The Teacher Appears, by Tim Bulone

"You're wasting your time!" my high school chemistry teacher derided me after I had finished telling him what my college plans were (the local state college). It was an awkward moment in my senior year, the two of us alone in the main hallway. The stinging words reverberating for miles down endless corridors. He thought I could do better.

I was thinking about that interchange today, having just come from the Long Beach City College Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Yeah, LBCC Hall of Fame! I had no idea either. I would normally not attend such an event because, believe it or not, I am pretty shy, not big on small talk, definitely not big on crowds and I never attended LBCC. But, since my boss was one of the inductees, I had a good reason to go AND it included lunch.

Four people were inducted, a high school football coach, a political consultant, a poet and novelist and the last a Navy Admiral. What they had in common, it turns out, was finding a talent, working at it and making it their own. They each had a vivid story to tell about being led to discover some skill or behavior that would dramatically change the course of their lives and it involved often a specific teacher or teachers at City College. They all said that, at the time, they did not necessarily recognize the importance of those interactions. They had no idea that what they learned would so directly result in the successes they had experienced in life.

I can't really say how important it is to get into a "good" school. As the inductees found out, what they really needed were "good" teachers and for those four, they were found at City College. My chemistry teacher may have been right afterall, but not in the way he thought. I might have done better at City Colllege! I also wonder what little faith we have...that we are led to be at the right place at the right time to receive gifts that will bear such fruit. That someday, we will look back and say, oh yes, it was this moment that meant so much...and I didn't even know it. I find it humbling that such activity is in play, that when the student (literally) is ready, the teacher appears.

Tim Bulone is an ardent observer of life on the swirling blue marble. He works at Davis Group Consulting and creates fine art and canvas prints which he likes to sell from time to time at www.MyFamilyArt.com. He is an early morning pedestrian in Belmont Shore, where he resides with his wife.