Nobody Ever Retires, Even After They’re Dead [1] by J Bradley Minnick

Mr. Balding, our 5th grade Social Studies teacher, was so old that the Germans shot the hair from his head on two separate occasions and in two separate wars. Mr. Balding was so old that he hated and despised discussing his age. He was so old that the hairs in his ears had fossilized and had grown longer than the hair on his head. He was so old that his cataracts had cataracts. He was so old that he couldn’t remember being our age. And, yet, in a weak attempt to connect to what he imagined to be our violent sensibilities, once a month, or so, some military and patriotic force compelled him to tell gory and graphic war stories from behind the full view of the obit page of Peoples Gazette—our local and irregularly published bi-weekly.

I have to admit that although all of the boys in the class regaled in Mr. Balding’s stories, these were not the kinds of tales you really wanted to listen to more than once. They were filled with blood, guts, lost limbs, and broken hearts, yes, but before getting to what the boys in class called “the good parts,” Mr. Balding, while sitting at his desk from behind the Peoples Gazette, was hell-bent on waxing interminably about the finer points of attack theory, defensive maneuvers, battlefield conduct, and ethics.

He would, with a deft touch, roll down one of his many ancient and yellowing maps—which hung about his room encased in small metal-submarines mounted to the walls. Mr. Balding would discover his rubber-tipped pointer in the corner, and we’d soon be off: he pointing to the most significant foreign squiggles: World War I: the battle of Verdun, Sommes, the first battle of Passchedaele, and the Third Battle of Mount Sorrel.

Snapping the pointer like a crop and hitting the bejesus out of the maps: “World War II: Guadalcanal—XIV Corps Advance,” SNAP! Rat-tat-tat!; “10 January-9 February 1943; Iwo Jima 1944”—SNAP! Rat-tat-tat!

Then, he would wheel out his ancient reel-to-reel film projector, plug it into the wall, chancing sure electrocution, carefully negotiate the celluloid from metal canisters—CONFIDENTIAL—wind the film through the various intricacies of the machine, push, click, and reset a variety of levers, attach the stray and flapping end of the film to the, as yet, empty spool, and with the flick of the lights and the upstart of grinding of gears, set the black and white war in motion against a background of maps.

Grainy war films: the click-clattering of the film projector’s grinding gears—STACATTO—not unlike that of a sub-caliber machine gun, were narrated by Mr. Balding’s grainy voice. The smell of the nitrate film called to mind the scent of gunpowder, and set Mr. Balding to coughing as if an unctuous and rusty mortar shell had lodged deep in his throat. Shown against the strategic backdrop of the maps, airplanes flew through the air spitting Gatling gun fire from their turrets and sprinkling bombs, whose clouds rose up like angry eyes toward our faces, blinding us, penetrating us, keeping us glued to our seats amidst the heat-weary room.

Yet, for all of his high-minded lectures, we felt as if our souls were being ignored. In Mr. Balding’s world, we suspected, while sitting in the dark, an even more pernicious darkness. 

During class, we tried to ask questions, but like his Friday quizzes, he gave us nothing in return; and because we just didn’t know what else to do, the worst part of our natures emerged as we sat in the darkness and watched the silent armies march past in unerring and unending rows, line-after-line; and we became terrible, caustic and cruel to each other.

In my case as I listened to my classmates’ grumble and spit at each other, I began to forget there was such a thing as classroom civility. Yet, I detested rudeness and respected the honorable. I think this was because of my father, who in November of my 5th grade year, expired in my arms. At the moment of his death, I became convinced that his soul, during my earnest chest compressions on his lifeless shell and my vain attempts to breath life into his soft lips—far softer than I ever imagined—had entered my body and, as if bitten by Peter Parker’s radioactive spider, had forever altered my DNA. My father had taught me one thing over and over from a very young age—to stand up, not to let slights, off-color jokes or unkindness, in any of its forms, go without comment.

After his death, I made people explain most everything they did or said. This, as you might well imagine, made for a lot of confusion and a great deal of fighting with the children and teachers of Peoples Elementary. Dr. Mark Luxon, Peoples’ Elementary guidance counselor, took on my particular case.

