Column: Ulysses in Dearborn

Once again it’s back-to-school month and whenever September comes around, I think of my mother. That’s because during the years I was growing up — and beyond, well into my adulthood — she was a school teacher.

Her domain was the 6th grade and such was her dedication that the discipline and authority she imposed on her 11-year-old pupils invariably carried over to the home front. I was constantly being told about the value and vital importance of what my cowboy heroes derisively called “book-learnin’.”

I’m happy to report that I endured these laser-force admonitions with the grace and forbearance that, even as a youngster, defined my core personality. But I must confess I didn’t much like having a mom who was a schoolmarm.

I understood that as a divorced mother with a child, she pretty much had to work to support the two of us or, as she often phrased it, “make ends meet.” But, I wondered — though never asked — why didn’t she have a more glamorous career?

In one of my fantasies, I envisioned her as a chanteuse who performed in swanky supper clubs.

How cool it would have been to refer to her or introduce her to others as “my mother, the torch singer.” Or, I thought, why couldn’t she have taken on one of those nifty jobs that Katharine Hepburn had in the movies she made with Spencer Tracy during my childhood and adolescence?

The way I saw it, being a schoolmarm was neither cool nor nifty.

There was one small blessing. Although we lived in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, my mother taught at a school in a neighboring community, a smaller suburb called Allen Park. Thus I was spared the appalling indignity  of being one of her pupils when I passed through the 6th grade.

But as time went on and I acquired a modicum of maturity, I came to recognize that there were some benefits in being the son of a school teacher. For one thing, since she nudged me gently but firmly toward books, I became an avid reader at a fairly early age. In fact, I spent almost as much time in the library as I did on the playgrounds.

I was naturally attracted to stories about young boys who had a zest for adventure and/or mischief (“Tom Sawyer,” “Penrod” and “Treasure Island” are prime examples that quickly come to mind), but the books that made the strongest impression on me were pocket-sized paperbacks adapted for juvenile readers from classics in adult literature.

My mother assigned books from that genre in her classes and once I reached the 6th grade level, she introduced them to me. My favorites in this category were “The Story of Achilles” — about a hero I called “A-Chills” until Mom corrected me  — and “The Story of Ulysses.”

It wasn’t until a few years later that I learned that those two volumes were stripped-down versions of the great epic poems “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” the early masterworks that provided the foundation on which is built the glorious tradition of Western literature.

Later on, when I went off to college, my mother was delighted when I called to inform her that I had enrolled in the Great Books Program and that our freshman reading list included the two Homeric poems. And a couple of years after that, while I was trying to make up my mind about what to do after graduation, she urged me to pursue a career in journalism.

I followed her advice and have never regretted that decision.

When she died some years ago, I was amazed by how many of her former students came to her funeral. It’s true that by then I had known for some time that she had been a popular teacher. Early on, when I was growing up, I became aware of the former pupils who had stayed in touch with her for years, even decades, after they left the 6th grade. Some of them, on occasion, even visited her at our home.

From conversations I had with them over the years, I gathered that although she was strict and demanding, my mother conveyed genuine affection toward most of the kids she taught and she enjoyed teasing and having fun with those she especially liked. And they, in turn, fondly remembered what one of them called, “her sly sense of humor.”

Even so, I didn’t expect to see so many of them at her funeral. After all, she was approaching her 82nd birthday when she died and by then she’d been away from the classroom for nearly two decades.

At the wake — a Holy Event of Obligation at Irish funerals — several of her students approached me, introduced themselves and expressed their condolences.

One of them, a husky fellow who was not that much younger than I, gave me a big bear hug and then asked: “Did you ever have her as a teacher?”

“Are you kidding?” I replied. “The answer to that is, most of my bloody life.”

(Except that the adjective I used was a bit more pungent than “bloody.”)

“Lucky you,” he said with a smile.

I couldn’t disagree. Had it not been for my mother’s guiding hand, I might never have cultivated a lifelong passion for literature. And without her strong encouragement, I’m not sure I would have become a journalist, a line of work that, over five decades, brought me some success and profound satisfaction.

Nevertheless, I must admit that over the years, I sometimes found myself wondering how my life would have turned out if my mom had been a torch singer.