I met my best friend, Pat McAdams Hall, in fourth grade–Mrs. Dye’s class. Pat had to be in Mrs. Dye’s class because the other fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Haynes, was Pat’s aunt. In fifth grade, we had Miss Stammer, a tough little old lady who came to Bisbee from Chicago in a pale yellow Studebaker.

I believe it’s safe to say that we drove Miss (no Mss back then) Stammer nuts! Pat sat in the last seat in an aisle of stationary desks–the old kind, with ink wells drilled into them. I sat in a movable desk next to the chalk board and pencil sharpener at the back of the room. We kept folded up wire clothes hangers in our desks and used those to pass notes back and forth. (Who says people our age don’t know about texting?) And each day, when we walked home for lunch, we’d have one of Mrs. McAdam’s garlic dill pickles for a handy dessert as we walked back to Greenway School. I’m sure we reeked, every time we came up to Miss Stammer’s desk. That was in the Fifties. In the early Seventies, I ran into Miss Stammer in the public library in Douglas. I remembered her and wanted to apologize for all those garlic dills, but she was suffering the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s and had no idea who I was.

In sixth grade, the dynamic duo was broken up. Pat went to Mrs. Riddle’s room in one building while I was with Mrs. Watkins in another. We were still friends though, and walked back and forth to school together every day. In seventh, Mr. Norton was our homeroom teacher. And in eighth Mrs. Hennessey. Our class had any number of rascals and urchins. By the time we got through with Mrs. Hennessey, she was ready to put herself out to pasture. Come to think of it, she wasn’t the first Greenway teacher our class forced into retirement.

In high school, Pat dated. I did not, but I stood by her through several painful boyfriend breakups. And then, in our senior year, we were appointed co-editors of the school paper, The Copper Chronicle. Our April Fool’s editorial column that year was written by somebody named Pudy and Jat.

All through school, my friend’s name was Pat or Patricia. It wasn’t until time for high school graduation that I discovered her name was Patsy. That was a shock.

We went to separate colleges. I attended the University of Arizona while she went to NAU. Marriage and kids got in the way of staying in touch for a while. We came back together in the mid-nineties when I heard from Pat’s mother that she was in the process of a painful divorce. With the help of the Internet and e-mail, with her and Florida and me in Washington state, I reverted to my old role of seeing her through that tough time. And why not? I’d already walked through getting a divorce. I knew some of those difficult ropes.

It turns out that she started teaching kindergarten thirty years ago, about the same time I started writing murder mysteries. She’s spent all those years taking starry eyed, rambunctious but illiterate rascals in hand, thirty at a time, and–in nine months’ time, bringing them into the world of being able to read. (Right now I am half way through teaching the first week of a two week writing class that includes fourteen students, all of them attentive adults. I am exhausted. And every day I think, “Pat did this 30 students at a time, all of them 5 year olds, for thirty years? How did she manage?”

But she did it. A couple of years ago, she was working on end of the year paperwork when one of her students came up to her desk and asked her why a certain kid was being held back. Appalled, she asked him how he knew about that. He pointed to the paperwork on her desk and said. “It’s right there. I read it.” Oops!

Periodically during that time, she’d have classes that were problematic, classes that probably resembled our class as we mowed through the teachers at Greenway School leaving massive teacher retirements in our wake. In her e-mails complaining about those kids, she’d refer to them as LUs–Little Urchins. I always thought of them as Miss Stammer’s revenge.

So this year, about the same time as I’ll be ending my paltry two week course, the lady generations of kids in Leesburg, Florida, have known as Mrs. Hall, my friend Pat, aka Patsy, will be ending her thirty year career as a kindergarten teacher. For years she’s been telling me that, when summer came, she was going to clean out her garage, but then summer would come and go and she’d be too tired from teaching or too busy getting ready to teach the next year to get the job done. Maybe this year, without that end of summer deadline, she’ll manage to do it.

And so, this is just to say a public congratulation to my friend–and to all those other retiring teachers–who have devoted their work lives to wrangling and civilizing kids just like Pat and I were back in the day.

Hats off to you Patsy McAdams Hall. Please consider this your diploma. I have to call you Patsy today because it’s a graduation day, too, and this is just like high school. Only REAL names are used on diplomas.