75 YEARS IN SEVEN DAYS: A TRUE TALE OF LIFE, TRAVEL, and ADVENTURE ACROSS SIX CONTINENTS

By Donald A. Bergman

Determined not to abandon the dreams and aspirations of youth, to be buried beneath decades of routine, predictability, and boredom, the author viewed life through the novel lens of each decade being represented by the single day of just one week. This unique perspective served as motivation to pursue dreams rather than letting life just "happen", was an antidote for deferring goals and aspirations until that illusive "someday", and a steadfast reminder of how quickly a week, and life, passes.

Seventy-Five Years in Seven Days chronicles the author's journey from the cattle and corn fields and of the family farm to an international school career that included eight fascinating countries on five continents. During more than forty years of living abroad, his journeys have taken him to many of the globe's iconic, remote, and distant destinations. His life story reads like a list of Hollywood movie genres including adventures, thrillers, dramas, tragedies, mysteries, crimes, and romances.

His adventures and experiences include sailing the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, trekking in the Himalayas, sharing a Christmas pig feast with the Stone Age Dani Tribe in Papua, jungle hikes surrounded by lumbering prehistoric Komodo dragons, descending into Egyptian pyramids and the burial tombs of pharaohs, solo parachuting, landing on and being catapulted off aircraft carriers, learning how to use a poison dart blowpipe with Borneo's Iban Dayak headhunters, walking atop the Great Wall of China, and visiting the long neck Kayan women of Southeast Asia.

He has been on safaris to Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, experienced Chile's deadly 8.8 earthquake, spent a night in the Inca ruins atop Machu Picchu, was drenched by the mist of the Zambezi River plunging over Victoria Falls, had a private conversation with President George H. W. Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush, traversed the Australian outback, trekked across glaciers in New Zealand and the Patagonian ice field of South America, and coped with the tragic deaths of four students on school campuses or while participating in school activities.

The author encourages the pursuit of dreams and aspirations to ensure a happy, fulfilling life, and believes one's life is best measured, not by counting birthdays, but by the number of stories created from life's experiences and adventures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350927603

Book preview

Introduction

A murky, mysterious darkness engulfed me as I stepped out of the humble thatched roof hut. A dense cloak of fog obscured the other tiny huts I’d observed upon arriving at Elephant Camp the previous night. The distant rumble of a generator and the dim glow of a light bulb were the only indications that I was not alone. An eerie tingle crept up my spine as I cautiously edged into the inky darkness.

Guided by the sound of the generator and a hazy shimmer of light, I made my way to a ramshackle enclosure furnished with a half dozen rough-hewn wooden tables and chairs. Thermos bottles of hot water, tea bags, and Indian flat bread sat on a countertop along the far wall. Filling a metal cup with steaming water, a tea bag, and a spoon full of coarsely ground brown sugar, I took a seat near the door. Concerned that the fog would add to the jungle camouflage obscuring any animal sightings, I contemplated if my long journey to Nepal’s Chitwan National Park had been in vain.

A remote encampment in the forests, swamps, and meadows of Nepal’s southern lowlands, Terai Elephant Camp was where I hoped to catch a glimpse of the shy, nearly extinct, one-horned Indian-Asian rhinoceros and the elusive, secretive royal Bengal tiger.

A handful of fellow adventurers, their bleary eyes still half-closed, straggled in for breakfast. Minutes later a wiry, barefoot Nepalese guide, wearing only a tattered T-shirt and baggy shorts, informed us that it was time to begin our trek into the forest. We followed him outdoors, where the sun had begun to invade the thick fog and mist shrouded camp. The damp, cool air gave me a shiver, and I was thankful for the hand-woven wool sweater, stocking cap, and gloves I had purchased at the street market in Kathmandu.

Climbing a rickety ladder to the top of a ten-foot wooden platform several elephants, led by their mahouts, came alongside close enough that we could step from the platform into a traditional wooden chair, like those used by Maharajahs, mounted on each elephant’s back. The mahouts guided the gentle giants toward the riverbank where, in single file, they eased down the slippery bank and into the meter-and-a-half-deep water. When we emerged on the other side, we crossed a grassy meadow before being swallowed by thick forest and dense jungle. With large, spongy pads on their feet, the elephants passed silently along the trails. The early morning silence was broken only by the calling of unseen birds in the jungle canopy above our heads. As the rising sun sliced through the cloud of fog that hugged the ground, we caught glimpses of small, graceful deer called chital, munching grass sprouts on the forest floor. Their honey-brown coats were freckled with small white spots across their backs and sides.

