Notes from public school - day 103

Notes from public school - day 103


As a teacher and a writer, I’m always trying to find ways and means to ‘build a better human,’ in the life of a student, in the life of a story, in the life of myself.

Today, I’ve been thinking a lot about the people who shape us and make us into who we are.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom.

Here is a small (yet big) way that she made me Trevor.


When I was a little boy, I would carry my blanket with me wherever I would go.

it was as if Linus had made his way out of the Peanuts comic strip in the Greenville News and come to live at 2701 East Lee Road in Taylors, S.C.

I named my blanket boo boo because it was there to soothe my boo boo’s when I fell down onto the asphalt of the road or the concrete of my driveway and scraped my knee, was there to strengthen the boo boo’s of my heart if someone said something unkind and I needed the courage to say, “Apologize and take it back,” was there to save the boo boo’s in my soul if I woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream.

In every way it was my security blanket, and I knew I could turn bad things good by just having my Boo Boo beside me.

As I look at my blanket, I see a seam from a time I couldn’t find my mom inside of our house.

I ran outside the front door toward my elderly neighbor’s house crying at the top of my little lungs, “I can’t find my momma! I can’t find my momma!”

I felt the gentle, wrinkled, bony touch of Mrs. Tooke’s hand on my shoulder as she guided me around her plum tree to my fence and whispered, “There she is right there. She’s hanging out the clothes on the clothesline.”

I threw my blanket over the fence to try to use it as a rope to climb to my mom and caught it on the barbs along the rim of the steel poles and ripped it right through the middle of it’s soft, cotton face.

Mom stitched it up as if she were a doctor stitching up a wayward wound on a broken child.

I run my fingers along those stitches, and feel the scar on my blanket that reminds me of the time it helped me find my lost mom.

After all the years, I faintly smell the clean, comforting smell of the detergent and fabric softener mom used day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year to clean my clothes and my blanket and to say, “I love you.”

I feel her holding my hand.

I hear her listening to me.

Nope, I don’t carry my blanket with me anymore.

But I do.

I hope I can be a blanket, a boo boo, to my students and to the world.