The dirty blonde who made the world come into focus

Let's face it; he was a lousy teacher. Boys teased him mercilessly for his skinny build and tight little '70s button-down shirts. Every day he stood at a podium in front of 25 12-year-olds, reading verbatim the social studies lesson he had meticulously written on a clump of index cards. Dozing was as polite as we got.

When he didn't show up one morning, we brightened slightly at the prospect of terrorizing The Substitute, as was our middle-school credo. From the looks of her, the victim at hand was ripe for the picking. She was shaped like a two-day-old brown-bag lunch, stains on her sweatshirt and dirty blonde hair that looked like it hadn't seen shampoo since Nixon took office five years earlier. She kept stabbing at the bread-slice-thick glasses on her nose. This was going to be easy. Most of us settled into our folded arms for a catnap until the bell.

The Substitute took a steady look at her yawning acolytes and barked out in a high nasal voice, "Why don't we biff out the lesson plan for today?" Silence. "Is there anything you children would like to talk about, ask about in the field of social studies?" Nothing. More dust snow-flaked onto prone heads on desks.

One hand went up despite the dirty looks lobbed over from the cooler boys. "What is this thing I keep hearing about called 'Watergate' anyway?"

We settled in.

She furrowed her brow for a minute, as if assessing her prey, and then began.

"One night, a security guard at a major Washington, D.C., office complex was doing his rounds when he saw something quite strange. Flashes of light were coming through the transom window of an office down the hall. When he quietly approached a door, the guard noticed something even stranger... "

There was a mild rearranging of head positions so we could follow this beauty.

"Somebody had put a piece of electrical tape on the door jam to keep the bolt pulled in. But why?

"The guard called the cops, they asked for backup — and when they burst through the door a few minutes later, you know what they saw?"

"What?" Someone actually wanted to know.

"Five well-dressed men in suits rifling through files."

A question slipped out despite the credo. "Who were these guys?"

Pacing the room, her voice rising in quiet intensity, she unfurled facts like a fan dancer letting the costume fall away. The story came tumbling out like an unstoppable Hitchcock film that we didn't have a clue had even started. What information were they after? Who were they trying to incriminate? Why? Hands began to shoot up with questions. People began to argue with her. Of course, the president didn't know about it. He can't do that.

Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean — even the pornographically famous Deep Throat. Names we heard somewhere in the backburners of pre-adolescent oblivion suddenly fell into context. A context we heard our parents clucking over watching the evening news but never bothered to ingest.

A coffee-stained newspaper was fished out of the rubbish can and four kids fought over what page to look for with that day's installment of American history beginning to breathe sparks. Two kids read out an excerpt from Woodward and Bernstein's reportage to back up their point, when suddenly the bell interrupted her answer.

"Well? Is it true?" someone demanded. No one was willing to move toward the door. We were mad and she owed us a decent ending. "Did the president really know about this?"

The Substitute turned, walked back to her desk and settled into the Buddha position we had met her in nearly 60 minutes before. She smiled and pushed her glasses up on her nose, one more time.

"Read tomorrow's paper," was all she said.

All it took was about an hour. In that time, what was proclaimed with thesurety of childhood suddenly became moving ground beneath our adult-sized Keds. No one ever imagines you can reach back into your personal history and pinpoint the single hour when the world outside suddenly came into focus.

We would be the generation that grew up to Richard Nixon's resignation speech broadcast over summer-camp loudspeakers that next year. Hundreds of campers danced around the speaker poles holding hands, singing, "Ding Dong, the Wicked Witch is Dead!" Too young to understand what he had done to the course of the American presidency, our pre-pubescent wisdom told us simply that he was a liar, and that stank. We would be the generation dogged by one question: Who are our arbiters of truth?

That morning, we changed in a way we couldn't have articulated then. Stamped on each of us was an imperative: Armed with this information, there was no turning back — you must now choose how you will engage in the world. It is a coda most of us still struggle to interpret. It is a coda I only remember with any semblance of passion when I remember her. When did political indignation quietly age to become conversations on the machinations of the world?

She played us like a pair of deuces, and we still won. Her gift was surreptitiously wrapped in a dirty blonde brown bag the depth of which we never could have guessed some 60 minutes earlier.

It has taken me more than three decades to come to understand her beauty that day.

If you read this one morning and recognize yourself as that teacher who, more than 30 years ago, gave us a first glimpse outside our adolescent mooring to see how we might begin to fit into the puzzle of the world beyond ourselves, I have only one more question to ask of you. That much I owe your tattooed memory.

I never caught your name.