Welcome to "Tuesday Morning"—a place where problems are discussed and issues are challenged each week, to help Christians everywhere.

 

I graduated from high school sixty years ago next month. I tell strangers that I was so bright I graduated from high school when I was thirteen, but I was neither 13 nor bright when I graduated from high school in 1949. However, I am still alive, which is more than can be said of more than a third of my graduating class!

 

I don't remember all of my high school teachers, but there are a few that I will never forget. No doubt you can say the same thing. Anna Elam was one of those teachers. She was head of the English Department at my high school in Glendale, California. As a sophomore, I was enrolled in her English I and II classes. Not everyone appreciated Miss Elam's commitment to accurate spelling and proper grammar, but I was one that did.

 

I enjoyed her classes so much that in my senior year I signed up for two of her elective courses, "Senior Comp I and II." We wrote essays and dabbled in short stories, but Miss Elam used the course to introduce us to some of the outstanding American writers of the 19th Century. Two of those writers—Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson—were on Miss Elam's short list of great writers. Initially, I was attracted to these two writers because they were from New England, where my dad grew up. Because of my dad I felt an indirect connection to them. As Miss Elam read from Emerson and Thoreau, I experienced an attraction that was beyond casual. I read their essays, poems, and speeches, and I wanted to be very much like them. Miss Elam was the one responsible for pointing me in their direction.

 

This week's "Tuesday Morning" is dedicated, as it were, to the memory of Anna S. Elam. Continue reading below whenever you are ready. And then prepare to reminisce about the mentors from your youth. You will be glad that you did.

 

Tom Barnard

A Very Senior Encourager

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Miss Elam

Tom Barnard

 

 remember Miss Elam very well. Her first name was Anna, but she was always known simply as “Miss Elam.” She taught me how to write when I was a high school sophomore. She was a short, plain-looking, older lady with thinning hair. I suppose she liked me because I had learned how to structure sentences long before I was assigned to her English composition class, and I knew the components of grammar. She saw something in me that I did not see in myself—a love for words.

 

But that is not why I remember her so well. I remember her for introducing me to two philosopher-writers from 19^th Century New England—Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. I discovered their writings in a senior-level elective course in advanced composition. And who taught that class? Miss Elam, or course. It was a small class that allowed for more direct teacher-student contact. I became so impressed with Emerson and Thoreau that in an essay assignment on “What I Want to Do When I Leave High School,” I said that I would like be a naturalist—like my two new heroes. I had no idea what a naturalist was or did. But it sounded more interesting than being a lawyer, doctor, or politician.

 

Emerson’s transcendentalism was just a long word to me. And unlike Thoreau, I had no interest in non-violence, environmentalism, civil disobedience, and simple living. I was captured by the writings of these men who changed the thinking of people in New England more than a century before I was born. I loved to read about Walden Pond and Concord, even before learning anything about the war that made Concord famous. It wasn’t the times of these men that interested me. It was what they said and how they said it.

 

Here is a sample of the ideas and thoughts that captured my mind and heart:

 

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.” –Thoreau, in Walden

 

“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but is braver five minutes longer.” –Emerson

 

“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.” –Thoreau

 

“Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.” –Emerson

 

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” –Thoreau, in The Ponds

 

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” –Emerson

 

“I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.” –Thoreau, in Solitude

 

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.” –Emerson

 

“I have learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” –Thoreau, in Conclusions.

 

By comparison with the Psalms of David the King, these words are not nearly as elegant. But still, they are words worth preserving from one generation to the next. Thank you, Miss Elam, for the heritage you gave me when I was looking for a teacher with wisdom at her fingertips.