The Kemsen Crush

My 6-year-old son is in love with my teacher.

I mean his teacher.

Who used to be mine.

No, I don't mean she used to be mine. Not mine mine in the leather-jacket-wearing, hickie from Kenickie kind of way. I mean she used to be my teacher.

But I used to wish her to be mine in that other way. 

Well, no. I don't mean I'd wished she'd given me hickies. I don't think I knew what a hickie even was when I was 13. I just mean she was my first teacher crush. My only teacher crush, for that matter.

Her name is Kemsen and I wanted to marry her.

And now, it would seem, my son is similarly smitten.

Granted, I was in junior high when it happened to me, while Griffin is merely a first grader. Clearly his Kemsen Crush affection thermometer mercury level is much lower than mine was. Lower meaning that crushes in a 6-year-old still hover around 10 degrees while when you're a teenager they rise to a boiling point.

Now, for Heaven's sake, don't run out and Google every reference you can find about 'teacher-and-student scandals' and try to apply it to my situation. Relax. This was an innocent crush, and in no way was (or is) Kemsen anything more than a pure-as-the-driven-snow teacher. And neither was my crush on her anything untoward. I was a 13-year-old, 68-pound dork who attended the Church of Christ. I didn't start entertaining impure thoughts or slow dancing with girls or start masturbating until, like, a year ago.

This is merely my G-rated, crush-on-a-teacher story universally experienced by just about every student on the planet. Including, it would seem, my son. Poor little nearly-toothless bastard.

I met Kemsen for the first time while sitting in the fourth row, first seat, of an English class on the second floor of the Oxford Hills Junior High School in 1982.

I was 13 and wore a pair of tan/brown/light-colored (how the hell would I know?) corduroys that my mother had purchased during our typical last-minute school shopping trip to K-Mart in Lewiston the week before. I remember the pants because it was the first week of September and our school classrooms had these monolithic, almost cathedral-sized windows that converted sunlight into raw energy that was further absorbed by my pants. Aside from the whiff-whiff-whiff sound they made whenever I walked, I always smelled like burnt hair.

Most everyone else in my class wore non flammables that breathed. I wore haz-mat chic and got the same kind of withering glances from my peers that one now casts upon piles of dog shit. Or Wal-Mart greeters. They chattered about their summers, who they were dating, and how they were all going to the Auburn Mall that weekend to see Fast Times at Ridgemont High, even though it was rated R. I was not allowed to watch rated R movies until my first child was born 10 years later.

It was then, while avoiding any eye contact with, or addressing direct questions about my pants from, my classmates, that our teacher entered.

Kemsen floated into the room that day to the sound of Air Supply's  Lost in Love, with her Farrah Fawcett feathered curls and her brilliant Colgate smile. She crossed the front of the room clutching books that she laid down on her desk with the delicacy of a new mother putting a child in a crib. I think she even patted them.

I knew then, and there, that she would be a special kind of teacher. Because none of my other teachers cooed at dictionaries. Or smiled. Or liked kids. Or smelled like a swath of wildflowers in the fields of the Lord.

Shut the fuck up. I'm not exaggerating. 

"Hi class," she said. And that, I believe, is the only thing I recall her saying that very first hour or so of English class. Which is ironic because, while I believed myself to be fluent in the native tongue, I swear to God her voice triggered some sort of chemical anomaly in my brain that blocked any cognitive language comprehension whatsoever.

She would talk and her words would flutter out and over me like happy butterflies, but would make no sense. I watched her lips move. Intently. Trust me, I stared at them all the time, trying desperately to understand her. I turned to my best friend, Ted, and scowled. He was opening a book to page 4. I looked at Kemsen, who was still talking, but all I heard was the gibberish of muted vowels and underwater consonants, while the erratic hummingbird pulse of my heart scared the shit out of me.

What was happening to me? I wondered if corduroy could reach a high enough temperature that, at a molecular level it could eventually break down and pass through skin and cause blood poisoning and lead to eventual brain-swelling. (See: Sylvester Stallone)

The class ended with the bell and everyone gathered up their things and left, including me.

"Listen," I told Ted while whiff-whiff-whiffing down the hall. "I think I'm dying of brain swell."

"What?"

"I didn't understand a thing she said. Not one thing. Her lips moved but all I heard was, well, Charlie Brown teacherspeak."

"You have a crush on her."

