A principal’s office — a portable blue building with chipping paint and cracked gutters — sits a half-mile from the dirt road. It’s summer 2002, and the campus is empty, giving me and my 30-year-old brain time to untangle ideas and make a list. I don’t know where to start. I’ve taught first grade here for a year because I’d come home from the Peace Corps and needed a job. Now?
“You’re in charge,” the veteran principal extraordinaire said yesterday on her way out the door. “We’ve added a 7th and 8th grade,” she called over her shoulder, which means I need to find a teacher, and it’s not like teachers grow on cactuses in this quirky desert town.
I jump when an old, bald Viking-type peeks his head through my cranky window and asks, “Are you the principal?”
“Hi. Yes,” I say, pretending, and I wave him in out of the heat.
He stands in the doorway. “I can teach middle-school kids.” His weathered blue eyes drift around the tattered office.
I hold my breath. Did I hear him right?
“Um. I can also fix things.” He rubs his scruffy face with oversized fingers. “I’m pretty handy, according to my wife.”
I grip his hand hard, the way my father taught me, so he can’t get away. “I’m Keri.”
“Bob Boone. Mr. Boone.”
I take him on the 10-minute tour, and Mr. Boone shares his hobbies: He prefers the outdoors, and he likes to collect bugs and snakes to study and take care of before releasing them again. He reads classic literature. We stop at the hitching post next to the empty playground and breathe in the warm afternoon quiet.
Mr. Boone lowers his voice. “I want to teach kids how to sit under a mesquite tree and think about nothing. I want to teach them to chew on a blade of grass.” He scratches a spot above his ear. “I hope you’ll take a chance on me.”
I study his sunburned face, his clear, serious eyes. He’s got 20, maybe 25 years on me, but his muscular build reflects discipline. When he mentions a military background, I give him room to say more, but instead he tells me about his little girl and his wife, who’s a nurse in Phoenix. He has several years of teaching experience.
I’ll do the background check and call his references, but I already know because I feel it: He’s trustworthy, which is everything when it comes to children. I bite my lip. “You had me at ‘blade of grass.’”
He doesn’t turn and run.
So, I tell him school starts on the 8th. But is there any way he could fix the toilet now?
When the school year begins, I often spy Mr. Boone in the dirt lot outside his classroom looking for insects and shade. A crowd of 13- and 14-year-olds trails him, looking a little bored but happy.
One bright September morning, Mr. Boone and his students come to the rescue in the fourth-grade classroom. A mother tarantula has built a nest, and now dozens of her offspring creep slowly among the desks and chairs.
Nervous students shift their weight, circling their calm teacher. Mr. Boone lifts a small, terrified spider and turns it upside down.
“Interesting that we fear what we know very little about, huh?” Curious eyes lean in. “Sorry, fella.” The captured tarantula attempts a final kick as it’s placed tenderly into a paper bag.
Leo, a stocky, hardened boy sent to us from the district school, wipes sweat from his forehead. Mr. Boone gives him a paper bag and places a reassuring palm on his shoulder. “I’ll help you with the first one.”
Within an hour, the spiders are relocated to the desert wash outside of town.
As an early December afternoon turns to evening in the gravel lot, Mr. Boone says he wants to take his 14 seventh and eighth graders to the Magic Mountain amusement park near Los Angeles before Christmas.
“Totally. Do it.” The words are out before I realize this is crazy.
“You’ll come, right?” He swings his legs into his truck.
I glance around. “Oh. Me?” Could I leave the school unattended? I put out fires. The place might burn down. And this is our first year together, Mr. Boone and me, and a big trip to California? With a bunch of rowdy tweens?
I can’t miss this.
What I soon learn is that Mr. Boone wants to use Magic Mountain as bait for the places he wants to stop along the way. He teaches us about the Old West and the female inmates who made good money as tattoo artists in the Yuma prison. About warheads at the aircraft museum off the freeway, and flora and fauna surrounding the Salton Sea.
By the time we pile out of the van at the amusement park, we’ve forgotten Magic Mountain is the reason we’ve driven all this way. Mr. Boone sends the kids off in twos and threes and tells them to meet back in a couple hours. They disperse.
But not for long.
Mr. Boone and I are standing in line for something fried when every kid has returned. They gather ’round their teacher like sheep who know their gentle shepherd.
A few hours later, some kids and I eat too much junk. I may or may not throw up in a trash can after a ride on a roller coaster named Full Throttle.
If Mr. Boone feels embarrassed for me, he doesn’t show it. Instead he says, “C’mon kids, Ms. Dresser’s looking for something she’s lost.”
The school year passes. With Bob’s help, I survive.
He peeks his head into my office one morning in July. He’s brought his lawn mower for the playground.
I glance up from my work. “Thanks, Bob.” Bright sun beams from around his silhouette in the doorway. “Wear sunscreen,” I croon.
An hour or so later, he stumbles back into my office, panting. His tongue, stuck. He manages through thick, cracked lips something like, “Bee allergy . . . ants . . . epi pen. . . .”
