The Weekly Screed (#619)

Mrs. Thompson welcomes me home
By David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — When Hotlips (my wife) and I announced our escape from New York, most friends responded by wishing us good luck and an easy move. It took a hardcore citydweller — Barry Fox, who couldn’t imagine living outside London — to ask the condescending question: “Why Madison?”

My first explanation had to do with cost-of-living, or with Hotlips’ fondness for the open spaces and greenery here, plus our proximity to one of America’s great universities. But the real reason was more complicated, and personal.

Barry’s question got me thinking about my bonds to this heartland isthmus. After a while, my thoughts brought me around to a brief, life-changing encounter with Mrs. Thompson, my eighth-grade math teacher. Unaware that she was doing so, Mrs. Thompson welcomed me to the big city, and to the unforeseen possibilities of life in a way — and at a moment — that made Madison, then and forever after, the hometown where I always feel at home.

I had started out elsewhere, in the hamlet of Tomah, “up north” of Madison. Despite my mother’s unsavory status there as a smalltown divorcée — whose stigma rubbed off on her kids — I had fun growing up in Tomah. I blundered along cheerfully despite being often bullied and generally shunned by my alpha-male peers at St. Mary’s School and despite being — at recess and in all after-school sports — “the last kid picked.” I gradually developed an outlook that allowed me to regard the cruelty of children and the trauma of my parents’ agony with an ironic resignation that should have been beyond my years.

One day in Tomah, I was struck — in front of the auto parts store at the corner of Superior and East Monroe — by an epiphany. I suddenly realized, with a mixture of surprise and fatalism, that I wasn’t destined to go far in life. Being only about 11 years old, I didn’t have the wherewithal to parse this brainfart. But I was old enough to read the handwriting: I was a shy, undersized, noodle-armed nebbish whose prospects were handicapped by circumstances beyond my control. I was stuck in one of the smaller, poorer, snowier towns in America, hundreds — or thousands — of miles from the nearest outpost of sophistication. In the big world where famous people like Pinky Lee defined success, I was a rabbit pellet. Most likely, I would stay in Tomah, graduate from Tomah High and maybe — if I got a scholarship (whatever that was) — I might attend the normal school in La Crosse. After that, back to Tomah and a a modest career, in insurance sales or lumberyard management, with a kitchen-drinker wife and a few unpromising kids just like me.

And that was all. That was it. That was the fabric of my future.

Not only did this realization hit me one summer day on my way to the Tomah Public Library (my refuge and my temple), it strangely consoled me. I knew, in a flash of precocious realism, that I could muddle through a comfortable adulthood in Tomah, never being much liked by my contemporaries but at least, eventually, accepted. I knew I would thrive beyond school, as I had thrived at St. Mary’s, without seriously challenging myself. I could be contentedly mediocre because, in a place so small and far away, my competition was third-rate and rarely sober.

In all these perceptions, I felt as though I was seeing myself from a distance. From that moment, I began, more and more, to look at all things Tomah as a solitary observer, insulated by irony and quietly reconciled to a fate better than death but a few heartbeats short of life.

I didn’t know then that my mother, who felt even more deeply the constant exposure of Tomah’s party-line Petri dish, was on the brink of revolt. Late one spring, desperate to escape the prying eyes, whispered gossip and Christian pity of her fellow villagers, Mom packed up two sons and a daughter and dragged us to Madison, a megalopolis of more than 125,000 souls. It was Tomah times 30.

That fall, I found myself — after six years of St. Mary’s — in a tough South Side public school, among hoods and Negroes. But here, I faced no smalltown preconceptions and I was never again the last kid picked. On the other hand, since I was the product of a parochial school in a frontier outpost, the Franklin School administration officially pegged me as an “eight-two,” consigned to matriculate among those eighth-graders deemed unlikely to ever aspire to a college education. I took this affront more equably than some of my “eight-one” acquaintances, because I understood my background. Tomah was my new stigma.

Hence, I was sweetly unsuspecting on a day in October when Mrs. Thompson took me aside. I figured I’d screwed up somehow in class. I was, after all,  barely pulling a “B” in math, my weakest discipline. Mrs. Thompson leaned down (I had yet to hit five feet) and informed me, matter-of-factly, that — based on my work thusfar at the Franklin School — I was being bumped up to eight-one status.

I was properly thankful. But I took the news coolly — probably because, by then, I knew I deserved the promotion. However, since then, I’ve come to better appreciate the significance of my swift ascension to the eight-one elite. In that moment, I shook off Tomah. I achieved citizenship in a new world of cities, universities and limitless possibilities. Inarticulately, I realized that if I belonged among these bright, ambitious Madison kids with parents who’d gone to four-year colleges, among kids who were both tougher and kinder than my Tomah nemeses, then maybe I had a fighting chance anywhere. Madison — through the agency of Mrs. Thompson — launched me toward a life of wider scope than I ever dared to dream in Tomah. Madison was, in Carl Sandburg’s phrase, my “great door.”

As for Barry Fox, the British friend who asked me “Why Madison?”, the answer might be Barry himself — whom I first met in Tokyo and with whom, since then, I’ve shared drinks and fellowship, told war stories and traded barbs, in Las Vegas, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Cannes, Berlin…