RIP: Miss Pirman

I didn’t even want to go to Nazareth Academy, at the time an all-girls Catholic high school in LaGrange. My older brother had gone to Immaculate Conception in Elmhurst, still Catholic, but co-ed. Why couldn’t I go there?

My Catholic father wouldn’t budge, believing that the nuns and lay teachers at Nazareth would be stricter, keep me more in line, and so less likely to get into the kind of trouble my brother did regularly at IC.

Well, yes and no. I mean, if one is prone to that kind of thing, the setting doesn’t really matter. Which is why when I get together with my fellow Naz grads—those eight “girls” who still live in the area—we have many funny stories to share of how we daily tested those nuns and teachers.

But I must add that in addition to our shenanigans, we were also fairly decent students, the lessons pouring in spite of ourselves.

For me, some of the most important lessons came from my high school English teacher, Miss Pirman. In fact, it’s probably not an understatement to say that had it not been for her, I would never have become a writer, and never 51 years after being her student, become an author.

It was my pleasure to show my gratitude to Miss Pirman in my book, Finding Your Voice, Telling Your Stories. In Chapter 3, “Telling Stories About People,” I describe her generosity and her influence, something I wish I could’ve done in person, long before she died last Tuesday at age 81, just one day after my 74^th birthday.

Miss Pirman is not the first of my high school teachers to die, but her death resonates more than the others. The following excerpt from my book—“People from High School”—might help explain why:

People from High School

High school is a critical time for most of us, so it is no wonder that many of our important, even dramatic, stories originate there: stories of classmates, best friends, and hated enemies; of dances, sports events, and talent shows; coming-of-age stories about first loves, finding our place among peers, finding even our life’s work.  For some there are dark stories as well, of troubles at home or at school.  And of course there are stories about the adults from that time: those teachers, coaches, and counselors who inspired us, saved us, or whom we barely survived.

            In my writing workshops, I regularly invoke the spirit of my freshman English teacher, Miss Pirman.  I’d arrived in her class ill prepared in the basics of English grammar and so she’d volunteered to tutor me on her own time after school, to help me catch up with the others.  I can still see us sitting there in that empty classroom, the thin autumn light coming through the windows, me hunched over at my desk, her next to me, that quiet, encouraging voice leading me through the monotonous grammar drills. 

            It was in that tedious process that Miss Pirman unwittingly instilled in me an enduring love of words, which she then recognized by publishing my first poem in our class anthology.  It was a bouncy little paen to a St. Bernard dog that I can recite to this day.

And if there is a heaven--the "Paradise" that Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, imagined "will be a kind of library”--then I imagine I’ll be seeing Miss Pirman again.