An Unexpected Gift from Mom

This afternoon as I was going through another of Mom's boxes, I found an envelope addressed to me and never mailed. In it was the following with a Post-It attached which stated, "Honey, When I re-read this, I realized this was my version of your blog."

Mom may not be physically in my life anymore, but emotionally and spiritually, she is still teaching me lessons.

One More Lesson

I came to Duke in September 1941 with a better than average scholastic background and, by and large, had not much difficulty with freshman subjects. Actually my first contact with learning on the more detailed, precise, for-me-new college level came in zoology 1 under the guidance of a scrumptious looking red-headed bombshell named Katherine Jeffers.

I enjoyed the factual material; of the course and was so utterly fascinated with the lab work that I rarely managed to do the dissection and write-up the work in the lab manual at the same session. I consistently volunteered to help absentees do make-up work and by this guise was able to remove four frog brains instead of the normally allotted one to a student.

I must be one of the few students who failed utterly on an important exam because of too much interest in the subject. The second semester included three “quizzes” only; the last on Arthnopeta inclusively. As I began to review the night before the exam, I became so entranced with the segment on insects that I never got any further and didn’t even realize I hadn’t until I looked at the question sheet. At that point realization was such a shock that I forgot everything and got a 46 on the exam and a D in a course that I still remember with precise detail.

The elusive ingredient here was the professor. She didn’t lead; she only pointed the way and I found the superb excitement of finding out by myself the basic likenesses of protozoa and life in its most complex form. Never once did she say look for God in the laboratory, but I know that because of her I found a quiet reassurance in the like beauty and basic simplicity in everything I see and touch.

I loved school, enjoyed and was thrilled just with learning and for this I am grateful to many people, but to Miss Jeffers for this special kind of wonder that brings me joy every day I live.

Today I learned another lesson from this good friend. Baron and I were enjoying the Sunday paper with breakfast when he said quietly, “Katherine Jeffers died in Cleveland this week.”

I had the awful feeling of a child who is next in line when the last lollypop is given out. For four years, Miss Jeffers had been at Jackson – so close – and yet I never got to see her. We talked often on the phone, but I never quite made the extra effort to go to Medford – less than twenty miles.

Feeling this frustrating sense of too-lateness, I am trying to recall others I must tell what they have meant to me – and through me, to others.

That I am now thirty-six; that this will happen to me much more often; that I must prepare my thinking now to deal with this dreadful knowing that I have waited too long – this is the one more lesson. Like the other lessons fifteen years previous – she didn’t do more than point – or need to.

God bless Katherine Jeffers.

By Kaye Mayer 1959