Friday, December 5, 2008

40 to 40 (Gratitude 30)

I am thankful for kind and compassionate teachers through the years. I was fairly awkward socially with my peers. Maybe awkward is the wrong word. I was invisible. I hid behind a book before class, between class, on the bus. I was so shy that rather than face the lunch room in junior high and high school, I regularly tossed the lunch my mom made me and retreated to the halls to read.

My mom went back to work when I was 10. In junior high, we would sometimes ride our bikes to school. It was 3-4 miles. This gave us mobility before and after school if we needed or wanted to stay after for some reason, we didn't have to wait for my mom to come and get us after 5:00. Pretty soon, my sister and I were riding every chance we got. It wasn't that we loved the ride. It was more that we could then hang out around school and talk to some of the teachers. I remember several teachers who were very kind in just letting us hang out or help out with this or that after school chore. We were a bit starved for attention and their small acts of kindness to a couple of shy girls were a real blessing.

I don't know if they ever knew what that attention meant to us.




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