The Loving Cup

I was fourteen the first time I met her.  She was standing with the rest of us derelicts on Pleasant View, the street where kids too smart for their own good went to smoke cigarettes and pot before the enduring the rigors of a college prep education.  Anya had short blonde hair, an eyebrow ring, and smoked Camel Lights.  A student teacher, and as punk as a teacher could be – short black shirt, black tights, black sweater.  I was immediately intrigued.

A lowly underclassman, I didn’t get to experience Anya as a student teacher; she was busy working with the drama teacher at school, but I’d run into her from time to time and always give her that knowing kind of nod … it was if I knew our paths were meant to be congruent at some point.

Shortly after her arrival at that elite college prep school, I dropped out.  Over the summer of that year, I landed a job with a non-profit group here in Cincinnati that encourages kids to embrace their art – writing, drawing, dancing.  She was part of the writing team and I couldn’t believe I’d run into her again.  Summer quickly passed as we sweltered in ‘Nati humidity in makeshift tents at Eden Park.  I started at another school that fall, hell bent on being a real writer, and lost touch with Anya once again.  That school didn’t pan out for various reasons, but in my final foray into public education, I landed at a very urban school and lo and behold, there was Anya, rockin’ out to Tupac and teaching English to kids who didn’t know there could even be a difference between a modifier and a misplaced one. 

At sixteen, I thought I knew the world.  After becoming estranged from my birth mother that year, I was lost in a sea of teenage angst and real life choices.  Anya helped me to understand that the only way I was going to make something of myself was … to make something of myself.  Her favorite expression in those days was, “C’mon, I don’t have time to get to the engraver; hurry it up already.”  That sort of urgency, immediacy and need for action shaped and fully altered the ways in which I approached life then, and still do now.  Her students, unaccustomed to a woman so strong and resolute in her beliefs, took to her.  We, her Pickles (as she lovingly calls us) flocked to the truth and light that she brings to the classroom and to this world.

At that very urban high setting, we started The Tracks, a literary magazine in a school that boasted only a forty percent graduation rate.  We spent hours on that magazine, pouring over submissions of poetry, artwork, short stories.  I began to see myself as a writer, and knew that at some point my dreams would come to fruition.  She encouraged me when the world around me was full of dirt and grime.

It happened that I had to drop out of school once again.  I went to Anya in her classroom in tears and told her what was going on.  She hugged me and told me to keep on keeping on.  We managed to stay in touch for a few years, but her life took her far from the city and mine did as well.

I searched for her for almost a decade, googling every variation of her name I could find.  Nothing.  It wasn’t until I put it out into the Universe that I was ready to really start on my writing career that we finally connected.  I found her!  Sent her a message and said I was entertaining the idea of graduate school for fiction.  Immediately, she flooded my inbox with suggestions, ideas, constructive ways in which I could begin to shape the life I was only beginning to imagine.

Over these last three years, I’ve been blessed to visit with Anya at her pond in Kentucky many times.  We sit in the sunroom, or near a fire, looking at words and discussing life.  She offers me insight into the world I am exploring, suggestions for ways to advance myself – as a human, a woman, and a writer, and is very much a pillar of truth in this changing landscape of life.  She’s gifted me more than just my first feature reading, or invaluable insight into my words.  Anya has gifted me the dedication of a human who has no motive except that of being real. 

In Hungarian, Anya means ‘mother’ and it couldn’t be a more fitting name for her.  She calls me DD – short for Darling Daughter.  I am blessed, grateful and honored to have her in my life.