"What?! No I don't! That's, like, gross!" I scolded him, but I suspected deep down that he was right. My own father had worked as a teacher and a school principal for all of my life and I recalled stories he told of star-struck girls who used to hang May baskets on him. Boy did that piss Mom off. (And soooo make me want to be a teacher. That and getting summers off.)

I tested the theory. I returned to school the next day because, well, that's the law. I took my seat in the fourth row, the row closest to the surface of the sun, and a foot from Kemsen's desk. I braced myself for her entrance, expecting her to do so on a silver-laced cloud, or in the escort of angels, or singing directly to me in French. (On the news the night before there had been a story about Jeanine Deckers, the Singing Nun, and I had Dominique on the brain. What? It's catchy and cute.)

She entered under none of these conditions, of course, because, let's face it, what public school system in Maine do you know of would allow teachers to be creative unless they paid for it themselves? Taxpayers don't pay for clouds, dude. Or angels. Or Belgian nuns with guitars. Or basic supplies.

Of course my heart started in again. Then came the breathlessness that arrives with anticipation and really cold weather. And confusion. And lack of focus. And a desire to break out into a rock ballad that has a pretentious orchestral bridge.

She stopped me in my tracks mentally and physically. I was in some sort of shock, yet I knew I was enduring it at the same time. A cruel dream-within-a-dream kind of emotional apoplexy. The kind of feeling you get that is so shattering that your mind embargoes its explanation for a minimum of 30 years. All you know, all you recognize, is the fact that you've been struck by something you don't understand.

In other words, love.

Please spare me your picayune postulations on true love verses infatuation versus admiration versus passion versus like versus obsession versus desire.

I was 13, for fuck's sake. Someone had just detonated a grenade in my soul. I was feeling something bigger than me. With all of its fuzzy, inexplicable, knee-weakening definitions. Get a law degree if you wanna argue semantics, you parent's-basement-dwelling, formula-fed loser.

Sorry. Anyway...

On accepting the truth of my condition, everything around me now became infused with her likeness. Songs I heard on the radio were naturally written for us like John Cougar's Jack and Diane. Or Waiting for a Girl Like You by Foreigner or Chariots of Fire, because every romance needs an instrumental. (Um...Duh. Hellooo??). The lead characters on my favorite television shows were now replaced in my mind by Andy and Kemsen. I was her Remington Steele, she my... my.... whatever the female character was in Remington Steele. My imagination was consumed by images of sunsets and songs, eternal love and lots of slow-motion runs on tropical beaches.

I loved everything about her. Her name. Her way of diagramming sentences. Her really cute one-shoe-sole-is-thicker-than-the-other trick. The fact that she used to be a cheerleader at the very same junior high school. The fact that she didn't ask me if I was visiting as part of a field trip for third graders.

She was, by her smile, the valentine that came when girls in my class conveniently forgot my name on their lists of cards to be handed out. Her presence was the lighthouse in the stormy pubescent seas of junior high school. Her's was the face that helped me realize that the faces of pretty girls were not to be figured out, but simply admired.

I spent that year in a fog. But as it turned out, I learned to love everything to do with English and reading and writing. The point is, I survived. I worked through my crush and came to understand something about the Human condition: we are supposed to be in love, we Humans. We are OK if we love our mentors, so long as its innocent. And, well, the music of the 1980s was awful, but that it's okay to love it nonetheless.

Now...what to do about Griffin.

He has Kemsen for his first-grade teacher and whenever he mentions her name, he glows like a bulb on a Christmas tree. It's adorable, really. And not lost on me, who came to be illuminated some time ago by her magic.

When I saw her again for the first time in years she had popped her head out of her classroom at the kid's elementary school. She'd migrated to the lower grades years before, I guess, but seeing her face still made me blush.

"How are you?!" she asked me and gave me a hug. Something I dreamed of getting so many years ago, but never did, to her credit as a professional. I think I heard angels, but I might be wrong.

"Hey. I saw...that...you. Teacher. Nice. Weather on the outside," I stammered.

Another couple stood a few feet away while Kemsen explained that I had been a student of hers "many years ago."

"He still blushes," the woman said. And I was. I could feel it, clearly.

I don't mind all these years later. I can appreciate now the effect a good teacher has on an absorbent student. Had she not entered my life at that moment, I may not have come to love what she loved: the written word. I find myself cooing over books all the time, as a matter of fact.

And what's more important is that Griffin loves her, whatever that means.

I think I do, and I think it's good, and pure, and cool as hell that he does and that he gets to see her every day.

Lucky bastard.