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    Once when I was between jobs, I worked as a substitute teacher in my hometown. I was a year out of college and most of my former teachers were still around, including Rosemary Helton. She had been hired to teach freshman algebra, but her real purpose was to serve as the town’s last line of defense against juvenile delinquency. If a kid made it past Mr. Morris, the junior high shop teacher, with his arrogance intact, Rosemary Helton could guarantee a personality conversion by the Thanksgiving recess.

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    She was a short, muscular woman given to wearing sweatsuits in the classroom. She coached the girls tennis team and would sometimes leave early to make a tennis meet. She’d throw a piece of chalk to Don Dodson and bark, “Dodson, take over!” We would sit and listen while Don Dodson finished the lesson. Don was my friend and a complete flop in other subjects but a wizard at algebra. I was mathematically impaired and would stare open-mouthed while Don said things like, “Obviously, X must equal 24, therefore y2 must be 112.” Don said “obviously” a lot, though nothing about algebra was ever obvious to me.

    Rosemary Helton took me under her sturdy wing. “Gulley,” she’d say (she called all of us by our last names), “Gulley, your sister didn’t understand this, and neither did your brothers. What is it with your family and math? Here, let me show you.” She would hover over me, hammering the gospel of algebra into my head, an evangelist laboring mightily to bring me math salvation.

    She never grew discouraged. Toiled forty-plus years to bring enlightenment to our town. Spent her summers praying her next crop of students would produce an Einstein but ended up with a classroom of Forrest Gumps. It was a quirk in our town. We produced a surplus of lawyers but not one mathematician. We felt so guilty about it that we named a street after her, Helton Drive, down at Ellis Park, which was named for Harve Ellis, but that’s another story.

“Here, let me show you.”

    Helton Drive starts at the swimming pool, runs by the Little League concession stand, the basketball courts, the drinking fountain, a picnic table, and ends just past the Chuck Brooks memorial tree. Four speed bumps and two stop signs. ~/~u can’t take it too fast, just like algebra. Teenagers sit at the picnic table and carve dirty words into the wood. It is a testimony to our town’s academic excellence that all the words are spelled correctly.

    Rosemary Hehon is our resident Noah. The Lord told Noah to build a boat, and Noah hammered away for decades, never giving up, never losing faith. Got up every morning, strapped on his tool belt and built himself an ark over the taunts of neighbors who said he’d never use it. (These are the kind of folks who say the same thing about algebra.) Noah would just eye up another nail and drive it home.

    Now some people build boats, and others build people. People builders:

    ...the mother or father whose idea of a good time is reading to the children,

    ...the social worker who drives a client to the doctor on his day off,

    ...the teacher whose deepest joy is your moment of “Aha!’

    They rise at dawn, say their prayers, and go forth to build their little corner of the kingdom. If Tuesday is bad, they trust Wednesday will be better. They are patient. There is no rush. They are building people, and that takes time.

    During the summers, Rosemary Helton hired herself out to teach tennis, ten lessons for five dollars, cheap tuition for the school of Rosemary. I would ride my bike past the tennis courts and listen to her bring another generation along. “Johnson, don’t hold your racket that way. Your father had the same problem. What is it with your family and tennis? Here, let me show you.”

    Now Mrs. Helton is retired, and a whole new batch of teachers are becoming institutions in their own right. I happen upon my old algebra book up in my parents’ attic and remember the days when X equaled 24 and Rosemary equaled one patient lady who hammered out a better world, one life at a time.

From the book Home Town Tales: Recollections of Peace, Love, and Joy by Philip Gulley. © 1999 by Multnomah Pub., used by permission. Also available on audio cassette!