Suddenly, our elephant abruptly stopped and stared into the jungle to our right. The mahout pointed to a clump of brush forty feet away. Through the early morning haze, a primeval-looking one-horned, armor-plated rhino stared back at us. A small calf stood motionless by her side. We sat, mesmerized, for several minutes; the only sound was the clicking of cameras. Then, as quickly as she had appeared, she and her calf turned away and vanished into the jungle. I still get tingles when I recall being in a Maharajah’s chair atop an elephant in the mist-shrouded forest of Nepal, my eyes filled with the sight of one of nature’s most unique creatures.

*

With a passion for learning, exploring, and adventure, I have visited more than fifty countries and traveled around the world numerous times. My travels have fulfilled a childhood dream of seeing many of the world’s most iconic historical, geographical, and cultural sights. I’ve lived on five continents and worked in Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Chile, Lebanon, Egypt, and the United States. I’ve trekked Himalayan Mountain trails and walked along jungle paths next to giant Komodo dragons. I’ve climbed the winding switchbacks to the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu, descended into the depths of the Grand Canyon and walked atop the Great Wall of China. I have sailed under the showering mist of South America’s Iguazu Falls, and circled India’s majestic Taj Mahal. I was taught how to use a poison dart blowpipe by Dayak Tribesmen in the jungle of Borneo, and I’ve stood in the shower of the Zambezi River as it plunged over Victoria Falls. I’ve taken eight safaris to Kenya and Tanzania and participated in wildlife and community service volunteer projects in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Moreover, I’ve explored many of the great cities of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa as well as some of the world’s most remote destinations including Tasmania, Patagonia, Torres del Paine, Papua New Guinea, and Mauritius and the Seychelle Islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Along the way, I’ve met thousands of diverse and interesting people and learned about countries, cultures, and religions from around the globe. These and many other adventures are the stories of my life.

I am documenting my travels and experiences to share what I believe is the key to a long and fulfilling life. I hope it encourages readers to dream BIG and to turn their dreams, whatever they may be, into reality. In the absence of a dream and taking steps to fulfill it, life just sort of happens. Our dreams get sidelined by day-to-day existence until they are diluted to the point of being unrecognizable.

Pursuing one’s dreams takes courage, confidence, and perseverance to step beyond routine and one’s comfort zone. It requires taking calculated risks, venturing into the unknown, and changing direction if the current path is not leading to your desired destination. In my case, choosing to become a teacher and an administrator of international schools fulfilled a dream of traveling the world while providing a meaningful and rewarding career contributing to the education and future success of thousands of young people.

I didn’t keep written notes or a journal throughout my life. Therefore, this book is a collection of memories as far back as I can recall them. Sort of a chronological diary of my life’s adventures. I can’t validate the exact date of every event, and I acknowledge that over time, memories can dissolve into a cloudy combination of fact and fiction. I further acknowledge that memories are often revised by the blurriness of time and our minds’ tendency to rationalize, justify, and sanitize. I can, however, confirm that the events are true and accurate accounts of what has been recorded and reside, as memories, in my mind.

Although a memoir, I hope the following pages serve as a real-life example of how one can link childhood dreams and aspirations to reality and live a life that brings true happiness and fulfillment. Unlike many how-to-live-a-happier-more-fulfilling-life books, it has nothing to do with eating nuts, drinking green tea, miracle diets, wearing sunscreen, taking vitamin supplements, vegetable smoothies, meditation, or mindfulness. It's about living the life of one's dreams.

Before the age of thirty, it struck me that my life could well be half over. Longevity wasn’t necessarily a family trait, with cancer being predominant on Dad’s side of the family and heart disease on Mom’s side. Moreover, several close family members had died of natural causes in their forties and fifties. Grandfather Lee died at age 51, Grandmother Anna at 44, Uncle Jim at 48, Uncle Ralph at 45, and Cousin Lee at 34. Predicting I’d reach the statistical average age of the mid-seventies was far from a sure bet.

Most people count the number of years since birth to determine their age and speculate about how much longer they have left in this world. They ponder questions:

Will I live to age sixty, seventy, or longer?

Will I live long enough to enjoy a few comfortable years of retirement? Will any of my life’s dreams come true?

I had long told myself that if I lived to the age of fifty, I wanted to feel as if I had experienced a full measure of life, had achieved some of my most important goals, and that any years beyond fifty would be a bonus.

