"My arithmetic still needs improvement," I said, sliding my report card across the table to her, "but I'd like to think my printing is still worthy of your 'Excellent.' "
Julia picked up the card, and as I studied her smile in the candlelight, it occurred to me that I was still her student even 25 years later, still eager to please. And that she was still absolutely beautiful.
"My goodness... you kept this?" she said. "After all these years?"
"It was my last good report card, Julia," I joked. "Why wouldn't I keep it?"
The name "Julia" sounded strange on my lips. She was, and in many ways would forever be, Miss Russell. She had been my teacher in the second grade, and she was the first woman upon whom I had a hopeless, heart aching crush.
As I watched her study my report card, I thought about many things.
I was still in her classroom, sitting at a tiny desk with an inkwell, and I could still see her precise schoolteacher's hand on the blackboard, above which was every letter of the alphabet in careful script. Each letter was a model of textbook penmanship.
I could still hear the squeak of the chalk, and smell the paste we made from flour and water, the chunky slop that made even a small exercise book six inches thick. I could still see the mountains of paper on her desk, and I could still smell her perfume, the delicate scent I could swear she wore even today.
I could remember first walking into Miss Russell's class that September morning, and then feeling dry in the throat for a full school year. Of course, this wasn't like the crush I would have on Mrs. Crawford in the eighth grade, when an adolescent boy was trying to sort out all kinds of confusing messages being cross wired by his body and his brain. But this was every bit as magical, and even more so.
As a left-hander, I struggled with my printing, forever dragging my wrist through the ink of my cartridge pen, making an unholy mess of every sentence I tried. But Miss Russell was also left-handed, and she taught me a trick or two, taking my hand in hers, showing me how to angle the pen away from the wet ink.
I did all the silly things a smitten schoolboy does, volunteering to clean the blackboard erasers, tidy up the classroom. More than one day, I was still in the recess yard when she left for the day, not by accident, and I would make it a point to wave goodbye. To her, I was, and I remain, Andrew. Never the abbreviated Andy, never Drew, which I heard from my friends. Strangely, I felt like a grownup around her.
"Now that I think about it, Andrew, I remember you had trouble concentrating in arithmetic class."
Julia's voice brought me back from my daydreams, and I smiled at her recollection.
"Thank heaven for calculators, Julia," I replied. "I manage my taxes fine, but just don't ask me to decipher the Pythagorean theorem."
We laughed together, and I poured another glass of Beaujolais for us both.
I passed the second grade that year and moved on to the third, transferred to a new school closer to my home. I saw Julia seldom in the years that followed. With the attention span of a typical youngster, there were other things in my life. She was soon just a signature on a report card.
But through the years, I've often thought about her, lately more than ever. I still drive past that grade school a couple of times a week, and I have a few black and white photographs of her at her desk. I've even been back in the school's corridors when the building has been used as a polling station for municipal elections. Twice, I have gone back into room 3D; twice, I could still see Julia at her desk, at her blackboard. The desks with inkwells are gone, replaced by computer stations.
I went on to a good career in writing, living within the shadow of that school, and once in a blue moon I'd find that second-grade report card in my files. I'd laugh about my strong marks in penmanship (but only in the final term), and my weakness in arithmetic. Even then, Julia saw me headed for the creative arts, not the sciences.
And now, here we were, in the elegant dining room of a downtown hotel, 25 years after I left her class. I am looking at her, and surely she sees it in my eyes: I still have a crush on this lovely woman. A damp-palmed, short-of-breath, butterflies-in-the-stomach crush.
It's almost incredible how we have reconnected.
Much of my published work is online in various forms, feature stories and profiles written for magazines, newspapers and books in a half-dozen countries. I received an e-mail a year ago from a kind woman in New Zealand, named Julia according to her return address, telling me she had been touched by one of my stories. She closed with, "It's funny to think that I taught a boy in school many years ago who had the same name as you."
It took just one exchange of e-mails, and digging into my files to find my second-grade report card, to realize that this Julia was in fact MY Julia. Small world, indeed, and soon we were writing each other twice or three times a month, marking birthdays, sharing stories of the past and present.
She had taken early retirement and moved to Auckland, where she had married and divorced. But with friends and family still in Canada and no children to keep in school, she told me she came home every few years for an extended visit. Since our mutual rediscovery, we had arranged to meet on her next visit, and I made dinner reservations at the Ritz, a marvellous dining room in the city's best hotel.
No longer was I eight years old. I was 33. She was 54.
I met Julia in the lobby, and my heart nearly stopped when I saw her drift toward me, the cotton dress of muted pastels billowing gently around her summer-bare legs. She was every bit as graceful as I remembered her from the second grade.
I kissed her on both cheeks and hugged her tight. Gone were her horn-rimmed glasses in my pictures. She was fuller than the teacher I recalled and I loved how she looked and felt, pleasantly soft to my touch, womanly at the hips. Her hair was shoulder-length, a tousled, honey blonde. Once more, my mouth was dry.
So many years, so much water under the bridge. We were tucked away in a cozy corner of the restaurant as I had requested, in flickering candlelight, and we sipped our wine and ate our meals almost in slow motion. It was over coffee and dessert that I showed Julia my report card.
She was touched that it has meant so much to me over the years, and when she slid it back across to me, our fingers met, and she placed hers over mine, patting them.
"How wonderful to find you again after all these years," she said, not removing her hand, and the fire I felt was my blushing or the wine or a returning crush that was was nearly overcoming me.
