Miss Hollywood

Miss Hollywood was my 4th grade teacher. In my school it was always a relief to have a lay teacher rather than a nun. There were a few sweet and kind nuns but more often than not they were fearsome in their administration of discipline. The lay teachers were all sweet and kind, none more so than Miss Hollywood. She was everything you would imagine someone to be with that name: tall, soft complexion and with Grace Kelly blonde hair, except in her right hand she was missing her middle and ring fingers. My parents knew her a little because she had been a high school classmate of my older sister, and the story I heard about her hand was hard to comprehend. It was explained to me that she had a hobby of going to cemeteries and doing what are called "rubbings". She would take a piece of light paper and press it over the surface of old tombstones from the late 18th and early 19th centuries and make impressions of the artwork on these tombstones. One time as she was doing this a tombstone collapsed on her hand and crushed her fingers. To this day I can not imagine a scenario on how it would be possible for this to happen in the way it was described to me. It was a testament to Miss Hollywood that this disfigurement did not diminish Miss Hollywood's beauty in my eye. It may have been that I was so happy to have a lay teacher teaching the class, or maybe it was also that I was becoming of age to recognize that some woman were especially attractive but it was not hard to put her injury out of my mind. She spoke to the class with a soft and re-assuring voice and that was heaven for me. During the lessons she would take a piece of chalk and then curl her index and little fingers and put on the blackboard the most gorgeous handwriting.