“Daniel Stark”—Luxon wrote in my file—“ is an angry young man, who has internalized his inability to save his father and is convinced that in order to keep his father’s spirit alive, he has to materialize, in exaggerated ways, aspects he feels represent the better parts of his father’s nature. This manifests itself in an inability to tolerate anything at all that he feels is wrong. That is to say, what is wrong is wrong—there are no gray areas.”

The aspects of my personality to which Dr. Luxon alluded—anger and ultimately fighting—were true enough. Still, with all his interviews and interventions, reports and recommendations, special accommodations and boundaries that were set and then pushed back and set again, Dr. Luxon could not, no matter how much ink he used, draw my full-portrait.

That year, I had had my nose broken no less than three times—twice by the hands of bigger boys (Stewie House and Bart “Mouth” Johnson) who were mean-spirited bullies and about which I cited a list of “crimes against humanity and peace” and once by a hearty girl (Monica Heart), who I called a “know-it-all.” Once one’s nose is pounded flat or out of shape and it shifts to one side of the face, by nature, one should think better of inserting it into the wrong place again, but truth be told, I rather enjoyed the pain of fighting and because oppression is ever-present, I sought to stamp it out completely. 

My face, as you might well imagine, had become somewhat of a mess and because one’s nose is so permanently featured in the center of it—the rude and the unselfconscious, the prankster and the prickster, the arrogant jokester’s baiting barbs most suddenly came into view as sudden tests.

I knew life was not fair.  I knew whomever believed it was, was for sure a fool. The meek may well inherit the earth but sure as shooting, they were not going to inherit any part of Peoples Elementary.

Thus, in 5th grade, I was intolerant of rude words. I would not tolerate unkindness toward any creature—animal, adult or child.  I couldn’t conceive of any real reason for the passive voice. And, I was unwilling to hide behind my horribly deformed nose—instead, it was my Purple Heart and I wore it with pride—you could deal with me or just walk away.

In contradiction, my high standards of decorum for others did not apply to Mr. Balding. At the sight of him sitting there smugly behind his newspaper, I felt some inner part of myself slink away, as did the content of my character, which horrifyingly turned into a muted, stilted silence and a difficult to reconcile contradiction for me. 

The sad fact was Mr. Balding was a terrible teacher—one who did not care and did not care that he did not care, and he was well past his prime—if indeed, he had ever had one. Truth was because he didn’t care, we didn’t care either. Most of us found one excuse after another to ignore him, yet for some strange reason, I was fascinated by him:  I defended him—in the chow line, over dreary over-heated MREs (meals rejected by the enemy), on the playgrounds for war, around the gathering spot beneath the big light pole, in the latrine with the MREs that refused exit, and on the school bus, even. 

As I sat in the atomized darkness of Mr. Balding’s room, I considered how alone each of us ultimately is—wholly alone with the thoughts of ourselves— seriously and terrifically alone even amidst others—more alone than the tomb of the unknown soldier, more alone than the names of the glorious dead inscribed into the numerous war memorials, which were reflected in the dense focused beam of the film projector and onto the maps—ultimately and completely alone and forced to face our ultimate rewards, alone then, too.

The beginning of the real problem occurred when one April day when Mr. Balding’s film projector suddenly broke. The machine had been crippled before—once the back arm hurled its metal reel toward the maps as if in disgust. Throughout the year, Mr. Balding’s ancient war films were invariably snapping, stopping short, or just refusing to be threaded.

Mr. Balding, as old as he was, produced a flashlight and with articulate and nimble fingers (together with a trusty splicing kit) found a way to patch together the celluloid in less than 15 minutes, while the rest of us sat in dread darkness until the monotone of the sad out-of-date machine started up again.

I must admit that although I refused comment, I had had enough of everything—the maps, the war films, Mr. Balding’s scripts and his blasted newspaper. I had had enough of sitting in the dark in a 5th grade classroom, unable to discuss, analyze or make connections with others about the terrible over-and-over again images.

Dr. Mark Luxon said later in the Peoples Gazette that I suffered markedly similar symptoms to post-traumatic stress. He said, “Daniel Stark lifted a finger to help and his ‘helpful’ attempts actually exacerbated his own situation.”