Despite the possibility of an early trip to the cemetery and assuming seventy years was a reasonable, if somewhat optimistic estimate for my personal longevity, in my mid-twenties I chose to view each decade as if it were one of the seven days of a week. Perceiving life as if it were only a single week-long became an obsession motivating me to constantly explore, discover, and embrace the unknown, to challenge procrastination, and refuse to postpone my dreams until that elusive someday.

My first ten years were represented by Monday, and each subsequent decade progressed through the days of a single week until Sunday when I’d reach seventy. However long I might live, I didn’t want to look back at a life filled with I could have, I should have, and I wish I had. Instead, I was determined to fill my life with I will, and I did.

Years later, this philosophy was reinforced while attending a presentation by John Coyle, a three-time TEDx speaker and award-winning author. John posited that to live a longer, more fulfilling life has more to do with the number of stories created from the experiences one accumulates than the number of years one lives. He asked questions like Do you want to live longer?, How can you extend your lifetime? and What would you start doing now if you knew you had only one more year to live? His definition of measuring time was not by the clock, the calendar, or age but by the number and quality of experiences we accumulate and the stories these experiences contribute to our personal book of life.

Our best stories often come from unique, out-of-the-ordinary travels and experiences rather than our common work and home routines. In 2016, HostelWorld, a web-based travel, accommodation, and social media site, posted the following quote on its blog:

Of all the books in the world, the best stories are found between the pages of a passport.

When I turn the pages of my current and old passports, each visa, entry, and exit stamp sparks a flashback to a special memory, a unique experience, interesting people, or an awe-inspiring view. In total, my passports represent an eclectic collection of travel adventures, thrillers, mysteries, dramas, comedies, and romance stories, each having contributed to my book of life.

A friend and former colleague at Singapore American School, Pat O’Brian, recently sent me an amazing travel essay entitled Why We Travel by Pico Iyer. When he read the article, Pat said I was the first person he thought of. In his essay, Iyer wrote:

We travel to lose ourselves, and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in and fall in love once more. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year – or at least 45 hours – and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity, and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

Pico triggered every emotion I’d experienced during four decades of living and traveling the world. It was like he looked inside my head and heart, describing in detail what he found there. I am grateful that someone has put into words what I could never have written. Pico accurately describes why I have been a lifelong traveler and global nomad. His essay is a prescription for a life overflowing with wonderment, fascination, surprise, amazement, curiosity, awe, reverence, and love.

I suspect some family and friends viewed my unconventional life of living, working, and traveling around the globe, often to remote, challenging, and impoverished countries, as that of a vagabond or a gypsy. As if I were wandering from country to country without roots or a place to call home.

Between international assignments in Japan and Singapore, my father introduced me to some of his farm neighbors as my son Donnie, the one that can’t hold a job. My uncle Max, a farmer from North Dakota, once told me that I needed to put a post in the ground and tie myself to it. But conversely, my life was just the opposite. I intentionally pursued my dream of travel and discovery and felt that the entire world was my home.

I’ve spent most of my adult life, more than forty years, in eight distinct and contrasting countries around the world, each with its own unique, fascinating culture and landscape. The combined experiences, accumulated over decades, have extended my life well beyond a century when measured by the number of people I’ve met, places I’ve visited, and adventures I’ve had.

The following pages include experiences, achievements, disappointments, successes, and failures as I journeyed along life’s path. It consists of seven chapters, one for each day of the week. A chronicle of the past seven decades lived as if each decade were a day of a single week. It has served as motivation to fill every day of every month of every year with new challenges, new adventures, new experiences, and new knowledge to ensure that none of life’s precious time was forfeited.

Chapters entitled MONDAY and TUESDAY represent the first two decades of my journey from childhood to adulthood. They include my earliest memories, learning to ride a bicycle, playing in the woods behind our house, elementary, middle, and high school, and being responsible for farm chores when I returned home from school. Learning to drive a tractor and use farm machinery, participating in sports and drama, having a first date, going to prom, and high school graduation were common experiences of many children in farming communities across the US in the 1950s and 60s. Upon finishing high school, we had little more than dreams and an eagerness to venture out on our own.

