DIED 2001
BY THE TIME MY older son was in fourth grade and my younger in second, I had come to believe that their birth years had identifiable personalities. As a group, the children of ’88 were among the best anyone had seen: polite, friendly, earnest, their backpacks zipped, their smiles bright. Every teacher, every coach thought so—and would, all the way through their graduation from high school in 2006. The children of 1990, however, were just the opposite, inspiring rue, exasperation, retrenchment, and the invention of new disciplinary measures wherever they went. As the Chinese zodiac tells us, Horses want things their way and they will become aggressive when all else fails.
Because she was pretty and blond and young, I at first took Vince’s second-grade teacher for a marshmallow, one of those pushovers whose perfect letterforms and shining teeth and multiple Miss America exclamation points are such a balm to the elementary school soul. But she wasn’t much like that at all. She had a formal, almost nineteenth-century quality, a seriousness about phonics and place value, a certain gravity to her bulletin board displays. She signed the reminders sent home with her first initial and last name, C. Green, and that was what I always called her in my head.
By the time she got to Vince, C. Green was at the end of the alphabet and long hours of coming up with encouraging things to say, penned in careful cursive on carbon-paper layers. “Vince has a beautiful spirit and enjoys school. At times moody or negative in contrast to usual good nature. Something of a ‘rebel,’ for example about Valentine’s dress-up. (Where does he get this?)”
After we moved across the country and my children merged into different groups of squeaky-clean ’88s and troublemaker ’90s, I heard that C. Green had died of breast cancer, leaving young children of her own. It seemed impossible. Aren’t elementary school teachers eternal and ageless—like Santa Claus—holding open the heavy steel doors to the future as the babbling river of children runs through and through?