A PERFECT RENDEZVOUS

Play Pretend

1993

"Look out, Mr. Mathison!" the shrill warning from the boy in the wheelchair came too late; Harry was dribbling the basketball down centre court, laughing as he whirled to make the shot, then he caught his ankle in a footrest of a wheelchair and went flying backward, landing squarely and ignominiously on his rump.

"Mr. Mathison! Mr. Mathison!" The gymnasium reverberated with the alarmed shouts of handicapped kids in the gym class Harry supervised after school, when his regular teaching duties were over. Wheelchairs gathered around him along with kids with crutches and leg braces. "You okay, Mr Mathison?" they chorused. "You hurt, Mr. Mathison?"

"Of course I'm hurt," Harry teased as he shoved himself up on his elbows and scooped the hair out of his eyes. "My pride is very, very hurt."

Willie Jenkins, the school's nine-year-old macho jock who'd been acting as observer and sideline coach, shoved his hands in his pockets, regarded him with a puzzled grin, and remarked in his deep, bullfrog's voice, "How come your pride hurts when you landed on your bu—"

"It's all in your perspective, Willie," Harry said quickly, laughing. He was rolling to his feet when a pair of wing tip shoes, brown socks, and tan polyester pants legs entered his field of vision.

"Mr. Mathison!" the principal barked, scowling ferociously at the scuff marks all over his shiny gymnasium floor. "This hardly looks like a basketball game to me. What sort of game are you playing?"

Even though Harry now taught third grade in the Keaton Elementary School, his relationship with its principal, Mr. Duncan, hadn't improved a whole lot since the time he accused him of stealing the class lunch money fifteen years ago. Although his integrity was no longer an issue with him, his constant bending of the school rules for his students was a permanent thorn in Duncan's side. Not only that, but he plagued him to death with innovative ideas and when he nixed them, Harry rounded up moral support from the rest of the town and, if needed, financial support from private citizens. As a result of one of his notions, Keaton Elementary now had a specially designed educational and athletic program for physically handicapped children, which he'd created and was constantly altering with what Mr. Duncan viewed as typical, frivolous disregard of his pre-establihed procedures. Mr. Mathison had no sooner gotten his handicapped program under way last year than he'd gone on another—stronger—tangent, and there was no stopping him: He was now waging a private campaign to stamp out illiteracy among the women in Keaton and the surrounding area. All it had taken to set him off on this crusade was the discovery that the janitor's wife couldn't read. Harry Mathison had invited the woman to his own house and started tutoring her there, but it soon evolved that the janitor's wife knew another woman who couldn't read, and that woman knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone else. Within a short time there were seven women to be taught to read, and Mr. Mathison had pleaded with him to let him use a classroom two evenings a week to teach his students.

When Mr. Duncan had protested sensibly about the added cost of utilities to keep a classroom open at night, he'd sweetly mentioned that he'd speak to the principal of the high school then. Rather than look like a heartless ogre when the high school principal yielded to his green eyes and bright smile, Mr. Duncan had agreed to let him use his own classroom at Keaton Elementary. Soon after he capitulated on that, the irritating crusader decided he needed special learning materials to help speed up the learning process for "his" adults. And as he'd discovered to his everlasting frustration, once Harry Mathison had set his mind on some goal, he didn't stop until he found a way to achieve it. Sure that he was right, that some important principle was at stake, Harry Mathison possessed a stubborn resiliency combined with a boundless, energetic optimism that was as remarkable as it was annoying to him.