Creative Aging: Phone Call From the Past

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. —Henry Brooks Adams, American Historian

Photo by Nationaal Archief on Unsplash

Monday morning I find a message from The Write Place in my phone mail. “Ed Boer left a message for you. He’d like to talk with you about your book “Child of the Plains.” If you want to talk with him, his number is . . . .”

The Write Place is a business I formerly owned and managed. Ed must have Googled me, failed to find my personal phone number, and found my former connection to The Write Place.

Ed Boer? Can he possibly be the Ed Boer who was my junior high English teacher in Orange City, Iowa, more than six decades ago? That would be amazing. I have often wondered about him over the years.

I eagerly punch the phone number into my cell phone and a clear tenor voice, almost the same as I remember from decades ago, greets me.

“Is this Ed Boer?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Is this the same Ed Boer who taught English in northwest Iowa in the 1960s?” I ask. I hold my breath.

He says yes, and I introduce myself. “I’ve been hoping you would call,” he says. “I enjoyed your book and identified with it.” Like me, he grew up on a farm near a small northwest Iowa town, and his small-Iowa-town experiences were very similar to mine. The book brought back many memories for him, he says.

His background is new information for me. In junior high I saw him simply as “Mr. Boer” who appeared out of nowhere at the beginning of the school year. I knew he had children, because I babysat for them. I knew he was a softball pitcher because my umpire father told me that. But I never considered him as having a childhood.

His presence in the classroom was memorable. He taught us sentence structures with clarity and precision. He organized our school’s first-ever interpretive reading contest. I chose O. Henry’s short story “The Whirligig of Life,” for which I enjoyed trying to imitate a hillbilly drawl. That story stayed in my papers until I turned 50. In fact, it may still be buried in my memorabilia.

Mr. Boer also introduced us to the classics, walking us through Sophocles’ Greek drama “Antigone.” That play was an ambitious undertaking for twenty-five squirrelly junior high students. (It may have been a simplified version. At the time, though, I believed I was reading Sophocles.)

When I suggest a Sophocles undertaking was daring, Ed replies, “But your class was an unusual one. I didn’t realize how unusual that class was until I taught other classes in subsequent years.”

I have never thought of my class as unusual, but as Ed and I chat we recall the careers of various members of that group. I realize how academically gifted some of my classmates were, going on to become doctors, architects, teachers, and contractors.

“Based on your book, I concluded you didn’t exactly like junior high,” he says.

“I liked school academically,” I say. “I just didn’t fit socially. I didn’t become comfortable in my own skin until I reached college.”

Then I tell him how his grammar lessons carried me through high school, and how his encouragement to study English led to a college major and a career in words. Ed Boer’s influence had been something I wished I could tell him about over the years, but I had never before had a chance.

We talk about the intervening years. He moved to Michigan, where he became half-time school librarian and half-time middle-school English teacher. I taught high school and college English and did various kinds of writing—including founding The Write Place.

We discuss people from our shared past and what we are doing in retirement. We discover we both have become part-time performers. He has become a storyteller—sharing both folk tales and true stories with different clubs and groups in Florida where he retired.

“Do you have the stories memorized?” I ask.

“Almost,” he says.

“That would terrify me,” I say. “I do readings for groups, but I want the script in front of me when I’m performing.”

Not Ed. He wants to rely on the story in his head.

He thanks me for calling. He says it has been a highlight in his day.

It has been a highlight for me as well.

At age 74, to get a chance to tell a former teacher how he helped to shape my life is a rare privilege, indeed.

Adapted from Creative Aging by Carol Van Klompenburg, published 2023, available from Amazon and for Pella-area residents at Pella Books, the Curiosity Shop, or directly from Carol. Carol has an MA in theater arts and is available for reading performances of her writing on aging, moments in her gardens, memories, and other topics.