Susan Moody's Answer

Camp Building at WCU was
once Cullowhee's sole facility
for primary through high
school students.

When Mrs. Wachob told the class to write an essay after scolding them for being out of sorts, subject being why we'd been behaving like such children, my friend Susan Moody penned the perfect answer. "We behaved like children, Mrs. Wachob," she began in Zaner-Bloser letters with its loops and lines, "because that's what we are." So simple and concise, she wisely did not mention
that our teacher featured facial warts much older than her students. Scant decade from the womb, our classroom conduct had indeed been less than
what it should have been or could have been but
from sweet Susan's sage perspective,
even that made perfect sense. Some day we'd grow up,
gravitate to higher forms of savoir faire, decorum,
etiquette and all the rest, but nested there inside that little fourth
grade room, a college laboratory school, it was plain to Susan,
anyway, that Mrs. Wachob's question found its answer
in the obvious. The kids are acting like they're kids,
because they're kids, a fact that some adults lose sight of
and forget, regretting that they've lost more in the process
than capacity to laugh and play along the way. Of all
the essays I have been assigned throughout my life,
to read or write or study, it is Susan Moody's answer
that remains one of the truest.


(c) Ellen Gillette, 2013 

Camp Laboratory School was grades 1-12 near Western Carolina College in Cullowhee, North Carolina when I was there in the 1960s. High school boys drove the school buses during the winter along curvy mountain roads and everyone, as far as I know, survived. Mrs. Wachob was my fourth grade teacher. Susan Moody was my best friend. We moved to Florida the summer after and I only saw her one time since then.