In Memoriam

Patti, in Gunnison

The day before Patti Bippus died I was a delegate to the Democratic county assembly, ran into someone I taught with years ago at DSA. He asked about her. “She’s living in Alaska,” I said. “I talked to her two weeks ago.” I didn’t know she was in the hospital at that moment. Family had flown to Fairbanks from the lower 48 to be with her.

My first year at DSA I knew I’d made a mistake. I’d had a team of hard-working teachers at the alternative school. At DSA, down the hall a teacher passed out worksheets and played computer games with her back to the students for the rest of the period. Arts teachers seemed jealous of their domains; academic teachers argued about who would teach what classes. The guy I shared a classroom with told me daily how much he hated the job and the kids. I missed my team. When the principal left, there were rumors that downtown was hiring someone who would clean house. If it weren’t for that hope, in spite of students I was head over heels in love with, I wouldn’t have stayed.

I sat at a long conference table full of faculty, parent, admin and community reps to interview her. There was a moment when she took my breath away. Having been asked two questions almost simultaneously, she undertook to answer one with research, facts, and anecdotal evidence from her own experience. In the midst of that elaborate, well-articulated reply, she paused to say to the other person, “and I haven’t forgotten your question,” wrapped up the first answer to move smoothly into the second. I was sold.

At our first faculty meeting with Patti, she wore a button labeled “B.A.” She didn’t like to be but could be a badass if necessary, she said. She’d been a principal before. “I’ve been yelled at in grocery store parking lots,” she declared, could take the heat. Some took offense. I wanted to applaud. If you’re doing your job, what are you worried about?

For most of the slackers, that flash of the B.A. button was all it took. The next year, I no longer had to watch the woman playing solitaire all day long, no longer had to hear that guy bitch about how he hated his job, or have students beg to transfer to my class from his when I already had over the limit. Those teachers chose not to return. Patti didn’t even have to fire them.

At the old Byers building Patti got out of her car to find several students waiting for her. “Hi, Ms. Bippus, can we walk you to your office?” “Of course,” she told them, realizing instantly that something was up. They’d filled her office with balloons. Patti was delighted. “You can’t really walk in there,” she informed us. “You have to shuffle.”

At the new Montview building, I was meeting with her about schedules. When I walked into her office, she said, “come take a quick ride with me.” A block from school, she opened the windows and lit a cigarette. I’m a former smoker, recall clearly how irritating it was for people to nag me about it, how it only made me want a cigarette more. But I’d been listening to her cough during faculty meetings.

“Patti, I’m going to say this once and will never say it again: you need to quit smoking.”

“I know I do,” she answered. “I know I do,” with more grace than I ever replied to that advice with in my smoking days.

Lucky teachers have role models, teachers they want to emulate. One of Patti’s was someone I never knew, Jim McElhinney. When he died, she gathered her notes of “Jimisms,” things he’d said in lectures and meetings, and typed them into a booklet she hand-bound for his family. She sent me a copy:

School ought to be as enhancing for teachers as students.

People have a right to instruction at their own level of competence and interest.

Teachers have a responsibility to help students build a value system but have no right to impose a value system.

There are about a hundred quotes in the booklet. Every one of them speaks to a philosophy of education Patti held dear.

I rushed from my creative writing classroom to her office, furious. Sara and I’d spent hours figuring out next year’s classes, put it all in a detailed memo, got agreement from everyone, and now the schedule hit our inbox with none of those changes made.

“Oh, my God, Pat, I’m so sorry. That’s my fault. I totally forgot it. Let’s do it right now.”

My anger evaporated. I’d never had a boss who would so readily admit to being wrong. Patti was a brilliant big picture person, weak on details. I knew that already. We sat down to her computer and fixed it.

I’m not sure when she got the COPD diagnosis. Maybe after she left DSA or when she went to Juneau to open a new high school, where she had a great time, served as principal and put a two-year limit on her commitment. How she got that job: when the finalists candidates were on lunch break at the existing high school, the others stayed inside, talking to each other. Patti went out to the halls and talked to the kids, asked what they’d like to see in their new school, came back well-armed for afternoon interviews.

