PALLAS AND THE RAVEN

“At the center of all the color, a dark image hung on her wall…."

Mrs. Moreno was the other English teacher at my little school, and she was beloved. Kind, generous, welcoming, with a genuine smile for all. As a teacher, she put my planning and preparation to shame. Her shelves were lined with binders and binders of materials, lesson plans, curriculum maps. Her classroom was a gallery of her creativity and craft, the walls adorned with jewel-toned posters bearing adages in her signature calligraphy. For lessons in ancient history, she wore Egyptian robes and headdresses; for Shakespeare, sequined gowns of the Middle Ages.

At the center of all the color, a dark image hung on her wall: a framed black-and-white drawing of Poe's raven, the haunting black bird perched upon a bust of Pallas, as the poem goes. The goddess of wisdom gazing downward, her expression detached, unmoved. Behind them, over and over, the word “Nevermore.” It was a gift from Mrs. Moreno’s brother, an artist himself. 

After the car accident, her classroom became a shrine. Friends, family, former students showed up to pay their respects, telling stories, sharing memories, reading the wisdom on her wall. We also read "If I Should Go," by Joyce Grenfell, and "Remember," by Christina Rossetti, and Shakespeare's Sonnet 31—poems we found in her file "In Case I Die.” That's how prepared she was. We asked everyone to take with them a token—a poster of Rome, an embroidered sonnet, a laminated quote from Edna St. Vincent Millay. She would have freely given them. And it spared us the burden of casting away her treasures.

One day I passed her classroom and saw a man sitting at a student's desk.
"I'm her brother," he said, not looking at me. 
I didn't know what to say. In the stack of her remaining things sat the raven drawing. "Take this," I told him. "You should have it. It's yours."
He shook his head as though my suggestion were absurd. "It belongs to her." He walked out without saying goodbye.

In the following weeks, I would salvage a file cabinet's worth of her materials: curricula, lesson plans, poems, artwork. And over the years it would, all of it, meet its inevitable fate, shelved, set aside, ultimately buried. Her lessons were not for me to teach.

But the raven atop Pallas Athena, I can’t let go. Pallas, the goddess of wisdom.
To the students she was Mrs. Moreno. We teachers knew her by her first name: Sage.

—Stephen Guinan