While I sat in the dark gazing at a montage of airplanes that played cat and mouse through the skies firing at each other with random precision, the bright bulb that kept the projector alive suddenly burst behind my head and the room was thrust into total darkness. Glass shards were catapulted through the entirety of the classroom, and I remember instinctively grabbing the back of my head. The loss of light was so sudden and immediate that none of us quite knew what was happening. We were all caught in the middle of a firefight—this accompanied by a sudden burst of Mr. Balding’s voice, raised to a fever pitch.

“Stay down everyone! Keep you heads down for Christ’s sake. Don’t move a muscle until I can access the situation.” Quite suddenly, the boring and long-winded Mr. Balding turned into a shadow of action that moved with purpose towards the back of the room and his disabled machine. I covered my head and silently waited for further instruction. My brain—only working at half-speed—stifled the evolutionary response to flee.

“Button it up, shut your pie-holes. Pay close attention, men.” The machine that had all but quivered and died suddenly and completely without warning began to emit a noxious smoke. I think I was among the first to realize that the sudden light now coming from behind my head was the product of the film having caught fire.

I dared to look back and watched the spinning arm of the ancient machine surrounded in flames, which pitched forward and back, and hurled the fire ball toward the front of the room, narrowly missing Rainy Rector’s pigtails and landing in the smack-middle of the Peoples Gazette, whose pages lay abandoned and splayed like a blanket over Mr. Balding’s desk. Then, the paper along with what must have been numerous (perhaps the whole catalogue) of Mr. Balding’s film scripts were set ablaze—the flames jumping across his desk, lit so suddenly and unexpectedly that I can only imagine when the majority of the class members opened their eyes, they thought they still saw Mr. Balding sitting behind his desk reduced before us to ash.

That we couldn’t see him but still heard his voice in the dark, didn’t make sense. The fire was growing by degrees.

“Would somebody please turn on the lights?”

But no one did.

Lights themselves just weren’t something that we didn’t think much about in this room.

Suddenly, Mr. Balding was up in front of us using the wooden pointer to heroically battle the conflagration. He didn’t screw around—he was ready to save us all. And, we stood right up in our seats in the dark and we hooted and we hollered and we screamed as the Blitzkrieg swept across Poland, France, Stalingrad—and the rest of the maps; Mr. Balding battled the demon flames in the Balkan Campaign. The fire had now jumped up and caught the furl of the large American flag that sat perched in the corner of Mr. Balding’s room almost touching the floor.

Mr. Balding stood poised in front of us wielding the burning flag, which he held a good distance from his body. He was putting an end to his beloved projector, smashing it again and again as if it just wouldn’t die—and after he had thoroughly completed this mission, the projector reduced to a heap of gears and screws and separate parts all over the floor, he made his way around the room and deftly beat the flag against the burned-up maps. I think I was the first to recognize that something was just not right and that Mr. Balding who, in microcosm, was valiantly attempting to save us, was, in macrocosm actually killing us all.

The whole room was now on fire around us—burning scripts and maps daring to alight the walls.

I can honestly say that for perhaps a minute, I just stood there like everyone on top of my desk and cheered along with so many others until I realized what I was clapping and hooting and hollering about.

As written later in Peoples Gazette: “What heroic acts did Daniel Stark call upon? Was he wise and prudent? Was he methodical? Yes! Did he gather the class together and carefully walk a cluster of awe-struck pupils through the door? Yes! Did he find a way to help the other trapped students crawl out of the partially opened windows? Three cheers, yes!  

 “What Daniel Stark did might well have been exactly the wrong thing to do, but as it turned out, the paramedics remarked, it was exactly ‘the right thing to do.’ He returned after helping the children exit the burning room and he returned to save his beloved teacher, who had fallen in the front of his room and was still holding onto the smoldering flag, which he would not let touch the floor and dragged Mr. Balding into to the safe confines of the hallway. And, even with badly burned hands, Daniel Stark found the strength to begin mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions on Mr. Balding’s broken shell. Mr. Balding, who, after almost a half a century of fighting so long ago, first as a teenager and later as a 36 year old veteran, fought this time with his student Daniel Stark once more valiantly to save us all.” ^[2]

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^[1]              Taken from a story by Ruiz

^[2]              Peoples Gazette, “Daniel Stark Saves Day: Hero of Real Firefight: Beloved Teacher Falls But Survives.”

Bradley J Minnick

Title Image: L.K. Sukany courtesy of the author

Banner Image by Thomas from Pixabay