Beware the Ides of March....and Mrs. Morehead

“The Ides of March are upon us”, Mrs. Moorehead would remind us every year as March 15 approached. Mrs. Morehead was the consummate English teacher.  She used every opportunity to steer us students toward nobler and higher ambitions than buying a six pack of beer and dancing the watusi on the  banks of the Catawba river. 

Martha Moorehead was a figure to beware and to behold.  She said to her students, “when I was your age, I said there were three things I would never do:  be a teacher; marry a minister; and get fat.  And I have done all three!”  In her own humbling confession, she taught us the meaning of the word “irony.” She also taught us what it means to be human!

She laughed as she corrected us.  I recall my classmate Kenneth, always the gadfly as he strolled into the classroom dragging the heels of his boots and misquoting  Shakespeare as his greeting:  “Romeo, Romeo, where in the world are you at?”   “Now, Kenneth,” Mrs. Moorehead  said, “ you know that a preposition is not a good word with which to end a sentence.”   Kenneth rebutted, “Romeo, Romeo, where in the world are you at anyway!”  Then Mrs. Moorhead would roll her eyes and concede, “Well, I suppose there are times when a preposition may be the preferable word to end a sentence with.”

These many years later, I observe the narratives of years past as from a cosmic balcony where, as Frederick Buechner observes, “Memory is more than looking back, it is looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still…”  Martha Moorhead and Kenneth are both long gone, both too soon.  But as surely as the Ides of March are upon us, so are their words, their wisdom,  their laughter, and the wonder of their humanity.