On a sunny afternoon in the spring of 1981, I was called out of class by one of our coaches. He had been my history teacher the year before, but I wasn’t involved in any extracurricular activities he sponsored. Still, at that time in your life when an adult who is a member of the faculty tells you to come out in the hall, you go out in the hall.
“I need your help,” he whispered.
“Okay,” I answered, puzzled. “What’s up?”
“I went home at lunch and decided to fire my new flintlock rifle. I’ve got a ball stuck in the barrel and I can’t get it out.”
Let me fill in some background here. My father had no sons and so imparted all manner of interesting and unfeminine skills to his daughters, me in particular. The year before this incident, he gave me a .45 Kentucky long rifle for my birthday and a .36 Navy Colt revolver for Christmas. I suppose black power shooting was an unusual hobby for a girl and it was common knowledge that I owned and enjoyed the weapons.
All these years later I remain amazed that Coach signed a release for me to leave campus so I could go home, get a cleaning rod with a ball puller attachment (basically a sharp screw to burrow into the soft lead ball), go to his house just a half a block from school, and work on his rifle.
I also remember patiently explaining that he had not sufficiently lubricated the patch underneath the ball before trying to seat it against the powder with the ramrod, which is why it became lodged in the barrel half way down. I loaded the weapon for him and we fired it successfully — a half a block from school and right in the middle of town — and I went back to class.
Now in the telling, several things strike me about this story, the first being “only in a small town and only 30 years ago.” This is a sequence of events that would never happen today. That’s not, however, why this is such a vivid memory. That was the first time I can recall an adult coming to me because I knew how to do something they didn’t. For the length of time it took to solve the problem, my teacher and I were equals.
As a precocious child and a grown-before-her-time teenager, living long enough for those moments of equality to be the norm was an excruciating experience for me. A few years ago when I reconnected with an old high school friend, our graduating classes came up as we talked. I will never forget the shocked look on her face when she said, “You were in the 8th grade? I always thought you were a 30-year-old divorced woman.”
This year, turning 47 feels a lot closer to 50 then I expected it to, and yet I can truthfully say that more times than not, I still feel a great deal like that girl who fixed her teacher’s rifle on a sunny summer afternoon 29 years ago — just on the cusp of being a grown up and knowing what I was doing. Somehow, I think that’s better than mistakenly thinking I have it all figured out.