“You should meet Martha Lindey,” someone suggested at church one Sunday nearly 30 years ago. “She’s about to retire as the journalism teacher at Vista High School. Maybe you could do your student teaching with her.” Thus began my career with an unforgettable mentor.
Thanks to circumstance, opportunity, and, although not recognizing it at the time, God’s intervention and direction, I had left 15 years as a reporter and editor to pursue a teaching credential. Under the loving guidance of Miss Lindey, I learned how to manage a classroom of teen-agers ready to test the mettle of a student teacher, how to raise the standards of the Panther Print, our school newspaper, to earn an award as one of the top 10 in San Diego County, how to survive school politics, how to thicken my skin against occasional barbs of maliciousness, and most of all, how to love and appreciate literature as never before.
While I pored over our anthology of American literature looking for stories that would educate and appeal to young minds, Martha enlightened me about various selections as she recalled the details of each one in the library of her mind. She described harsh landscapes and closed minds of the early 20th-century Midwest as seen by the perspective of Willa Cather. She delighted in the creative revenge of the downtrodden as evidenced by Edgar Allen Poe. She swooned over the magical poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. She laughed with delight at the subtle humorous understatement of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, while at the same time demonstrating in her own life the inherent value of all humankind that this American classic embraces.
At that time, our curriculum included an entire semester of grammar instruction. (I apologize now to my former students who had to suffer through it; district requirements tied our hands.) Martha helped me remember the difference between a participle and a gerund. She found ways to make a vocabulary lesson seem like a rollicking good time. She knew how to demonstrate the functions of each part of speech. She, as I, demanded that students make their writing sparkle by using active instead of passive voice, or at least learn to distinguish the few occasions when passive voice might better serve the purpose.
On Martha’s 60th birthday, her students and I made her “Queen for a Day.” As a humble person who did not enjoy attention directed at herself, Martha nonetheless sat in front of the classroom with a red velvet cape and a rhinestone tiara while all of us blessed our beloved Miss Lindey with well wishes and tales of special memories. She blew out the candles on her cake, and graciously accepted the love showered upon her.
When Martha, as she relayed it to me, marched into the principal’s office and said, “She’s a natural; you have to hire her,” apparently he believed her. I see it as a grand example of hyperbole, but I deeply appreciate her support in launching my teaching career.
Throughout the years, I kept in touch with Martha as part of the same church family, the family that introduced us in the first place. With her engaging grin and her dignified manner, she never failed to offer encouragement or to ask about my children and grandchildren. For a woman of letters, Martha focused on only a few words in her lifetime. Give. Love. Laugh. Share. Appreciate. Forgive. And, to all who knew her, White Rabbit! White Rabbit! White Rabbit!
I am among the many who will miss this extraordinary woman, but also am the many blessed by her remarkable spirit. One of the works she particularly cherished, a poem by William Cullen Bryant, comes to mind now that her life in this realm has come to an end. “Thanatopsis,” a meditation on death, provided Bryant a way of coping with the passing of many of his young classmates who succumbed to the ravages of 19th-century tuberculosis and plague. Nature soothed him; nature explained to him the endless mysterious cycle of life; nature comforted and caressed him.
I look now through the trees into the setting sun and watch the full glorious moon appear on the opposite horizon. Rest in peace, Martha.
