Does anyone know where Miss Polansky is?
It was early September of 1961. The first day of the new school year. I was walking to school with one of the neighborhood kids who would be in the same class as me. He seemed a lot more excited than I was about the end of summer vacation.
“We have Miss Polansky as our teacher. She’s really nice. Everybody likes her.”
At that time I had no idea if he was right about this. My family had only moved into the area a few months earlier. I had spent just a couple of months at this school. I wasn’t a big fan of my third-grade teacher. I was hoping he was right about our new teacher. It didn’t take long to find out that he was.
In my less-than-stellar academic career, fourth grade stands out. The combination of my classmates and my favorite teacher made it a special year that is still memorable six decades later.
I can close my eyes and picture what most of my classmates looked like back then. Their names roll off my tongue easily. Jerry, Mitch, Mike, Mark, two Garys, two Larrys, Janice, Diane, Cookie, Carol, Lynn, and Nancy.
But….but…but as much as I liked the above folks and am still in touch with many of them, fourth grade for me was all about Miss Polansky.
She was the first and maybe the only teacher that I ever crushed upon. It’s easy to explain the attraction. She was very nice and she was very pretty. It was that simple.
My gaga attraction to Miss Polansky must have been obvious, at least it was to my mother. At Christmas break, my mom took me aside and told me she had something important to tell me. She gently broke it to me that Miss Polansky was getting married. When we went back to school, she would be Mrs. Klein. HEARTBREAK!
Six months later, fourth grade came to end. It was summer vacation and my classmates moved on to fifth grade. Mrs. Klein moved on to her next class, too. A few years later, my family went to a Wisconsin resort for a winter weekend vacation. Guess who was also there with her husband? Yep, it was Miss Polansky/Mrs. Klein. I chatted with her a few times, but my puppy love crush was over. I moved on to girls my own age. That worked out about as well as my earlier crush on the teacher.
I went a few decades without thinking about my fourth-grade teacher. I didn’t think much about the students in that class either. We all moved on with our adult lives. But, about ten or so years ago, Facebook and social media made reconnecting with the people from your past fairly easy. Whenever I talked with one of my former classmates, the name of my favorite teacher would usually come up.
“I wonder what happened to Miss Polansky? Does anyone know how to find out where she is?”
I admit I made a couple of calls to the school district trying to find her. They had no idea. In fact, their records didn’t have her on their list as a former teacher. As far as they were concerned, she never existed. It might have helped if anyone knew her first name. Susan? Maybe?
Last weekend I was with some of the classmates I mentioned earlier. It was the Covid-delayed fiftieth high school reunion of our class. When her name came up, the reactions ranged from smiles to “She was hot”…and that last one didn’t come from me.
Doing the math, I guess Miss Polansky/Mrs. Klein is in the eight-five-year-old age range now. I hope she’s still alive and healthy. I hope she’s had a good life. Maybe she or someone in her life will read this. Maybe this will be the way we find our teacher from long ago. But, it really doesn’t matter. After sixty years, the memories are still strong and sweet. That’s more than good enough for me.