The Old Bentley Schoolhouse
by
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Her mother’s heart told Andrea that the call on her cellular phone was coming from the best Christmas present she had ever received; her son Will Roger Hogan. Her heart, and the fact he had programmed her phone to play Allegro in F Minor whenever he called. Born late on that Christmas night in 1981, he had been the light of her life for all of his twenty-seven years on this earth. “Hi, Will!” she answered. “I was just about to call you!”
“Mom, guess what?” he asked excitedly. “I got that job with the public radio station here in Austin! You are now speaking to the new voice of WKMT, 99.9’s “Saturday Night Alternative Music!’ I start in two weeks! Can you believe it?”
“Oh, Will, I’m so happy for you! I know how much you’ve wanted to break into radio broadcasting. You’ve had this dream since you were a teenager—maybe even before that. I remember those ‘commentaries’ you did after each ‘Playtime Poppy’ performance.”
“You can’t say I was ever at a loss for words,” he acknowledged. “Of course, this isn’t full time so I won’t be leaving my ‘day job’ at Whole Foods, but my boss assured me that she won’t ever schedule me to work on Saturday night. Although, come to think of it, maybe we’ll do a live remote from the store one night.”
“I can’t wait to tune in through my laptop. I’m so glad you made me buy that gadget; I can stream WKMT any time I want to, and I know I’ll want to when you’re on the air!”
“It’s good to know I’ll have at least one loyal fan when I start. I can’t wait to introduce these Texans to Will Elliott Whitmore.” He sounded so happy that she was reluctant to interrupt with her own good news. Or was it good news as far as Will was concerned? It certainly put a crimp in their tentative plans for her to spend the winter with her friend Cynthia in Forth Worth. Her news would put all long term plans on hold for at least five years.
“Hey, Mom! I was so excited to tell you my news that I didn’t even think to ask what you were going to call me about!” he inquired. “Did you finally start that novel you’re always threatening to write?”
“No, no novel this year,” she admitted. “I’m probably going to be pretty busy starting this fall when I begin teaching Freshman English and Composition at BGM Consolidated School System in Marshtown, Iowa.”
“This is the day for news in the Hogan family!” he crowed. “Mom, I’m really happy for you if this is what you truly want to do. I guess I thought you were going with the substitute teaching in Des Moines that you talked about when you went back to UNI for your teaching certification.”
“I thought that was my plan too…right up to the time that I hit ‘Submit’ on the online application to teach at BGM,” she admitted. She went on to tell him about the job and how her young friend from UNI, Trish Wilkins, had encouraged her to apply. When she had returned to UNI two years ago to complete her secondary education certificate, she had not planned to teach full time. This was to be her “retirement” job—substituting from time to time in the Des Moines school system to pay for that blasted necessity: health insurance. Winters would be spent somewhere warm—preferably in the same state as her boy. After all those hours studying, writing papers on the latest teaching techniques; and finally the four glorious months in the classroom during her student teaching, she had been bitten. She loved the smell of the classroom, the perfume of the dry erase marker, the sight of all those desks lined up so carefully. She knew she could not be content hopping from one classroom to another, one school to the next. She wanted her own classroom. More than that, she wanted her own students, young people who would challenge her mind and hopefully learn a little something about that quirky language known as English.
Could she get a full time job at the ripe old age of 58? That was the question. What school system would want to invest in a teacher who already qualified for the AARP restaurant discount? Certainly not the Des Moines School District where substitutes bounced from school to school for years before achieving the all – important “full time equivalent” status. No, if she was to have her own classroom, it would be in a small rural school or at a teacher – starved district in the middle of Houston. All in all, the rural Iowa district would be the better choice for her.
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About the Book
Andrea Hogan had always dreamed of being a High School English teacher, but with the teacher glut of the 1970’s she chose a different path into government administration. The one thing the government job allowed her was to retire early to return to college to complete her credentials to teach. Suddenly she finds herself with a job in a small school district in southeastern Iowa and an apartment in a renovated school house. The last thing she expected was to find that her new department head and upstairs neighbor would be the man she had shared an apartment with during their senior year in college.
About the Author
Vicki Hughes is a retired government administrator who always dreamed of being a teacher. She has had this idea for a novel rattling around in the back of her head for quite some time. As she was complaining about being bored to her adult son one day he replied, “Why don’t you just write that novel you’re always talking about.” So she did.