She was an artist, had been an art teacher. At DSA she initiated a week of local and world travel combining arts and academic curriculums, an intersession week without regular classes. Despite efforts to get every student enrolled in one of the programs, a small group remained unassigned. Patti took charge of them herself. They created a long wall mural under her direction, although few were visual arts students. One of them told me it was a highlight of her time at DSA.

We were of the same generation, driven achievers, artists who’d spent our lives postponing art. But we became friends partly because of our bad marriages. We’d married similarly unsuitable men. In private times together, we did blow-by-blow comparisons of those relationships. Like processing grief, processing regrets can be a lifelong undertaking. She loved the classroom, became an administrator after the divorce because she needed the money for her children. Unlike me, she never remarried.

After Juneau, she moved back to her hometown, Gunnison. I spent a week with her there after her hip replacement. Principals are good at telling you what to do: “Pat, put that chair over there, bring me my glasses and that book.” I felt useful. She organized a Gunnison high school class reunion (her 50^th I think) was appointed to education committees. But you can’t go home again. So many were conservative, she had a hard time finding people she could truly befriend. Gunnison’s altitude, its fierce winters, were too much for her lungs.

In Fairbanks, at sea level, she didn’t always need oxygen at first. She was thrilled to be back where she’d been a young teacher, raised her children. She loved her senior living facility, found former colleagues there, had a daughter living nearby, volunteered, took university extension classes. One class was about Alaskan native peoples. She knew more about that than anyone else in class, taught in a native community long ago. Patti was quick to laugh, caught a dozen enthusiasms a week, bubbled over with news and projects each time we talked. Her telling of the story of her birthday last November, when her daughter and friends decided to light 76 candles, setting off the fire alarm, made me laugh to tears.

We talked monthly after she moved to Fairbanks, took turns calling. On March 8, I called Patti. She seemed fine. “She was happy,” her daughter Stacia told me, “she was happy and contented.” It must have been a week after our call that she got sick, a few days more before she went to the hospital. “It was so fast,” Stacia said.

In recent conversations Patti told me her activities were becoming more limited. She said, “I can do one thing. Once I finish this two-hour volunteer duty, I’m done for the day.” She was a good listener but became even more so. I found myself chattering away. She hadn’t the breath to say more than a little at a time. Even at sea level, there was no longer enough oxygen.

Still, it was pure Patti to multitask, volunteer at the reception desk while she talked to me on March 8. “Just a minute, Pat. Can I help you? That meeting is down the hall to your right.”

On April 8 my calendar said, “Patti calls.”
But that  won’t ever happen again.

Back at DSA in 2003, we’d been complaining about never getting to our own work. My husband was out of town and Patti had a mountain retreat opportunity, an artist escape weekend she invited me to join. It gave me the first poem I’d written in ages, a poem I gave her for her next birthday:

Artists, again

for Patti, on her birthday

On the flat roof the prickle
of sun-struck adobe wall warms my back.
Like the in and out of surf
caressing a pebbled shore,
wind in pines rises and falls,
chorused by Deer Creek’s steady progress
through its elbowed path below.

On the far side of this valley,
aspens wink whitely in morning sun,
the smoky haze of their bare branches
marking a border between palomino pasture
and green pines climbing upslope.

A gang of ravens gabble from tree to tree.
In the house, faint ticking of heat registers,
the greedy crackle of fire, and no word spoken
these several sweet hours since breakfast.

You sit at your easel in the sunbathed porch
and I do not look, knowing I would cover
this page should anyone approach,
protecting the fragility of work in progress:
what is not yet owned cannot yet be given.

When I climbed the spiral to the roof,
an angry buzzing increased.
The tower windows were full of flies
hatched from eggs laid in ceiling vigas.
Alarmed at my presence, they swirled
around me till I flung open the rooftop door,
and like so many pent-up ideas,
they burst into the blue.

November 14, 2003