Pat ad Nyel

When I first began teaching in Ocean Beach School District in 1978, John Snyder was a second grade teacher at Hilltop School which, for a few years, housed all the primary grades except for Margaret Staudenraus’s two  Kindergarten classes at Ocean Park.  When I was assigned first grade just across the hall from John, I asked him a little bit about the social studies curriculum.

“Oh, I always start the year by teaching about Australia,” he told me.  The more I questioned, the more I learned  — mostly that when it came to social studies,  most elementary teachers taught what they, themselves, found interesting.  There really wasn’t a curriculum.   “I always start by asking the  kids how many of them have been to Australia,” John told me.  “There are always a few hands that go up.”

Laura and Don

“This year,” he went on, “one kid said that he and his family go to Australia every year just before school starts. ‘We all get our new school shoes in Australia,’ he told me.  He thought the ride across the bridge was the best part.”

I thought of that tonight as Nyel and I went on our first outing since his Tuesday homecoming.  We were heading for the Bridgewater Bistro where, once or twice a year, a group of old friends get together for dinner and reminiscing.  Catalysts for this gathering are Don McQuarrie and Laura Creekman who lived on the  Peninsula (gulp) thirty (?) years ago and then moved with their young family to Lynden, WA.  During those years that I taught first grade and John taught second grade, Don was just shouting distance down the hall with a class full of third graders! (If you know Don, you understand my ‘shouting’ reference.)

It’s a disparate group that gathers at the Bistro.  Owners Ann and Tony are central to the group although they are always too busy being restaurateurs to actually sit at table with us.  Chris and David Jensen, Pat and Noel Thomas, and Nyel and I make up the rest of the crew.  Although some of us see one another at other times during the year, as a group it’s so seldom that we get together that we spend most of our time catching up.  And laughing.  We’re all good at that!

Tonight, of course, Nyel held center stage much of the time — not a place that he feels very comfortable as a rule.  But, everyone had questionsand even some advice.  Nyel, as usual, said little, listened closely, and ate heartily.  After all… there’s hardly anything more fun than our Annual Dinner in Australia!

Annual Dinner Party at the Bistro