Sandra’s Story: It’s Not Gonna Be A Very Good Day

AGarret Mathews

Sandra’s Story:It’s Not Gonna Be A Very Good Day

Garret Mathews

Cover photo by Molly BartelsBook and cover design by Colin Mathewswww.pluggerpublishing.com

About Garret Mathews

Garret Mathews is retired from writing the metro column for The Evansville, Ind., Courier & Press. Born in Abingdon, Va., he graduated from Virginia Tech and worked on the Bluefield, W. Va., Daily Telegraph from 1972 until 1987 when he came to Indiana. In 2000, he was named Columnist of the Year for Scripps-Howard newspapers. His books include “Baseball Days,” “Swing, Batta, “Past Deadlines: Past Lives,” Can’t Find A Dry Ball,” “Defending My Bunk Against All Comers, Sir?” and “They Came To Play.” He and his wife, MaryAnne, have two grown children, Colin and Evan, and daughter-in-law Rachael.

Mathews has written more than 6,500 columns. He gathered 80-some of these pieces for a collection titled “Favorites.” The book includes the tale of an exotic dancer who wants to be a herpetologist and a 91-year-old Kentucky woman who won’t stop bootlegging beer and whiskey. For more information, go to www.newspaper-writer.com.

Mathews has written a two-act play published by Heuer about the civil rights movement titled “Jubilee In The Rear View Mirror.” The comedy-drama about a young black man and a racist Caucasian sharing a Missis-sippi jail cell is based on dozens of interviews Mathews conducted with men and women who came to Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s to register black voters

and to help desegregate schools, restaurants and stores. For more information, go to www.hitplays.com.

Mathews also penned a play titled “Can’t Find A Dry Ball” based on his book that chronicled a season of the Evansville Otters, a team on the lowest rung of profes-sional baseball. Players earned $12 a day in meal money and were more attuned to discount coupons than the homeless. For more information, go to www.jacpub.com.

His latest project is a double CD titled “Folks Are Talking,” an audio tape based on more than two dozen interviews Mathews conducted in southern West Vir-ginia and southwest Virginia in the 1970s when he wrote for the Bluefield, W. Va., Daily Telegraph. Included are chats with snake-handlers, survivors of coal mine explo-sions and the story of a female furrier who skins musk-rats while eating peanut-butter sandwiches. There’s also original music in keeping with the project’s Appalachian theme. For more information, go to www.pluggerpub-lishing.com.

iGarret Mathews

Sandra goes to elementary school in one of the poor-est parts of the city. Only one child in her fifth-grade class does not qualify for the free-lunch program. It’s the rare youngster who resides with both biological parents. Not many of their caregivers graduated high school. Several have problems with drugs and alcohol. Some are in jail.

Few caregivers are active participants in the learning process. School wasn’t an important part of their lives and they pass that indifference on to their children. There are frequent acting-out episodes in class from kids who mimic the behavior they see at home.

Sandra lives in a $200-a-month rental apartment with holes in the walls and mice in the insulation. Her mother has emotional and health problems and doesn’t work. Sandra’s dad has long been out of her life. An elderly man fathered Sandra’s 7-year-old sister, Sophie. While he is not married to Sandra’s mother and they live sepa-rately, he comes over most days.

There is no car. Sandra walks to the grocery store and the Laundromat. The girls wear ill-fitting clothes from Goodwill and the Salvation Army.

Sandra’s teacher asked me to speak to her charges

INTRODUCTION

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about writing, something I’ve often done at schools in our three-state area. At that time, I penned the metro col-umn for The Evansville, Ind., Courier & Press.

I quickly became aware that many of the children in Sandra’s class have never been to the mall or the museum or to a baseball game. I started taking three or four kids at a time to these places. This was my first intimate expe-rience with urban poverty. I had been like most others in Evansville who only knew the projects as fleeting images in the rear-view mirror while speeding by on the express-way.

I wrote several newspaper columns about our after-noons and evenings together to include a piece about a little girl from the neighborhood whose father was ar-rested for making methamphetamine. She was removed from the home by Child Protective Services while Sandra and her sister watched.

Sandra and Sophie became regular companions. Once I met a neighbor who was carrying a bag of grocer-ies into Sandra’s apartment. She explained that the family often runs out of money and it’s common for folks living nearby to contribute items.

That became the impetus for a book on Sandra’s fifth-grade year, both at home and at school. I wanted read-ers to discover, as I did, what it’s like for a child to grow up poor with all the odds against her. To make matters worse, Sandra is extremely shy and anxiety-ridden. Her mother has convinced her that the world is a dangerous place. The child won’t go to the zoo because she believes the stories she’s been told about how the animals could get loose and kill everybody they see.

The narrator is a girl in Sandra’s class who lives in

iiiGarret Mathews

the neighborhood and is like the proverbial fly on the wall.

A corollary part of the story is the sad fact that the learning process is much more difficult in poor neigh-borhoods where the most immediate priorities must be obtaining adequate food and shelter. Sometimes caregiv-ers move several times during the school year – often in the middle of the night – because they can’t meet rent payments.

It follows that a teacher’s job under such circumstanc-es has its special challenges and frustrations. “Sandra’s Story” focuses on Mindy McDurmon, but there are thou-sands of instructors just like her in poor schools across the country. In an educational system that sometimes seems to care more about test scores than the obstacles many boys and girls face just to get to class, these women and men add whopping doses of compassion and under-standing to the lesson plans. I salute them.

I changed Sandra’s name and that of her mother, her sister and the elderly man who was often a part of the household. The cover photograph is not of Sandra. I also do not use real names of students in her class, some of whom are based on boys and girls I met during other volunteer efforts in the same inner-city community over a several-year period.

I spent many hours in Mrs. McDurmon’s classroom. Sandra’s mother was generous with her time and an-swered all my questions. I could not have written the book without them. Thanks are also in order to Cedar Hall School officials who let me hang around.

I have not seen Sandra since the end of her fifth-grade year. As I write this, she should be entering her

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freshman year of high school. She deserves the best. I wish her plenty of good days ahead.

August 23, 2011

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