WEDNESDAY, the decade of my twenties and early thirties, is when most young adults and I began choosing the roads we would take to pursue our dreams. THURSDAY and FRIDAY represent my mid-thirties to mid-fifties when life’s dreams either begin to come true or fade into the distance like objects in a car’s rearview mirror. SATURDAY represents my mid-fifties to mid-sixties, the start of the weekend and the time when we are, hopefully, at the pinnacle of a career and achievement, contemplating the rewards of retirement or resigned to the reality that childhood dreams had been buried beneath decades of routine, predictability, and boredom. Suddenly, it’s SUNDAY, my mid-sixties to mid-seventies, and the last day of the week. Regardless of how each of us gets to Sunday, we have one last opportunity to choose where, with whom, and how we’ll spend the final day of the week.

Having turned seventy-five recently, I continue to perceive life as if it were only seven days, just one week. In my case, that means it’s already SUNDAY AFTERNOON! I hope that readers will be encouraged to choose their own roads less traveled and be inspired to pursue their dreams, unshackled and uncompromised by the impositions or expectations of others, regardless of how well-intentioned their advice on how we should live our lives may be.

Life needs to be actively lived to turn dreams into reality, not passively observed from the sidelines as a spectator or audience member. As opposed to watching it pass by, engaging in life comes with risk, being judged, often criticized by others, and the possibility of failure. To fully embrace life’s opportunities, it takes not just a willingness but an eagerness to venture into the unknown and challenge the boundaries of one’s comfort zone. It means being comfortable, not in a simplistic world of black and white, but in a world of different and constantly changing colors. The reward is pursuing and living the life we want rather than accepting whatever happens to come our way.

Happy to still be seeking new adventures and creating more stories; my earlier concerns about how many years I might live became irrelevant decades ago. I realized I had already lived a long, full, gratifying life when measured by accumulated stories like encountering the rare armor-plated Indian rhino, while riding on an elephant’s back, deep in the jungle of Nepal’s Terai lowlands.

CHAPTER ONE

MONDAY: The First Decade (1947-1957)

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Lao Tzu

Britton, South Dakota

I was born on April 17, 1947, in the small farming town of Britton, South Dakota, home to 1,400 souls. In the summer, Britton was surrounded by a sea of golden wheat fields, rows of field corn standing like soldiers marching to the horizon, and green pastures of native buffalo grass dotted with beef and dairy cattle. The tranquil landscape was transformed into a cold, wind-swept prairie buried beneath a blanket of icy snow in winter. Britton was like thousands of small farm towns sprinkled across the Midwestern United States. As if God had tossed a handful of small-town seeds to the wind, each sprouting from the heavy brown soil to become part of the natural landscape.

I was the second of what would eventually become six children of Ken and Virginia (Winder) Bergman. Both of my parents had come from large families. Dad was one of ten kids, and Mom was one of nine. They grew up during the tough depression years of the 1930s. Adding to their hardship, Dad’s mother died when he was only fourteen, and Mom’s father died when she was just sixteen. Grandma Anna Bergman collapsed and died of a brain hemorrhage in the presence of her children while preparing a meal in the kitchen. Although the circumstances have never been fully clarified, Mom had always told us that Grandpa Lee Winder died of complications from having been gassed in Europe during the first World War. Years after his death, whispers floated through the family that Grandpa Lee was also a chronic alcoholic. If true, perhaps this explains why my mother was a strict teetotaler and became infuriated if Dad had an occasional bottle of beer after a hot, dusty summer day working in the fields.

Both Dad and Mom had younger siblings, including toddlers, which made life even more difficult for their widowed parents. As a result, Dad quit school in the eighth grade to help his father on the family farm and Mom worked as a babysitter contributing whatever money she earned to help her mother, who earned a meager salary from her job at the J.C. Penney store in Britton.

My parents were married on June 5, 1943. Dad was a few weeks shy of his twenty-first birthday; Mom had recently turned twenty. Still recovering from the severe economic depression of the 1930s, they began married life under strict government rationing of automobiles, gasoline, coal, sugar, coffee, meat, dairy products, canned goods, and shoes imposed during World War II. When Dad reported for military service, he was asked what his profession was. Responding that he was a farmer, he was told that the war effort desperately needed food and agricultural products, and he was deferred from military service to continue farming.

Mom and Dad lived on a small farm they’d bought near the tiny hamlet of Forman, North Dakota. My older brother, Larry, was born in July 1944, and my younger sister, Lois, was added to the family in December 1948. I have no memories of the North Dakota farm or the house we lived in as my parents moved the family to Minnesota in search of better farmland when I was three years old. All I have are a couple of photos. One was taken when I was about a year old, sitting on the front porch with a dog and some chickens, and another was celebrating my second birthday with my double cousin Dick, who was just ten days older than me. We were considered double cousins because our dads were brothers, and our moms were sisters.

