The way she nervously consulted her notes reminded me that I hadn’t always disliked Bea Myerly. There was a time in those early days when I appreciated her hard work, her thoughtful questions and studious nature. Mostly, though, I pride myself on my fondness for the misfit student. Somehow, however, over time, Bea had imperceptibly crossed the line to become my least favorite student ever.
“Why did you choose history to be your life’s work?”
“The truth?”
“Always.”
“Well, Bea, I became a historian to escape the tyranny of being the small non-basketball-playing son of arguably the third-most-successful coach in the history of women’s Division III college basketball.”
“Do you care to elaborate?”
Apparently, I did. “History brought me comfort. No matter how bad things got when I was growing up, I knew somewhere in history there was a story or an account of someone enduring a worse experience.”
“So for you, history was a way to feel good about yourself?”
“Well, we’re talking about when I was eight or nine. Some kids set off fireworks or shot frogs with their BB guns. I read Herodotus. I read Gibbon. The Bible, even, although as an historical document, it’s rather suspect. History helped me deal with it all.”
Bea was too busy searching her notes for a next question, so I continued uninterrupted. “You see, Bea, the great gift we give others is the permission to change us. Please, enter my world, leave me bettered, leave me smarter, leave me more alive, but above all, change me. History is about how we change. History is about why we change. History is about what happens when we don’t, when we resist. History is . . .”
A smarter man would’ve stopped. Me? Desperate for the right words, I flailed on: “History is . . . the great collective . . . ball of stuff . . . from which we . . . uhm . . .”
With that, Bea Myerly stood up and quickly gathered her things.
“Wait—is that it?” I asked.
“Ten minutes, Mr. Welch. You were very clear.”
“But I could spare a few more minutes . . .”
A few? It was now one entire ninety-minute audiocassette later. I even stopped midsentence while Bea ran out to buy more blank tapes.
I have to give her credit. For the last hour and a half, she’d been listening with the contented smile of a lottery winner. And who could blame her? Not only was Mr. Welch sharing secrets, he seemed to be enjoying himself. I even joked at one point, “Oh, the catharsis of it all.” Bea did her part, sighing along with me in the appropriate places, her eyes welling up as she heard how the coach’s son couldn’t dribble a basketball, how I was too short to play, how I was uncoordinated and bruised easily and was not inspired by the dank smell of locker rooms. So what did little Timmy Welch do? I became a scholar of the game. I learned the difference between a 2-1-2 zone and a 2-3 zone, the pros and cons of the four-corner offense, when to full-court press, the correct hand placement and wrist flick for a set shot. My bedroom became a shrine to the Cayton College Lady Revolvers, and I became the ball boy/unofficial stat keeper/special assistant coach/unpaid team scout and the backup team mascot once I was tall enough to fill out the life-size foam-rubber silver bullet.