School Memories
Posted Saturday, May 15, 2021 01:19 PM

In the 5th grade, when  I came home from school one day, mommie said “OK, what is it?”

 
“What?”
 
“That sheepish look on your face!”
 
She could always see right through me.  
 
“Well, I’ve got a new name for Mr. Rannow...”
 
“Oh?”
 
She knew he was my history teacher, and I’d already told her about his peculiar manner of suddenly pivoting around from the black board and accurately hurling the eraser at whichever class miscreant was “acting up”...
 
But she had never told me Mr. Rannow had been her high school track coach, nor even that she had competed in track, much less been a top girl sprinter in the state.
 
“Yep, from  now on he’s “Mr. RAN-OH-NO-ONY!””
 
Sometimes I could be pretty clever.
 
“Oh, no!  What did he do this time?”
 
“Well, he had drawn some straight lines across the blackboard”, I explained, “then he told the entire class: “it was the State track championships, and our sprinter, Ony Stauffer - young Mr. Locke here’s mother - was here, in the outside lane.”
 
He put an “X” at the spot.  
 
“At the sound of the starter’s gun Ony exploded out of the starting blocks, widening her lead all of the way down the track until she broke the tape at the finish line!”
 
He slowly pulled the chalk across the board, and across the lanes, until it crossed the finish line in the inside lane.
 
The class erupted as he proclaimed: “She ran  faster - and, yes, farther - than anyone else
In the finals race, yet she came home as only a disqualified winner, an “also ran”!”
 
The glint of a tear on her cheek triggered an awareness in me that - rather than clever -it would just be cruel to even mention my own little embarrassment in front of my classmates; that her own chagrin had to be so much deeper and more painful.
 
“Just so you know I know, mommy, everybody who ran in, watched, or has even just heard about your amazing race  knows who was the fastest young lady wearing spikes that day!
 
She erupted in the happiest, most contagious laughter I ever heard (a delightful laugh that lit up the entirety of my childhood!).  
 
“I wasn’t wearing spikes, silly... “
 
We bear hugged, lip pecked, and eye locked behind beaming smiles.  
 
Her given name was Wyona, but I only ever heard her called Ony or mommy. After that day I often thought of her as “Champ”, but never said so.
__________
 
Everybody has “Oh, no Ony!” moments in their life: innocent-but-costly faux pas incidents.
 
A drastic example was “Wrong Way”  Corrigan who, after making a transcontinental
flight from California to New York in 1938, then flew from New York to Ireland though his flight plan was filed to return to Long Beach, CA.
 
This, coincidentally, was at about the same time as my mother’s own “Oh, no Ony!” experience...