Monticello, Minnesota 1950

My parents moved the family from North Dakota to Minnesota in 1950. Dad rented a farm a few miles outside Monticello, a small farming community fifty miles northwest of Minneapolis. My first memories were of the large two-story brick farmhouse, the dairy barn, and several smaller buildings, including a chicken coop and an outhouse, as many farmhouses didn’t have indoor toilets in the 1950s.

Besides the house and farmyard buildings, I only have a few distant, yet vivid, memories. One is of the large mean-spirited goose that chased and bit my younger sister and me if we passed the area he had claimed as a no trespassing zone. Unfortunately, his territory included the pathway to the outhouse. The goose would attack whenever my sister or I needed to use the toilet. Being too small to defend ourselves from the dreaded gander, if he was on or anywhere near the path to the toilet, Mom, Dad, or my brother Larry would have to come to our rescue.

I also recall the one-room schoolhouse a half-mile down the gravel road from the farm. Larry had begun attending elementary school there along with a dozen or so other children and one teacher that taught every grade from one to eight. It was one of the last of the one-room schoolhouses across the US that once numbered in the thousands. I have faint memories of walking alongside my mother carrying Lois in her arms as we accompanied Larry to school in the morning and returned in the afternoon to walk him back home.

One of my most traumatic childhood memories was my mom catching Larry, who was seven at the time, trying to light a cigarette. He had taken a book of matches and a cigarette out of the pack of Pall Malls that Mom had left on the kitchen counter while she was taking a nap one summer afternoon. He told my sister and me to follow him behind the chicken coop where he began striking matches, attempting to light a cigarette. He hadn’t been able to light it before Mom discovered us. She was-rightfully-furious as the lighted match could easily have started the loose straw scattered around the chicken coop on fire.

Deciding that I was as guilty as Larry, despite having nothing to do with the cigarette or matches other than being an observer, Mom made both of us open our mouths, which she filled with a bar of gritty Lava hand soap. After our mouths had been filled with soap, we received a memorable spanking, sent to bed without supper, and were threatened that there would be more consequences when Dad got home. At three years old, my sister was deemed too young to know what was happening and rightly received no punishment. At four years old and having done nothing more than follow Larry behind the chicken coop, Mom chose to give me the same consequences as my older brother. From my earliest memories, I never felt a close bond with Mom. I sometimes wonder if the punishment that day, which I felt was harsh and unfair, had contributed to the distance between us. Or, perhaps, it was the classic middle child syndrome, my being between Larry, her first born, and Lois, the baby sister, and only daughter? Whatever might have been the cause, the distance remained over the years.

Big Lake, Minnesota

In 1952, Dad bought a two-hundred-eighty-acre farm eight miles west of Monticello and three and a half miles from the village of Becker. Between the time the rental of the Monticello farm ended and possession of the farm in Becker was scheduled, Dad moved us to an aging two-story farmhouse a few miles outside of Big Lake, another small town several miles from Monticello. It was my first memory of winter, deep snow, bitter cold, and huddling near the oil-burning stove in the living room to keep warm. It was also my earliest memory of Christmas. Opening our gifts on Christmas morning, Larry and I received not one, but two amazing presents from Santa Claus. The first was a cowboy belt with double holsters and a pair of toy six-guns! After strapping on our gun belts, we opened the other colorfully wrapped packages. Inside were identical bright-red Tonka toy semi-trucks. It was a time when such toys were made of metal and lasted a lifetime, as opposed to today’s versions made from plastic. Seventy Christmases later, it remains the most memorable Christmas of my life.

With the move to Big Lake, Larry transferred from the friendly one-room schoolhouse to the elementary school in Big Lake. The much larger school full of unknown kids was a difficult transition for Larry. To compound his difficulties, he was left-handed. Hard to believe now, but in some schools in the 1950s children were not permitted to use a pencil, print, or color with their left hand, as cursive writing had to have the proper right-handed slant to be considered correct. Each time my brother instinctively picked up his pencil using his left hand, the teacher would come from behind and deliver a sharp crack on his knuckles with a wooden ruler. Not surprisingly, this led to Larry hating school. The full consequences of this dreadful experience would unfold in the years ahead.

Becker, Minnesota, 1953

By the spring of 1953, the family had moved to the farm near Becker. The tiny village had an elementary and high school that served three hundred children from the surrounding farms, a small mercantile store, an even smaller variety store, a post office, a farm equipment dealer, Gilyard’s Phillips 66 gas station, Bud Hart’s Texaco station, the Ramble Inn café, and a population of 250 residents. Becker would become the place where I grew up, finished high school, and lived until I joined the navy at age eighteen.

