I won the pool when Ruth's first baby was born. It was during the pre-service week of my second year of teaching, and my guess was closest to his weight and date of birth. The year before, her principal had pulled through right at the end of August and hired me to teach sixth grade English (mostly on the merits of my spaghetti cooking, I think), and it was he who stepped to the mike during one of those endless faculty meetings we have before the students return and announced the good news that our colleague was a new mom.
Sometimes, the longer you know someone, the more you find that you agree on, but the opposite was true for me and Ruth. Don't get me wrong: the longer I knew her, the more I liked her, and our disagreements never got personal, but we had some distinct political and ideological differences. Ruth's empathy for the students was unparalleled, though, and I wasn't at all surprised when she took a high school job at the end of that year. I understood that theater had always been a safe place for her when she was a teenager, and she wanted to provide that for other kids. And so we parted ways again.
Sometimes, the longer you know someone, the more you find that you agree on, but the opposite was true for me and Ruth. Don't get me wrong: the longer I knew her, the more I liked her, and our disagreements never got personal, but we had some distinct political and ideological differences. Ruth's empathy for the students was unparalleled, though, and I wasn't at all surprised when she took a high school job at the end of that year. I understood that theater had always been a safe place for her when she was a teenager, and she wanted to provide that for other kids. And so we parted ways again.
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