I was seriously in love with my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Harsanyi. He was 25 years old. (My sister had been in his class two years before, his first year teaching.) I heard a few years ago that he retired in 2011, after 40 years.
He was my first male teacher, and my parents had just gotten separated the summer before. I was really hoping he might marry my mother. I think I may even have altered a note she’d written for me to give to him, explaining an absence or an early departure, by printing the words “with love” above her signature. Or maybe, hopefully, I only thought about doing it.
I mostly loved him because he read to us. Every afternoon he stood in the front of the room, leaning back against his desk, and read to a class of 10 and 11 year old boys and girls. Maybe he did it in hopes of creating a love for books and reading. Maybe he just wanted to calm us down after recess. For me, it was an absolute gift. Like naptime, but better. He read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Hobbit. Maybe also Watership Down, or I might have read that on my own. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? Maybe.
It’s hard to remember which books, but I have never forgotten Mr. Harsanyi or how I felt when he read to us.