I had my sixth birthday in April, just before the elementary school conducted what was called Kindergarten Roundup, a six-week alternative to a full year of kindergarten. I was excited about starting school and riding the school bus with my older brother. However, a few days before the program began, I was climbing up the side of the corn crib when I slipped and fell six feet to the ground, landing hard on my right arm. A trip to the hospital in Monticello and some X-rays confirmed a broken right wrist. I returned home with a heavy plaster cast from the palm of my hand to my elbow and missed the Kindergarten Roundup sessions.

I started first grade the following September. It was common in those days not to know anything upon entering school. Like most children, I didn’t know the letters of the alphabet or how to count numbers. Having missed the six-week Kindergarten Roundup the previous spring, I literally started from zero.

After family, our schoolteachers and school experiences have a significant impact on the development of our personality, attitudes, confidence, and self-esteem. As a result, my siblings and I had very different school experiences that, I believe, influenced the future each of us would choose.

My first-grade teacher Mrs. Haberman was a local farmer’s wife. She was a heavyset, elderly woman, her hair pulled into a tight bun encircled by a braid of her gray hair. She was a strict, no-nonsense teacher where discipline was as much a part of the curriculum as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Despite my memory of the teacher’s frightening crack on my brother’s knuckles at the school in Big Lake and a stern, grumpy Mrs. Haberman, I adapted quickly, made friends, and enjoyed my first year of elementary school.

My second-grade teacher was Mrs. Flynn. She was a cold, short-tempered, middle-aged woman that always seemed to be angry. She was pencil thin with a severe short-cropped haircut and a permanent sour expression on her face as though she’d sucked on a bitter lemon before arriving at school each morning. Her preferred classroom discipline techniques were shouting, public humiliation, intimidation, and fear. The entire class was terrified of her. Fortunately, when we returned to school after the Christmas vacation, Mrs. Flynn was gone, having been replaced by a substitute teacher for the remainder of the school year. We never knew if she had resigned, been fired, had been fired, or had a heart attack. We were just happy she was gone.

Mrs. Dye was my third-grade teacher. The antithesis of Mrs. Flynn, she was young, kind, nurturing, and soft-spoken. She greeted us each morning with a welcoming smile, and it was from her that I felt, for the first time, the empowerment and motivation that comes from positive, supportive encouragement. She assigned each of us small classroom chores to tidy up our classroom at the end of the day, and I was elated when chosen to clean the dusty chalk powder that had accumulated in the thick felt erasers. I will forever remember Mrs. Dye’s classroom as an inviting environment where we felt safe, protected, and loved.

I only have vague memories of fourth grade. I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t recall my teacher’s name. Like many of Becker’s elementary teachers, she was an older heavyset, gray-haired woman. She was kind and much like a grandmother to her students. One clear memory was being called upon to go to the front of the classroom to solve a multiplication problem she had written on the blackboard. I had not yet fully grasped multiplication, and I was nervous to show my confusion about carrying forward a number when multiplying double and triple-digit numbers. A happy memory was each of us decorating a shoe box with colored construction paper that had a narrow slot on the top where classmates could drop notes and cards to each other on Valentine’s Day.

A few weeks before the school year started, a rumor circulated that a teacher from Japan had been hired for fifth grade. Having never seen an African American, Hispanic, or Asian person, I was excited and hopeful that the rumor was true. When I entered the classroom on the first day, there was indeed a young, petite lady with long coal-black hair, porcelain skin, and almond-shaped Asian eyes standing behind the teacher’s desk. I don’t recall her name, but she was very kind and spoke in a soft gentle voice. Her instructions to the class sounded more like polite requests than directions. Sadly, it wasn’t long before a few of the rowdy boys sensed that she was not in control of the classroom. Over the next few weeks, the classroom descended into a daily whirlwind of noise, disruption, and chaos. A few of the boys totally ignored her repeated requests, then desperate pleas, to be quiet and sit in their seats. I was embarrassed by the behavior of some of my classmates and felt sorry for this kind foreigner who must have thought that American children were the rudest, most disrespectful, and undisciplined students in the world. She left a month into the school year, likely shattered by the dreadful experience. I have often wondered what became of her, this genteel, demure visitor from the other side of the world. Did she seek another teaching position in the US? Did she abandon teaching as a profession?