By Larry Shurilla
As teachers, we get called lots of names. Many of which I cannot print, but those are usually shouted in outbursts when a student has really lost it and you’ll only hear them once in a blue moon. I usually heard, “Mr. Shurilla, Mr. S or Coach,” all my years of teaching, but every once in a while, a kid would get ahold of your first name. Now, I do understand there are a few teachers that don’t mind it and actually prefer to have their students address them by their first name, but I always thought I needed that wall of professionalism that a Mr. or Mrs. Something provided. I didn’t want to get too chummy-chummy with the kids and hearing a “Hey, Larry!” from a kid in the back of the classroom was, to me, as bad as scratching your fingernails on a chalkboard or chewing on aluminum foil! Give me Liberty, Death, or Mr. S, but don’t you dare call me Larry!
Somewhere in the middle of my career, I had the fortune of teaching three inseparable girls. Let’s call them Ally, Bella, and Kate. You know the type. They were always together in class, at lunch, in the halls, by their lockers-inseparable. They were also very bright and fun loving. They would get the giggles at almost anything and were so good natured that you just couldn’t get mad at them. They would get the jokes your other kids wouldn’t and were kind to everyone.
As luck would have it, one day some teacher must’ve been talking to me by my desk and said something like, “So Larry, when are you gonna get to Mixed Numbers in math?” or something like that. Bing! Bing! Bong! The ears on Ally shot up like a cat when you shake a Friskies’ box and she said with a crazed look of delight shining in her eyes, “Mr. S? Your name is Larry?!”
“Well, what am I going to say now?” I thought. She heard it. I’m not going to lie about my name, so I said, “Yeah, Ally, that’s my first name.”
Mistake. I should’ve lied. The name spread faster than a viral gagging cat YouTube video between the three and they kept using it! “Larry this” and “Larry that” until finally, I had to get serious with them and said, “Now look girls, you can’t keep calling me, Larry. We have to keep things a bit more professional in a school setting. That’s just how it is.”
They huddled up for a moment and then one of them said, staring at me with big eyes like the cat from Shrek, “Can we call you, Uncle Larry, then?”
This book is about confessions, successes, and mistakes, right? Mistake number two. I just couldn’t say no! So, I said, “OK, you can call me Uncle Larry, but only if other kids aren’t around and only once in a long while, OK?”
Needless to say, the girls were ecstatic and after about two microseconds, I realized that this could really go south fast. Imagine me teaching something in class and the principal drops in for a beloved observation and Bella or Kate goes, “Uncle Larry, do we have to do the evens or the odd problems for homework?”
The principal turns her head toward me and mumbles, “Uncle Larry? A bit informal aren’t we, Mister Shurilla? Why don’t you come down to my office after class and we’ll have a little chat with the HR-Director.”
Well, something like that scenario never happened! The girls were true to their word and only every now and then would I hear the two sacred words pronounced. I can still picture, Kate, waiting at the classroom door until all the other students had left and whispering, “Bye, Uncle Larry,” and then scooting out the door to meet up with her friends for lunch.
Time marches on. If you think it doesn’t, just try backing it up one second! You may wish it would go faster, but it never slows down, stops or goes into reverse. Time relentlessly moves forward and no power yet invented can change that. Whether you’re having a good year and you want to teach that class forever or you’ve got a group of Satan’s spawn and can’t wait to bless the 7th grade teachers with Children of the Corn, you only have them for one year and they move on to the next grade.
When you teach for more than thirty years an awful lot of things can happen to those kids. Some good. Some bad. And all the kids grow up. You see your students move on to 7th and 8th grade and then on to high school. You may see a picture of them in the district newsletter, run into them at the grocery store, or hear about their accomplishments from their parents or siblings, but nothing, no nothing can prepare you for the moment when you hear that one of your former kids is going to die.
Cancer does its deadly drop-ins to households indiscriminately. There are no protections on the homes of the young and innocent. One day, about four years after we taught her, we heard Kate was dying of cancer. Time was a blur after we were informed and suddenly Kate had passed, the funeral was set, and we, a group of her old 6th grade teachers, went to the church to pay our final respects. The death of one so young, so full of life seemed insidious. She was in the bloom of life and had so much to look forward to!
There was a long line of friends and loved ones that weekday evening at the church. Kate had touched many people in the community and everyone there wanted to show they cared. As I looked around the church, at all the friendly people quietly talking to each other, the beautiful flowers, the family gathered around the casket, I couldn’t help thinking this shouldn’t be happening. We should be here for Kate’s wedding, not a funeral, but I also felt an unmistakable feeling of love and gratitude that though her life was short, it was filled with love.
Soon we were shaking hands with Kate’s parents and expressing our sympathies when we spied Ally and Bella near the end of the family line. As we drew close, we formed a group hug, the old 6th grade teachers and our two former students. I don’t recall exactly what we said, but it wasn’t much, just that we cared. We held onto each other for a moment or two longer and then Ally squeaked out two of the sweetest words I have ever heard in my life. With tears in her eyes and a smile on her face she quickly whispered, “Uncle Larry.”