“Bob!” I reach out for him, but his gigantic knees buckle and his body drops. His eyes roll upward like he’s being struck by some unseen spirit. He’s laid himself out, wall to wall, and if I hadn’t seen him fall, I would have thought he was taking a nap.
Then, convulsions sweep through his body. Arching his back. Pulling his chest to the ceiling. Banging it back down on the floor.
“Shannon, call 911!” I scream to my secretary. Circle around him. Throw a chair out of the way. Lowering myself next to him, I say, “Oh God, oh God. It’s OK, Bob. Shhh, relax.”
He can’t hear me. His eyes are open, but he can’t see me. Bob Boone is deep inside his brain. This glorious man in tennis shoes and tank top and swim trunks on my hard, blue office carpet. I cry and pray he’ll take a breath soon.
I don’t realize a helicopter’s landed outside my office until seven paramedics in navy and white shush me away and drop to all fours. They’re young. A guy with a mustache braces Bob Boone’s head between his knees, brings out a long needle and suspends it above Bob, just like in Pulp Fiction. I am astonished such things happen in real life, especially in my little office in Cave Creek. Especially to the strongest person I have ever met.
He starts to breathe. They load up the helicopter with Bob on a stretcher and a black supply case, and they fly away. I lower myself onto the sidewalk, back against the wall, and stare at the hitching post. I realize how crazy it is that Bob is mowing the lawn one moment and glimpsing heaven the next.
I sit there so long that the sun casts long shadows off the hitching post. Flying insects form groups and surround my head and move on. I spy a patch of grass, the perfect blade, and work it with my tongue and teeth. My mind empties. The leftover buzzing of adrenaline in my brain and chest settles somewhere lower. In my belly. At rest.
When I finally reach Bob’s wife on the phone a few days later, she says, “Oh yeah. He’s OK. It happens all the time.”
“All the time?” I squeak.
“Yeah.”
At summer’s end, Bob marches by my office lugging terrariums full of small snakes and various frogs and cute geckos. I follow him, then peek into his classroom where he’s unloading.
“Hey Bob?”
“What can I do ya for?” His face is smooth, a tiny hint of tired shadow under his clear eyes. The present moment crumbles around me as I recall his seizing, the needle jamming impossibly into his chest.
“I thought you died, Bob! God!” I hold back tears. “I mean, does this just happen all the time?”
He looks into my face and then up at a large flowering plant he has draped over the classroom door. He puts his hands on his hips, inhaling, his broad chest expanding to double the size. “Oh . . . that. Sorry.”
I reach out to hug him, but I remember Bob’s not a hugger, and I cross my arms again, searching for the words to express his worth to me, his value to this school, the way his students won’t miss a day of class. I muster the obvious, “I’m glad you’re OK.”
His freckles turn a brighter shade of orange. “Me, too.”
The awkward silence that follows is not — as made clear by his whistling — at all awkward for Bob.
He waters the plants along the sill as he looks out to a cloud-filled sky. “Looks like rain,” he says, refilling the water for a lizard in its habitat.
I swing open the door. “It does. OK, Bob, I’ll see you later.”
He turns off the water. Clears his throat. “Um, listen, you know talking about myself isn’t my forte.”
“That’s OK. I understand,” I say over my shoulder.
“Wait. I think maybe if you knew some things you might understand why.”
I stop. Face him.
Then he speaks, and the words I hear are “Kibbutz . . . soldier . . . sniper.”
“What?”
“I was a sniper.” From a rusty sink in the corner of the classroom, he refills the red Solo cup.
“Oh.” I chew the inside of my mouth. Try to keep breathing.
Bob sits his large frame on a desk. Explains it was the 1970s in Israel. He’d lie in the fields, hiding for hours, days, with little food or water. He learned to breathe shallow breaths with no motion. He trained his mind to become empty.
He stops talking, and I think he’s finished.
Then he tells me about falling in love with his first wife. They were young and lived on a kibbutz with her family.
Resting his elbow on his knee, he gazes at the ground. The kibbutz was ambushed in the middle of a clear night in October, and she was killed.
And so was her family. Most of the village.
Bob was 24.
He stands. Puts his attention on a gecko.
I nod, wondering if it would be weird if I bow on my way out of his classroom. The respect I feel might bend me in half, regardless.
What do you say after a person lets you hold his soul for a moment like that?
I hope I said thank you.
As I get in my car, the dark purple storm clouds open, and rain pours down. When I park in front of my desert hovel a few minutes later, I don’t run for it. I watch the rainwater clean the windshield and imagine it clearing away all my opinions about everything I’ve ever mistaken as important. Then I take a deep breath and walk slowly, opening my chest to the sky, grateful for the simple things — beginning with a blade of grass.
Kerith Mickelson lives in Phoenix with her husband, three children and pets. When she’s not teaching English at her old high school, she’s leading classes for the faculty in yoga and tai chi or planning a Swappow+ skateboard event for foster kids. Her goal is to learn how to skateboard — not tricks, but for balance.
Bob Boone’s name has been changed out of respect for his privacy.