As my mother told the story, our family minister broke with tradition and, in view of my tearful disappointment at the tender age of 4, permitted me to attend Sunday school. Children were not permitted to do so until the age of 5. I wanted desperately to go to school. The public school system would not take me; the church, however, would and my educational career was launched in the Franklin Street Methodist Church in the quiet mill town of Bucksport.

That initial educational experience led to my becoming the teacher, using my older brother’s hand-me-down roll-top desk, to our teddy bears and sundry stuffed animals. Having inherited good spelling skills from my father, spelling tests became my specialty. They were quick and manageable. Spelling tests, I believed, were definitely the route to take to higher learning.

I progressed through the Bucksport public schools, enjoying en route the path to learning. As an introverted child, I turned to reading, my favorite of the learning requirements. I can still recall the thrill as a child of being permitted by Mrs. Terrill, the town librarian, to select books from the adult reading room since she felt I could handle the material. Convinced that I would not abuse my privilege, she frequently recommended books that were a challenge for a young reader. I felt very grown up at that point. The combination of my love for reading and the awe in which I held teachers, both who taught me and those who lived with us, led inevitably to my desire to become a teacher myself, particularly a teacher of literature.

Someday I would like to acquire a T-shirt that states “I Survived Teaching during the ’60s and ’70s.” As I view my teaching career in retrospect, I really believe teaching peaked in terms of difficult challenges during that period. It was a rough era – for both teachers and students. Oddly enough, it never occurred to me to change careers at that time because I viewed these decades as a tremendous challenge, personally and professionally.

Constant change – in teaching ideas, methods and personnel – contributed to my development. So did summer projects, travels and academic stimuli. Contacts with my colleagues and former students, some of whom went on to become teachers, nurtured me during my career. Above my desk at school, I posted a framed quote from the poet Shelley: “I love tranquil solitude/And such society/As is quiet, wise, and good.” That has been my credo. My teaching duties demanded that I have a generous portion of solitude and the wise and good society that, in some respects, few other professions can offer outside teaching.

What did I find most satisfying about teaching? In a 34-year teaching career there were several positive experiences. In truth, there were also moments of disappointment and failure. Permit me to illustrate one of my most gratifying moments with a personal anecdote.

A number of years ago, I had a student named Bob Wilson (not his real name), an unmotivated young man who spent most of the year sitting in the rear of the room playing with the cord of the window shade and gazing out the window across the athletic field toward the harbor. I never felt somehow that I had reached Bob, but he managed to pass the course with a low D. When he limped academically to graduation, I thought: There goes Bob Wilson. Our lives touched briefly, but I didn’t make a difference in his life, that’s for sure.

He enlisted in the Army and served for a long time in Vietnam. Surprisingly, he wrote to me and we began corresponding until his return to the U.S. One day, quite unexpectedly, he dropped by Room 124 for a visit. I was, of course, delighted to see him and discover he had returned home safely. During the course of our conversation, he said to me: “I’ll bet you think I wasn’t listening to you in class, Mr. Pettie. Sometimes I wasn’t. But I remember one day we were reading Robert Browning, and he wrote a line that I remember: ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,/Or what’s a heaven for?’ I still remember that line from that poem. It kept me going all that time in Nam.”

It seems that one line from Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto” helped to sustain Bob Wilson during those years he spent in Vietnam hell. To think that a single line from one of my favorite Victorian poets could make a difference in an American soldier’s life was well worth that day’s lesson. I’m so pleased to know Bob was in class that particular day.

There have been other Bob Wilson situations and sundry special teaching moments, but just as Bob will never forget the line from Browning, I shall always remember Bob Wilson and that brief visit on a gray April afternoon in Room 124. That was, perhaps understandably, one of the most satisfying moments in my teaching career.

Ralph Pettie is a retired public school teacher and a resident of Blue Hill.