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The previous chapter
And now
By our fifth year living in Fort Wayne, the depression had subsided, but I still wasn’t truly happy. I loved my family. I enjoyed the camping trips we were now taking as a family. I enjoyed teaching and loved my students. I enjoyed parts of Fort Wayne, like the Children’s Zoo and the occasional minor league baseball or hockey game. We had made the Johnny Appleseed Festival an annual family tradition and I frequently ran into people I knew who would say “hi.” I had a handful of people who I considered genuine friends.
But I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life there.
I was making more of an effort. At least, I told myself I was making more of an effort. We took our kids to events at our church and I had joined a Bible study. Our pastor’s wife had also started a dance studio that operated out of our church’s building, and our daughter had started taking beginning ballet, which she enjoyed but I instinctively knew wouldn’t last forever. (I was living my unfulfilled childhood dreams through a child who enjoyed dancing but was not a born dancer. I also quickly discovered I was not built to be a dance mom.)
I was thriving in my classroom. I discovered I didn’t just enjoy teaching AP Language; I was born to teach it. And as a Christian teacher in a Christian school, I was able to challenge my students in new and different ways. When I taught The Crucible, I could bring in John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” sermon and we could discuss both the rhetoric and our role as Christians in the world in which we lived. The Things They Carried allowed us to talk about the rhetoric of war and the brutalities of those realities. Really, the possibilities were endless. In the AP Language Facebook group, I read horror stories from other teachers about being stopped from covering certain topics or reading certain books, and while I was always cognizant of my audience and was cautious in my choices, my administration trusted me to make the right calls, as did my department head. I only had one run-in with a parent who confronted me on parent night about my choice of The Awakening as a whole-class text. I defended my position, well aware that I probably hadn’t heard the end of it. In the end, I didn’t have time for the text, and I developed a great relationship with her daughter. That crisis was averted.
Jeff was mostly happy with his job, and I was mostly happy with mine. I just wanted it to be in a different city. When one of my college friends told me there was an opening at the school he taught at in Las Vegas, I agreed to take the phone call from his principal.
I had never been to Las Vegas, but Jeff had a couple of times for conferences. “I don’t think you would like Vegas,” he said when I told him about the phone call.
“I don’t think I would either, but at least it wouldn’t be cold?”
“Yeah, instead it would be hot. Really hot. And Vegas isn’t really your scene.”
The phone meeting was good, but the principal had ended up not needing to fill a position, at least that year. He said he wanted to keep me on his list, and I was willing to do at least that much.
And I returned to life as normal.
Except, it wasn’t normal anymore. The seed had been planted. Maybe we didn’t have to have to stay in Fort Wayne. Maybe we didn’t have to even stay in Indiana. Maybe we could finally fulfill my desire for adventure that had been doused the moment I took that first call to the southside of Chicago.
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