When I was in elementary school I had a teacher who gave us the gifts of calligraphy and poetry. He wore a Mr. Rogers cardigan and wasn’t even one of our regular teachers, but for some reason we spent long portions of our days in his classroom where we learned how to put the nibs in our pens and hear the rhythm in a poem. He opened the world of goodness and truth and beauty to me, in thick books and papers dripped with India ink. He was such a fantastic man that I even bought him a Christmas gift.
Around this time I was inspired to send some of my poetry to a magazine, with a note assuring them there was “more where that came from” should they have a deficit of simple rhymes. I never heard back from them.
But that’s not the painful part of this memory.
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