I hung up feeling like I’ve had this conversation before. For one thing, my family is huge. My father is one of ten siblings. I’m one of twenty-five first cousins on my father’s side. Many of us went into teaching: my father, my uncles Red, John, and Joe, my aunt Betse, and my cousins Brian, Jackie, Jennifer, Nikki, and Stephanie, while cousins Alicia and Michelle are finishing college and planning on going into teaching. Several cousins are still too young for college, including Joseph, who is in middle school. And if I want to get really crazy, I can throw in my mother, my step-father, an aunt on my mother’s side, and god-knows how many second cousins. I lost track.
Another fairly significant bunch went into law enforcement. One standing joke in the family is that you can’t spit in New Haven without hitting a Courtmanche. The other one is that everyone in New Haven knows at least one Courtmanche relative. Half the city has been taught by one of us and the other half has been arrested by one of us. Sometimes both. In truth, my uncle Wayne is a corrections officer in Cheshire, where there’s a prison for juvenile offenders. When he first began working there over twenty years ago, he was escorting a kid to his cell, and seeing the name on my uncle’s badge, the kid said, “Hey, you related to Mr. Courtmanche, the principal at Cross?†Wayne said, “Yeah, he’s my brother.†The kid said, “Hey, tell him hi. He’s a cool dude.†Like me, that was not the last time Wayne had that conversation.
Growing up in New Haven, I found it a blessing and a curse to have so many teachers and cops in my family. It was cool when a party got busted and some cop who knew me let me and my friends go without arresting us, but the thrill of such an opportunity was fleeting because I knew that cop would be calling my grandfather (a retired former chief of police) the next day, and I would catch hell on Sunday when I went to my grandparents’ for dinner. I also found that I made it through high school with virtually no traffic tickets, despite being a typically reckless male teen driver. Of course every Sunday my grandfather would take me aside in the driveway, pull out one of his ubiquitous notebooks, and tick off a laundry list of violations he had gotten calls about. He had even gone so far as to give me one of his old license plates for my car so that it was easy for his old friends on the force to keep track of me.
The experience of having lots of teachers in the family was less punitive—though it certainly could have been. I went to a Catholic high school, and we had two sister schools. One was the now-closed Saint Mary’s in New Haven. One day when we boys got out early on a nice spring day (OK, maybe we cut our afternoon classes) a bunch of us peeled off our jackets and ties and drove downtown to St. Mary’s. St. Mary’s had the unfair reputation of having lower academic standards than our other sister school, and so in our adolescent minds we correlated this with elevated levels of promiscuity among the girls. Thus the inspiration for our sojourn that spring afternoon. We snuck into the school and got caught by a bunch of the nuns, who dragged us into the head nun’s office. She was like the principal and mother superior rolled into one. I was placed in a line before her desk with five of my friends (some got away). We felt like we were on trial. Then, after several minutes of awkward silence in that very warm office, the head nun shouted, “John, I’m deeply disappointed to find you involved in these shenanigans!†We all looked over at our friend John, whose head was hung especially low. Then John replied, “I’m sorry Aunt Joan. Please don’t tell Mom!†And at that moment I thought, my god I know that feeling! I should point out that John is now a cop in New Haven. Funny how these things come around.
It makes me think of the Physician’s Tale from Chaucer, in which the physician tells of a knight who is looking to hire a governess for his beautiful daughter, who has just turned twelve and is at risk of becoming “too soon ripe and bold.†And the physician says that he has advice for governesses: “And you mistresses in your old life/that lord’s daughters have in governance,/never take of my words no displeasure:/think that you be set in governings/of lords’ daughters only for two things:/Either for you have kept your honesty,/or else for you have fallen in frailty,/and know well enough the old dance,/and have forsaken fully such mischance for evermore.†He then tells us that the best governess is like a poacher who becomes a game keeper, and sure enough it is the formerly wanton woman that the knight hires to be governess to his daughter. She is best prepared to recognize the perils to which the young girl might fall.
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