SEVEN ROCKING CHAIRS

               So what could be duller than a retirement ceremony for school teachers? But a recent Henry E. Lackey High School Retirement Celebration down near the end of Indian Head highway in St. Charles County was a drama in seven acts.

               Seven teachers and administers with experience adding up to a couple hundred years or so sat on individually decorated rocking chairs – bought on sale from Cracker Barrel – to hear their careers summed up and to say their farewells.

               Five women, bookended by two men educators along with colleagues who roasted and toasted them provided poignant moments that added up to reality theater. The biracial cast displayed brotherly love mixed with school pride and good-natured ribbing combined with testimony to the overarching love for a job that was all about “the kids.”

               There was the wrestling coach-English teacher who told stories of being the “white kid” from a prejudiced northern metropolis who found human beings in the black neighborhoods of a semi-rural county below the Mason-Dixon Line. When you took rebellious students home, you didn’t take them to mama, but to grandma. Some of the kids had to be fed from time to time.

               There was the strapping guy who wept as he related how an English teacher listened to his book report read in class, then called for him to bring the book to her. She then read the squib on the dust jacket as he “listened to the same words he had just read.” He recalled watching his friends from outside his window as he labored, with assent from his parents, in reading two different works by the same author and writing an essay comparing them. That weeping man now teaches at Lackey.

               There was the secretary for the counseling staff whose face reflected embarrassment, irony, joy, surprise in ways that would make an accomplished actress envious as fellow staffers related her years of doing her job with love.

               There was the retiring staffer who turned the tables on the emceeing principal, pulling toys and hats and gag gifts with the repartee of a veteran comic to roast him as he reacted with the appropriate aplomb.

               Sincere expressions of love punctuated the hour and a half of the tributes and bestowal of parting mementoes, including framed Ls with brass name plates to signify the retirees had lettered in their academic pursuits. What had promised to be boredom turned out to be riveting theater . . . no, real life.

               Overriding all was the palpable mission of the school --- providing a future for the kids. The kids, not just the career, or the money, are the reason these fine people showed up every day.

               [For the record, the retirees: Stephen H. Gilligan, Mrs. Helen Griffith, Mrs., Charlene Haynie, Mrs. Claire Satta, Ms. Linda Burney, Mrs. Sandra Hamke, and Glenn Jones. James Short is the principal.]