That Monday she started out by telling little Ralphie 
to stop whining and put on his big boy pants. 
If you can’t handle first grade, your life is going to be 
one sad slug’s slimy crawl across the weed-filled garden.

We had never heard her speak like that before.
She spoke like an old woman possessed,
urging our care in assuming the reins of this 
rogue high-speed hansom called modern patriarchy.  

Make your mothers proud, she commanded. 
Then she mumbled a bit about ancient protest marches
and we moved on to read part of a short story about a kid
who worked in a grocery store. Soon Sophia Adams was 

boasting about her mom’s homemade apple pies
and how she also made a lattice pattern of the top crust.
Usually Mrs. Wilde would nod politely, and defer to 
Sophia’s mom as the doyenne of domesticity, but

now she was lighting up a filterless Marlboro,
and telling us all about her first husband Rory.
On the board next to yesterday’s Venn diagram
she started listing ingredients for making flavored moonshine.

Children, beware of homemade grain alcohol.
It made me think that Rory had special powers,
but he was just another truck-driving loser
who had a way of serving up potent “poison frogs”

to nice unsuspecting debutantes like she had once been.
Then a real funny look came across her face and we saw
she was remembering old times something fierce,
telling all the girls how they should marry first for love, 

then for money, and then a third time 
just for good conversation, which is where she was now.
This was in the olden days, before smartphones or computers,
back when chalkboards had erasers and life was simpler.

Mrs. Wilde blew her nose into a handkerchief
and the sound was something like a barnyard squeal.
She explained how the world was incredibly large,
but also a lot smaller than you might think.

And people will talk, she warned us, oh they love to gossip.
She used a lot of fancy words that week, 
like ‘audacity’ and ‘balderdash.’ For a woman dead set
against curse words, she knew how to make those fancy words sting.

We didn’t know what retirement was, and Ralphie said
it meant you moved to a farm in New Jersey.
But we all felt sad that Mrs. Wilde was leaving us forever,
and when the principal asked us to write little cards of appreciation

I know I used the word ‘love’ because she was always strict
but cared a lot about us, even the goofy kids. 
Someone told me her son was a policeman and that
maybe someone else heard he got shot in a drug bust. 

I don’t know if any of that was true, but Mrs. Wilde
always seemed stuck somewhere between sad and angry.
Each minute of each day she seemed to have lots on her mind,
but that one week she let us hear what some of it was.

And that’s the week I have remembered for a lifetime,
because now people don’t ever do stuff like that, 
but whenever I speak up for what I think is right,
I picture Mrs. Wilde in the corner, smiling and urging me on.