Chapter One
A handpicked dozen of the most musically inclined pupils from the second-grade classes at Marlice Gordon Elementary School were singing with varied degrees of passion on the stage of the lunchroom/auditorium in tribute to the school’s retiring principal. But it was Lisi Standeford, the cherubic granddaughter of third-grade teacher Carrie Standeford, who stood out.
The choir was part of a surprise farewell program that Mrs. Standeford and the other Gordon Elementary teachers had covertly put together for Ellen Louise Matner, who was about to retire after thirty years of active service as an educator and administrator in public schools of in and around Richmond, Virginia.
“Did you ever know that you’re my heeee-roh,” the children sang to the piano accompaniment of Herman Lundsford, the school’s music instructor and multipurpose classroom instructor who filled in for teachers who were ill or taking a day off. A former Virginia Commonwealth University performing arts major with a flair for the flamboyant and a passion for musicals, Herman lived for moments like this.
“And everything I would like to be … I can fly higher than an eeee-gle … You are the wind beneath my wiiiings,” they sang, about as on-key as seven- to eight-year-olds can be.
Eleven of them fidgeted and looked around the room as they sang loudly, just the way Mr. Lundsford had taught them in their secret, after-school rehearsal a few days earlier. But little Lisi’s eyes locked on Miss Ellie’s, and a tear spilled down her cheek as she sang her little heart out to an audience of one.
Mrs. Matner was broadly popular with the student body and, remarkably, among the faculty. Lisi’s tie to her was special because, unknown to most everyone else, Mrs. Matner and Carrie Standeford were off-campus best friends and had been since they met as teachers in an elementary school in Richmond nearly 20 years earlier. They kept their close relationship and wound up together here in the Richmond suburb of Chesterfield County. Their friendship remained remarkably low key at work and never fed into the gossipy, jealous ecosystem for which public school faculties are notorious. But now that Ellie was turning over her duties on the first of March to an acting principal who had been working as her assistant and understudy since September, they dropped some of their careful, shared workplace formality and were more open about it. Ellie would remain on the payroll and attend to a few duties, mostly remotely, until the end of the school district fiscal year on June 30.
Lisi had known Miss Ellie as a friend who had occasionally gone with her family on vacations to the North Carolina Outer Banks and sat with Lisi on the beach, reading books to her. She would accompany Carrie to Lisi’s dance recitals and attend Carrie’s pre-Christmas parties – always bearing gifts for Lisi. Having Miss Ellie in the school office was like having a favorite aunt running the show, and it was dawning on her that after this, someone else would be behind Miss Ellie’s desk.
I knew little Lisi because her grandparents, Carrie and Clint Standeford, lived just three doors down the street at the corner of our cul-de-sac where my house sat at the highest point of a slow-rising hill that crested a few hundred feet to the rear of my property on the Gordon Elementary playground, reputed to be the highest natural geological formation in Chesterfield County. From my front windows, I had a commanding view past the Standefords' house and down Cordovan Street as it fell away to the west, a gentle descent that ended at its intersection with a major U.S. highway half a mile to the southwest.
Now, as I sat in the crowded Marlice Gordon Elementary School activity room a few feet from Lisi, I could clearly see tears gather in her eyes and spill down her cheeks as she sang.
