Mrs. Farr’s Fifth Grade-Tahoe Lake School 1968

For some children, the classroom might be the only place they feel normal. It was that way for me. Home became so slippery and unpredictable; none of the clocks seemed to say the same thing and the lovely routine and delight in knowing when things are going to happen was gone. Life became especially frightening when I was a fifth grader and my mother became very ill, spending many weeks in hospitals far away on the threshold of death. I found relief at Tahoe Lake School which was my second home from 1963 until 1970. I knew that at fifteen minutes to nine, we said the Pledge of Allegiance and then we sang “My Country ‘tis of Thee” and then someone took the count for hot lunch and for milk only. I knew that at 10:30, we had morning recess and at 11:45, it was time for lunch. And I knew what was for lunch because the menu was handed out for the whole month and I kept in in my desk. I knew that we had spaghetti or pizza on Wednesdays, usually sloppy Joes on Mondays and fish sticks on Fridays. I never ate anything except the cornbread or mixed fruit on the brown plastic three-compartment plates except when we had fish sticks, then I ate all my lunch. I just loved that I knew what we were having every day. And I loved that the same kids and the same teachers were there every year. I couldn’t wait for fifth grade so I could have Mrs. Farr.
Mrs. Farr wore dark glasses all the time for reasons I never asked her about. Most of us thought it made her seem a little scary because we couldn’t tell if she was looking at us. They were shaped in the 1960's exaggerated cat eye style with a little smattering of rhinestones at the outer corners which served as the only frivolous decoration in her ensemble. Otherwise, she wore light lipstick, not the frosty colors that were all the rage back then. Her dress was usually a skirt to mid-kneecap with a matching blouse buttoned right up to the throat and pinned with a lovely pin or a scarf, opaque hose and flat, sensible shoes. She had gray hair that she brushed right from the cowlick forward and to the sides tapering around the back in a perfect oval curled slightly under. I adored her. It was my mission to please her, so I was quick to ask if I could stay after class to be the blackboard monitor, cleaning the green surface with the big eraser and drawing fresh lines with a line maker that held three pieces of chalk or straightening all of the desks into perfect rows. She taught us about things that meant a lot to her like learning the names of different types of trees indigenous to the Lake Tahoe area, perfect printing, Native Americans and Mexico, and how to fold a piece of paper into sixteen perfect squares for doing math problems.
She had reverence for trees and defended them when they were under threat as if they were her children. There was a huge Jeffrey Pine that stood right in the middle of the street in Tahoe City and on numerous occasions, it was proposed that the tree should be cut down because drunken tourists kept driving into it. And on numerous occasions, Mrs. Farr would storm down and stand right in front of the tree and scold the construction worker who held his chain saw ready to murder her favorite Jeffrey Pine. More than likely, he was once one of her students, and he backed down, knowing better than to argue with his teacher. She won many a stay of execution for the tree, but after she died, they cut it down because drunk drivers continued to run into it and no reflective lighting or protective fences seemed to reduce the number of annual casualties.
Mrs. Farr read to us or told us stories each day after lunch and I looked forward to getting lost in hearing of her adventures in Mexico with children who had no access to schools. Mrs. Farr spent many summers in Mexico building schools and teaching children. We became accustomed to saying “Good Morning” and “Good Night,” in Spanish and we learned the Mexican National Anthem which we sang for our parents at the winter assembly.

She told us stories about her girlhood growing up near the shores of Lake Tahoe where her parents had settled before the turn of the century. Her knowledge of Tahoe history was voluminous, and she always had some interesting little additions that hadn’t made it into the history books. She gave me my first insight into the injustices done to the American Indians by white people. She read the book “Ishi, Last of His Tribe” about a Yahi Indian whose tribe was eradicated along with so many other tribes by white gold seekers and devout believers in their inalienable right to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness no matter whose toes were stepped on or whose ancestry was erased. She also told us the story of the Donner Party and of the starvation and death the travelers endured on the shores of Donner Lake, perhaps a Divine intervention in balancing the horrid scale of genocide brought upon American Natives by white skinned people in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
I went to Girl Scout Camp at Donner Lake in the summer. It was hard to imagine people starving and suffering in the same place I sang campfire songs and ate S’Mores until I was nauseous. She told the story with passion and stopped numerous times to answer our questions, just as my father did when he told stories. I wanted to be just like her and my desire to do well in school returned because Mrs. Farr gave me a reason to care. She cared for me at a time when life seemed so cruel, but never made an issue of it in front of anyone. She knew I was struggling and took me to lunch at Pedro’s Mexican Restaurant in Reno with her husband on Saturdays sometimes. She sent me cards in the mail where she wrote comforting messages to me in her perfect printing and signed them, “From Your Secret Pal.”

She let me go to the bathroom as often as I needed to (which was very often). All I had to do was wink at her and raise my hand ever so slightly and she would nod, allowing me to go without humiliating myself by raising my hand and waving every fifteen minutes. The medicine I took made my pee turn orange and I had to drink so much water to keep infections from coming back that I peed all the time, so the system with Mrs. Farr worked better than my old method of holding it until I leaked because I was too embarrassed to raise my hand.
Her attention to me made my shame about disappointing her twice as bad, so I only did it a couple of times. Perhaps the most shameful moment came when she caught me drawing a larger than life but otherwise anatomically correct penis on her blackboard at lunch time. I was responding to a challenge by my friends who told me I was too much of a teacher’s pet to render this particularly daring anatomical part on Mrs. Farr’s blackboard while she ate her lunch. When she walked in unexpectedly, I froze with my chalk in mid-stroke having just put the finishing touches on my work. The others were asked to leave and I was escorted by Mrs. Farr out into the hallway where I received three swats on my buttocks with her oak paddle. I then had to clean the blackboard with water each day for a week. I think she was trying not to smile when she saw what I had drawn on the board next to a Robert Service poem. But it was hard to tell what she actually felt with those dark glasses she wore.
There were people who came into my life for a single moment or for a period of a few months in my childhood years who made me feel special enough not to give up on myself. Mrs. Farr fed my hunger by knowing me secretly and quietly. The breath of love was ever so soft and sweet as she walked past my desk looking at my work. She awakened my desire to be a scholar again and again when it went to sleep in the fog of despair, and she blew on the little embers she saw in me whenever she sensed I was allowing it to die. She was the angel who pulled me from the heavy sleep of sorrow and showed me that the sun still came up and dried the dew on the little purple flowers in the meadow as it could also dry my tears. I felt belonging in her room where our paper mache volcanoes stood neatly in a row and where it smelled like her hand lotion near her desk. Sometimes, I took the sleeve of her soft wool sweater and held it to my cheek before I left the room for lunch.