Learning to Polish Wood

by Mary Boone

As a rookie newspaper reporter I drew the short straw: I got the "Growing Older" beat. I was 21, fresh out of journalism school, and I was spending my days writing about bingo, ballroom dancing, osteoporosis, and 100th birthday parties. It was not my dream job. But, thanks to an editor who had been-there and done-that, I learned a lot from it.

Time after time, I'd come back from interviews with octogenarians who were sweet but hardly quotable.

"It's time to polish the wood," she'd tell me.

"Huh?"

"The story is there, it's just a little dusty," she'd say. "Some stories need a little more elbow grease than others."

At first I thought she was nuts. Soon, though, I realized her advice was solid.

These were ordinary folks—not mayors or inventors or activists. They had terrific stories to tell; they just needed some prodding to share them. I learned to ask better questions. I learned to read expressions. I learned to observe details that speak more than 1,000 words: a glittery appliqué of "The Last Supper" hanging on the living room wall, knotted fingers that knit on autopilot, false teeth in a jar on the kitchen table.

Thanks to my editor's ongoing mentoring, I grew and learned. Her coaching went beyond what was required by her job. She recommended books, offered lunchtime counsel, and challenged me to reach beyond my comfort zone. Thanks to Ann, I've become a better writer, an appreciative reader, and a keen observer of humanity.

Mary Boone is a full-time freelancer living in Tacoma. She writes for magazines including People and Teen People and just finished her first two nonfiction books for children.

Thank you, Miss Fine!

by Jaye Colorado Lill

Some people come into your life like a candle flame and ignite fireballs. So it was with us and Miss Fine, a young lady with frizzy black hair. She inherited a rascally class of high school misbehavers from Mrs. X. The previous quarter, Mrs. X was reduced to having us play bingo. She called out the words of the tests and we covered our bingo cards until we had five in a row. With Mrs. X, our attention span was exactly 30 seconds long.

When Miss Fine came in, she didn't know we were a dumb group. She led us through Lord Jim, looking for the metaphor of the dead fly, and Crime and Punishment, looking for the significance of the latch on the door. Miss Fine got us to connect to books in creative ways. Marianne and I got partial credit on our discussion of the anti-hero Raskolnikov by baking a cake in the image of the tortured man. The frosting was lumpy, so we disguised it by adding nuts. He looked like he had the pox, but he was a hit with the class and worth a B+ along with the written report.

Miss Fine was cruel. She did what many of our other teachers never did and actually assigned DAILY work, with each one carefully corrected. One of her best tricks was adding commas to every phrase so we could see how choppy our thoughts were. Our

• Sentences shortened.
• Verbs radiated action instead of passivity.
• Alliteration abounded.
• Parallelism became consistent.

By the end of the year, two students in Miss Fine's class became President's Scholars. Another won a Rhodes Scholarship. Everyone in the class ended up in the Honor Roll and many received college credit for our final class.

Miss Fine also took a special interest in us. She took me to the University District's Continental Bakery for my very first taste of the heavenly treat, baklava. We chatted about life; we shared what we were going to do next year. She said that budget cuts meant that as the new teacher, she was being laid off. Mrs. X, the senior teacher, would get us again. Miss Fine left our school.

The next year, Mrs. X's final exam was 50 fill-in-the blank quotes from Hamlet. The class studied with enthusiasm. We quoted lines on the pickleball court and in the lunchroom. Then we took the "final." Instead of assessing our critical thinking ability, the teacher asked 50 questions, in which every single answer was "blood" or "bloody." Although she gave the entire class A's, we felt our teacher didn't care if we learned anything or not.

Miss Fine, wherever you are, I hope you know how much you inspired us to reach beyond what other teachers thought we could do. You brought us to a place where we could look for the metaphor and the alliteration and the joy of finding the right word at the right time. And the good word is "Believe you can do better."

Seeing My Path

by DeAnn Rossetti