Charlie Trayer was my seventh grade world history teacher. He had to have been nearing retirement at that point and his old-fashioned suits and wide printed ties were perfect fodder for jerk boy derision, which passed for clubby humor then.
But I loved Mr. Trayer. For one thing, he knew his stuff. For another, he let me be me in ways that astonish me in retrospect. When it came time to write term papers, he agreed to let me write and put on a play about Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. It was quite an epic - with beheading special effects - requiring that everyone in the class play at least one role, so there Mr. Trayer sat, all alone in that big auditorium, on the day we presented it for him.
There was another generosity that I find remarkable to this day: he let me lie. Mr. Trayer let me stand up - we had to stand to speak in that class - and tell the most unbelievable whoppers without ever giving away even the slightest hint of judgment. Since this was world history class, these lies usually required me to place my family in exotic ports of call. I remember specifically the ski vacation in Switzerland. Yes, my family - barely middle class from small town Pennsylvania - went skiing in Switzerland. NOT. As any adult in our very small town would have known. Trust me, just the notion of Pete and Shirley and their brood of four in ski togs is so riotously absurd that I can barely suppress hysteria even now. But there I stood, expounding on that ski trip, rounding it out with details. And Mr. Trayer let me do it. God bless him.
I was reminded of this recently when Po Bronson was making all the public rounds promoting his book Nurture Shock. At each stop, reviewers would zero in on Bronson's case - supported by current research - that lying is something all children experiment with and usually not worth much fretting. That research goes to a fairly limited kind of lying among six-year-olds - "I will tell Mommy I didn't do it because she doesn't want me to have done it." "I will say I have a puppy because that will make me seem cool to my friends." - but there are many other kinds of lying...some of them quite artful, even beautiful, and all of them revealing in ways that simple truth can't match. These deserve courtesy.
Ayelet Waldman tells a wonderful story about her son in first grade. On Family Appreciation Day, the children took turns reading the stories they had written, decorated, and laminated about their parents. Ayelet and her husband went wide-eyed as their son took his turn...
"I love Daddy because he taught me to play poker and sometimes he even lets me win. And my mommy makes the best fried chicken. It's super crispy."
... and nothing he said - not... one... thing - was even close to true. Out of air, this version of what was special about his parents, which he was presenting to his parents. Was little Zeke sending some important message? Was he wishing that just once he could play a little poker while eating some decent chicken? Who knows? They chalked it up to his being the child of parents who write fiction and Waldman tacked the laminated lies prominently on the wall at home.
Or what about that story of the night I was born? It was in April "and there was a blizzard that night... your father hit the brakes at the hospital entrance but the driveway was so icy that the car skidded past it." My mother put up her hand. "Don't back up. I'll just get out here." - That's always been the story. I heard it so many times, it was like one of those golden book stories that got read and read and read until the pages fell apart. Then one day, I asked a good friend back home to dig up the newspaper weather report for that date. I was going to use it in a collage for a Mother's Day card. Turns out it was quite seasonal - even warm - that night. No snow, no ice. Go figure. My theory, based on what preceded the ride to the hospital, is this: something in my mother froze that night. And discovering the story this way gives me a whole lot more feel for its essence than "and I don't know how to explain it but something in me just froze that night."
Then there was my ninth grade girlfriend who told us about the Chinese Laundry spies trying to get the secret code she had found in the package and the relentless danger and they have special weapons that can shoot people through walls so you're not safe anywhere and what she really needed was for her Dad to come up from DC to save her... and I knew something was terribly wrong, but what? So I told the guidance counselor I was worried about my friend and he called in her mother, who threw such a fit in the school hallway that I felt mortified and ashamed and sort of grew away from my friend until, as adults, we finally talked about the fact that her stepfather was sexually abusing her. That "lie" was her version of expressing the thing that must not be spoken. I heard her, but not well enough.
When my little seventh-grade self stood to proclaim as true a family life with vacations and means and joyful shared adventure, I was - for those brief moments - inhabiting a remedy to what ailed me, and it was good. And who did it hurt? Another teacher might have called me out right then and there and shamed me in front of the class and then sat in church that Sunday feeling proud that she or he had "helped a child" that week. But it was Mr. Trayer who gave me what my soul needed: a moment of respite, the act of standing and claiming a different reality... in front of - just as with that other play - an appreciative audience of one.
In college, I bought a wide patterned tie at Goodwill - brown and green, ugly by some people's standards - which I wore as a belt with jeans for years, always with fondness for Charlie Trayer in mind.
Thank you, dear, dear Mr. Trayer, for the courtesy.