetwood Elementary was a weird combination of buildings. Some were white frame buildings built during the depression by the WPA. Others were starkly different rectangular brick buildings from the sixties. They were oddly arranged on land that I’m guessing was chosen because it wasn’t flat enough to be farmed. All the buildings were connected with a patchwork of sidewalks and paths. There was no such thing as going to the lunchroom or, in the case of faculty, to the office without going outside and walking to a different building. So, later in the morning, when Mrs. Fender had to make a trip to the office, she began the preparations and delivered all the instructions and admonishments necessary to leave us in the classroom unsupervised while she walked to the office and back.
It was a rainy day, and in her typical buttoned-up style, Mrs. Fender had arrived at school with an umbrella. She had left it folded and propped up beside the classroom door. Ready to leave for the office, she picked up her umbrella, held it over her head and unfolded it. The umbrella wasn’t even locked open when she dropped it and made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a shriek. She bent over and began to sort through her hair for something that had fallen out of the umbrella. Yes, it’s absolutely the truth. The frog had been in her umbrella and it had fallen out into her hair.
I can’t describe the sense of dread that I had when I saw her extract my frog from her hair. If it’s possible at six or seven to feel like your life is over, that’s what I was feeling at first. So, I tensed up and waited for her to grab me by the arm and march me to the office because, after all, that’s where she was headed anyway! I can remember watching her facial expression develop when we all realized what she had retrieved from her hair. What developed wasn’t a scowl or even a frown. What started out as surprise developed into a grin and became a smile and then a giggle and, finally, a big belly laugh. I couldn’t believe it. My frog had ended up in her hair and she laughed!
The story has a happy ending all the way around. After Mrs. Fender got the frog out of her hair, it was returned to the jar and I turned it loose pretty close to where I found it. Even if Eric was not guilty of opening the jar, I did, in subsequent years, bear witness to a large body of his work that was of equal or greater quality. And, by the time Mrs. Fender retired, my grandfather had passed away and my grandmother had moved into town to a house that happened to be right across the street from Mrs. Fender. Both of them had a long happy retirement. Every time my family and I visited, my grandmother would tell us that Mrs. Fender had asked about me. My grandmother and parents always held Mrs. Fender in high regard for remembering and asking after their offspring. I think it was because they presumed Mrs. Fender recognized some great potential in her former pupil. Privately, I always worried that it was a little more complicated than that.
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