The Dam Ham

I am not sure that is a time in my life when I didn’t enjoy a good story. I can still trace the phases of my reading life back to elementary school. I can remember loving Encyclopedia Brown and The Sugar Creek Gang in elementary school. That was followed closely by reading the Black Stallion and the rest of the books in that series after my childhood neighbor, Patrick Morel, told me to tell my mom we were going uptown to go shopping at Woodwards and he snuck me into watch the movie at the old Paramount movie theater on Columbia Street in New Westminster. A few years later I remember sitting in my sister Margaret’s room, reading her collection of Agatha Christie books. I still have a bunch of them in my basement. I was disappointed years later to see a TV series on her that showed her to be an older woman; in 8th grade I pictured her more as a young, vibrant, sexy Nancy Drew type. I still don’t know if I pronounce “Poirot” the right way.

But none of these books in and of themselves instilled in me a desire to teach English. The truth is, I don’t know that there is one moment that made me sit bolt upright in bed and I firmly knew what my calling in life would be. . But I do remember the first time I laughed out loud at a book and I do remember thinking then that being an English teacher might actually be fun. Up to that point, literature had been quite a serious thing: murder mysteries, adventure stories, and of course Bible stories—none of which we could laugh at, even if we thought they were funny because that would be disrespectful.

I was sitting in Mrs. De Jong’s English 10 class. Through not fault of hers, I decided that I was going to be a pain-in-the-donkey in her class. And I was. I was full value for my discipline notices and after school detentions and phone calls home. But I also remember that for a few brief weeks, that class-to this day-was my favorite class ever. I had only heard of the book To Kill a Mocking bird, and it was unfathomable to me that any book that the school decided we needed to read could actually be worthy of my attention.


But I loved that book from the moment I started reading it. I read it in less than a week from the first day it was assigned, and then I read it again. I loved it so much that if we ever had a son I wanted to name him Atticus. Our school still teaches that book, and sadly not many of my students have much good to say about the novel. Part of me gets that, because I didn’t have much to say about other books I read in school at that time (I mean, The Stone Angel…come on, that just has never worked for me).

But for whatever reason, Harper Lee just spoke right into my life. And when Scout told Jem to “pass the damn ham”, I laughed out loud. I could picture my neighbors, Cory and Tyler, teaching me all kinds of great illicit cuss words that made this dutch kid sound way tougher and more worldly than he dared to be.

I even tried using one once in the presence of my mom, and I remember she dropped a bowl and came marching over and it was the only time she cuffed me on the back of my head. Now that I think of it, I am surprised I didn’t get more. I’ve never taken the Lord’s name in vain again. So when I read that line at the beginning of that book, I laughed. It was a chortle almost. And that line, for me, made me realize for the first time the literature, in all it’s seriousness, could touch a truth in our own life while still being playful. And to this day, every time we have ham at supper, I want to ask someone to pass it with the same words that Scout did that one day years ago. Some day I will, and the kids will probably look at me in the same way mom did many years ago.