Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
Mickle
I learned a new word this morning. Mickle means something very heavy, or a large amount of something. It is a word of Germanic origin from around the 12th century. To me it means something altogether different, and a blast from my past.
This memory goes all the way back to the early 1960’s when I was in high school in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Although I’m pretty sure I turned into a responsible and mostly kind adult, this was not how I would describe me in high school. I was the ultimate quiet, rebellious kid. Anything I could do to knock down the norms I was raised with, I tried with great gusto. At the time my home life was pretty tense and sad, with both parents drinking more than was good for them – that is one quality I tried to duplicate. I attended wild and sometimes dangerous parties and never worried about getting caught. I helped jack a car one day so a bunch of us could drive down the mountain to the beach. I smoked cigarettes with great abandon, going to great lengths to hide this from my parents.
But back to my word of the day. I took French classes in high school and continued them in college. Today I’m lucky if I can ask where the bathroom is. The French teacher was a mousy little man named Maurice Mickle. He was hard of hearing and I always thought it was because he had so much hair growing out of his ears. I don’t know anything about how he became expatriated and found himself in a South American country. He had been at the high school for a lot of years. That means he had seen a lot of brats and tried to teach us the beautiful romance language.
There was a little group of us who always sat in the last row of the small classroom that was his domain. We were fascinated by his name, Mr. Mickle. So much so that we made it a habit to whisper-sing the Mickey Mouse Disney song. Only we changed the words to “M-I-C-K-L-E M-O-U-S-E” I doubt that he heard us, but if he did he did not dignify our misbehavior with any attention. We thought we were so clever, when really we were mean little sh*ts.
I remember him as a sloppy dresser. He might have owned a closet full of the same suit, or he might have just had the one he wore every day. Only his ties would change from week to week. He taught us from a seated position behind a desk that was way too big for his small frame. If anything went on the blackboard, he called on students to do the writing for him. I honestly don’t remember him ever standing up in class. And he was never to be seen in the halls of the school. We all thought he lived in the chair behind the desk in the classroom. The only thing I really know about him is that he was devoted to the French language and worked very hard with students to get the right pronunciation. In his fourth year class, we read French classic writings – Baudelaire, Moliere, Voltaire and Guy de Maupassant.
I may have made fun of Mr. Mickle, but his is one of the few teacher’s names I remember from 60-some years ago. Mr. Colby was the drama teacher. And I remember the English teacher who concentrated on building up our vocabulary, for which I am still grateful. And the other claim to fame from Sao Paulo Graded School was that one of the math teachers claimed to have been one of the original Little Rascals actors. I’m pretty sure that was a small high school’s urban legend. She wasn’t a very good math teacher, and I lay the blame for the utter confusion I felt in her algebra class at her feet.
So goes my wandering into sixty-some years ago.