by Amanda Rose
(to appear in the April 27, 2006 Delano Record)
I met Uncle Mike for the first time thirty-seven years, two months, and about one week ago, back on my birthday in 1969. My Dad tells me that 1969 was one of the rainiest years he remembered at the time. Uncle Mike was in his third year of teaching at Delano High School and was living in a trailer behind our house in Delano. Late one night in 1969 my Dad ran through our backyard to Uncle Mike’s trailer, in that pouring rain, to announce excitedly that my Mom had just given birth to a daughter named Amanda.
Uncle Mike is not actually my uncle by blood, but that’s just what you call someone who was best friends with your Dad from the time they met in junior college. From the College of the Sequoias they went on to Fresno State and then both took jobs teaching at Delano High School.
When I was a sophomore in high school, Uncle Mike was my Botany teacher. Like the parade of Delano High School students before and after me in Uncle Mike’s 33 years of teaching, we all learned how to identify California wildflowers using a manual first published in 1925 by a botanist named Willis Linn Jepson.
“Stamens homogeneous, more than one.”
That’s all I really remember about the wildflower classification terminology, but I do remember that the process required us to be analytical and to narrow down the differences across flowers until we were able to identify the precise genus and species. The project must have piqued my interest because I remember spending many weekends collecting flowers, counting their stamens, examining their other characteristics, and drying them according to Uncle Mike’s instructions.
Some twenty years later I happened to mention my high school Botany class to a biologist friend of mine. My friend Kent worked for a few years teaching Advanced Placement Biology at a private school in Pasadena. The students were bright and had every educational opportunity. They classified plants in their classes too.
Somewhere in the conversation I said “I have fond memories of learning how to use The Jepson Manual.”
His jaw dropped. “You used Jepson?”
“Well, sure, that’s what we used.”
“Jepson is an exceedingly difficult manual for classification. I use a much easier one with my students. Was this an Advanced Placement class?”
“No, actually all students in Honors, College Prep, and General Biology took Botany with Uncle Mike and used The Jepson Manual.”
Kent was shocked and, at the same time, impressed that Uncle Mike could pull that off.
Uncle Mike’s secret, of course, was that he never told any of us that The Jepson Manual was an upper-level college manual, if not graduate level.
I had planned on having Uncle Mike teach my own son how to classify wildflowers and thought that we might be able to get started when my son was ten to twelve years old. Uncle Mike was ready to mentor my son, but he suggested we start at five years old, not ten. So what if the Kindergarten Science standards in California say that children should know the difference between a stem and leaf? We’ll start working on Jepson anyway.
It’s all about expectations. With his high school students, Uncle Mike expected us to learn the classification process and we did. I am sure my son would have learned as well under his mentorship. Uncle Mike could teach complex material to us because he had mastered it himself, he could communicate it to us, and he expected us to perform. Only a master would consider teaching Botany in such a fashion to a bunch of high school sophomores, much less to a five year old. I sure would have loved to see Uncle Mike in action teaching a five year old, but alas, my son turns four this week.
Uncle Mike had a dry sense of humor, not often shared in the classroom or even recognized by students, but brilliant and unique nonetheless. In my sophomore year in Biology, I was in Lee Lowry’s class in the room that adjoined Uncle Mike’s. Uncle Mike had to miss school one day and had scheduled a test for his Biology students. To keep the semester on track, Uncle Mike videotaped the test for his students for the substitute teacher to play.
Back in the mid-1980s before video cameras were the rage, Uncle Mike nailed a fetal pig to the wall of his classroom in an odd spread-eagle fashion and pointed to various parts of its anatomy. “Question 1: Identify this organ and its function” (as he points to the pig’s heart). As he pointed to various pig parts, a fly joined the film and buzzed around as a supporting actor. You don’t often get to see a fetal pig nailed to a wall. The addition of the fly was almost more than Lee Lowry could handle. I found him howling uncontrollably in Uncle Mike’s classroom. As the substitute teacher that period, he had difficulty administering the test.
Uncle Mike was also instrumental in a prank I played on Bill Martin in my senior year. Mr. Martin “got me” one day with a canister of compressed air – he was squatting just inside the classroom door waiting for me to walk through. As I passed through the doorway, air shot out of that canister and I screamed. I visited Uncle Mike after school.
“I have an idea,” he said. “Bill has his own alarm system in his classroom and now and then he sets it off by accident. It scares the crud out of him. I’ll show you how to set it.”
He gave me instructions: “You must wait until some day when Bill is out of the classroom and all of the students have arrived. Close all of the doors and flip this switch. When he walks in, the alarm will go off.”
Some weeks later payback day for Bill Martin came and Uncle Mike reportedly smiled knowingly as he heard that alarm go off down the hall.
Uncle Mike had open heart surgery on Friday, April 21st in Bakersfield. It was a routine surgery with un-routine complications. The surgery appeared to go well except that his blood kept forming clots for no apparent reason. When my Dad’s phone calls to us finally convinced me that Uncle Mike would not live through the night, I jumped in the car and drove through the dark and in the rain hoping to be able to say goodbye to him.
As I drove from California Hot Springs, I thought about all of those wildflowers I was passing and tried to remember their Latin names. The night struck me because through the rain and the lightning clashing, I could see the lights in the valley below. The sky was clear of smog, much like it must have been in those early days when Uncle Mike first moved to Delano, when I first met him. And there I was witnessing all of this beauty and weather in one of the rainiest years in my memory, much like that winter of 1969.
Late winter rains in a season with little rainfall establishes the perfect conditions for wildflowers. Winter grasses are low and do not shade out the spring flowers. The spring rains bring flowers that have lain dormant for years waiting for a rainy season. As I write this story, the blankets of flowers are beginning to form in the Sierras and I expect they will be more brilliant than they have been in years. I will certainly notice the flowers more than I usually do.
Last Friday night I got as far as Ducor on my drive to see Uncle Mike. I write this story now because sometimes the road is just too long and you can’t drive fast enough when you should have left hours or days before. Because of poor planning and because life is just so unpredictable, sometimes you are not able to say goodbye in the way you wish you could. I will miss you, Uncle Mike. Say hi to Grandpa for me.
