what a life!

 

at home, and still on adventure

as we drive to Acadia National Park and back,

I am intrigued by her stories,

some of finding homes on or near the coast:

Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Olympia, Washington,

Bar Harbor, Maine, the Maine Maritime Academy,

and now Ellsworth, Maine, for the last decades,

the awe-inspiring wonders of Acadia and environs call to her:

the rocky abrupt just above sometimes raging sea,

today a flat placidity connecting the islands,

full of bounty hidden from the eye,

glacier-created ponds, sounds, bays,

hugged by tree and moss and flower,

drawing swarms of us to marvel,

all of it enough to hold her at home,

and lift up her spirit to adventure,

opening to awe a necessity to her,

we talk of back stories:

as an educator myself I am interested in what pulled her to teaching,

we start with a story from her last posting,

she wanted to pull her students into an elective on cosmology,

so she did, and 25 students joined her in pursuing answers

to basic questions of why and how all came to be,

what does a learner want at the most basic

not just to put food on the table

but to find answers to at least some of the great mysteries,

when she had taken education classes,

she hoped for practical specifics of alternative processes

to get the students journeying into understanding

of what she wanted them to grasp and hold,

those courses did not provide such a guide book,

so she had to evolve the strategies herself,

in her own schooling she knew that math and science

were definitely understandable, definable,

mysteries that her mind loved to ponder and solve,

the intellectual life a necessity for her,

physics in high school spoke to her,

but the meanness of some males

 kept her from the class,

what would a girl be doing in a class 

that should be for boys only?

they built themselves up 

by trusting to the superiority of their gender, 

even if their testosterone did not help in the challenge,

the patriarchal substructure a lifelong hindrance to her dreaming,

she would not be deterred in college by such extra weights to carry,

she found paths of science in undergraduate and graduate programs

that allowed her brilliance to express itself, to flourish,

even to the point of social time with the legendary George Gamow,

a hero of mine, and time with Frank Oppenheimer,

she is so self-deprecating that she has trouble seeing and holding

that her light is any different or brighter than others,

on the East and West coasts countless students 

loved for her to help them on their journeys 

toward the light of understanding,

true to the experience of many good teachers,

she usually just has to believe that what she did was of worth,

yet the occasional student has surprised her in chance encounters,

thanking her for making her classes engaging and worthwhile,

she still sees what can be and works to help us get there,

at Jordan Pond Tea Room, she softly and firmly questioned

the plastic in the cups we were given,

the moral life a necessity for her.

by Henry H. Walker

October 6, ‘25