Miss Primwood spent more than 40 years in Ukiah schools teaching English to students ranging from the indifferent to the absent.
Hers was a no-nonsense approach, a stickler heavy on grammar and composition and with an emphasis on reading serious authors. She was always respected, never loved, occasionally mocked and much the stuff of rumors and legends.
Like the time an unfortunate sophomore used the word “Arctic” and failed to articulate the first ‘c’ in the word. Artic? Miss Primwood didn’t think so and demanded the young lady write the word “Arctic” one thousand times by tomorrow morning. She flunked her anyway.
She threw blackboard erasers at kids caught daydreaming, broke up whispering pods of inattentive students by blowing a shrill silver metal whistle that hung around her neck like a string of pearls.
Miss Primwood loved the English language and its proper usage. She lived to quote from Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, politicians, Bob Dylan, Virginia Wolff and Robert Frost.
Sloppy manners, limited vocabularies, poor enunciation, dumb phrases reflecting deteriorating cultural standards infuriated her, and when plain inquiries were met with shrugs and incoherent mumbles she’d do her best to burn holes through transgressors’ heads with long flinty glares, jaw clenched tight.
When she retired they gave her a nice cafeteria luncheon, and a few former students tried to make her seem important in their lives. She was presented with a framed certificate honoring her but replete with misspellings and punctuation errors, and everyone had a good laugh over that.
Miss Primwood managed a thin grimace which eased slightly when a second, corrected certificate was handed to her.
Less than three weeks later many of those who had attended her farewell luncheon also came to her funeral. Shocking, etc., etc., as her earthly remains were hauled away…
…Miss Primwood slowly emerged from the mist and fog and saw vague shapes ahead; she moved haltingly in their direction. Two guards stood at a pair of plain wooden doors. They seemed to be expecting her.
Both nodded, one moved toward the door on the left, opened it wide and gestured for her to enter. She approached, saw a stairway heading down, then paused to watch an elderly couple arrive and be motioned through the other door. Those steps went upward.
She cocked her head, furrowed her brow in a quizzical expression. The guard at the door shrugged and said “Ain’t none o’ my biness. Let’s git goin’ here a-fore I give ya’ the boot.”
The door closed behind her and there was no option but to descend the stairway. She heard noisy conversation, loud jeering, laughing and rowdy yelling. The intercom announced a Blue Light Special on aisle nine.
The dingy room seemed to be what disco facilities were in her imagination: strobe lights, a DJ playing Snoop Dog, L’il Wayne, The Carpenters (backwards) and all at elevated volume.
Oh my, thought a semi-panicked Miss Primwood. Oh my goodness. What in the… as she was bumped and shoved and landed on a table piled high with People magazines, National Enquirers, dozens of romance novels, grimy piles of well-thumbed pornographic publications, a stack of Rolling Stone magazines and scattered AARP periodicals.
Her head swimming, legs staggering, and suddenly a bunch of guys were hooting, pointing, shouting at her, making lewd gestures and suggesting “kinky” sport. They began chanting crude slogans in synch with a spew of Eminem lyrics she heard despite clasping her hands over her ears.
An obese teenager with “Coor’s” tattooed across her forehead offered a pipe filled with simmering fentanyl. “Ain’t gonna hurtcha none down here no more, kin it?” she leered. “Wheredja get the bling?” pointing at the shiny silver whistle around Miss Primwood’s neck. “Aintcha gonna kick down?!?”
A nearby room had a crudely printed sign inviting all to a group discussion of poetry by Alan Ginsberg and Hallmark Card authors. She felt sickened, turned to leave when a big guy said “Hey granny, the hell is a adjictive anyways?”
There must be some mistake she thought, trembling, though she knew there’d been no mistake. Now she was running, falling, colliding but continuing to move until a steely grip clutched the back of her neck. A horribly smelly old man, wrinkled yet with pimples on his face and sulfuric halitosis, grinned and in a raspy gasp hissed at Miss Primwood: “Didja think ya wuz gonna read 40 years ’bout them Charles Bukowski pomes, Beatle words and the wisdom o’ Chairman Mao? And not never quote nuthin’ from Revelations or John the Baptist? Hmmmm?
“Lady, dintcha know they take that s**t serious up there,” jerking a yellowed thumb at the ceiling. “From who didja get the miracle of life, anyhoo??”
Head pounding, mind reeling, a choking Miss Primwood fought for air.
“No, no! You mean to say ‘From whom’,” she gasped.
Be First to Comment