Jerry had never really liked his English teacher at primary school. Her name was Mrs. Mary Madeleine Grace but she expected her pupils to call her just Adele.
After leaving primary school, he had realized he really hated her looking back. Once, at the age of twelve and while walking home from John Worthington Middle school, this girl from another class told him that her aunt - Adele - had told her that Jerry was a prick. "What a nice thing to say about a primary school student" he had told himself sarcastically. This last episode had just contributed to worsening his awful memory of Adele.
There were countless episodes that he could associate with guilt, fear, anger. Not exactly life-enhancing feelings that boost your confidence.
He recalled how one day, during an afternoon P.E. class (she also taught P.E. in fact), during circle time moment with everyone sitting on the floor, she had put him in the spotlight telling him loudly "That's disgusting, You make my stomach queasy! I just saw you picking your nose".
Jerry's immediate reaction had been to hide his bogey by...eating it! That had a disastrous effect. She had expressed her disgust further, and all the other kids had laughed their heads off.
Another time, Jerry's mum Liz had gone to pick him up and stopped for a quick talk with Adele outside the school entrance. Liz wanted to talk about Jerry's low grades in English, and Adele had replied with a textbook teacher's answer "Jerry's got the brains, but he needs to be more committed. What do you think Jerry?" He had replied with an imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. He actually thought she was biased and that he was already working hard, but that was not enough for her obviously.
The following day, Ms Adele asked him at school- with a clearly annoyed tone - "Why on earth did you not agree with me in front of your mum yesterday?".
Then there had been other things. Jerry had, unfortunately, a bad habit of coming up with loads of nicknames for his classmate: there was Del, the Blue Hippo, Roxette, Little Matthew, just to name a few of them. There were exceptions, but most of his mates quite liked these nicknames and didn't mind at all. But the teachers did, especially Adele. She thought this confirmed all her negative views of him being an arrogant bully.
She wouldn't let him be like that so one day she called him out in front of the whole class and started questioning him, like a real Stasi officer, asking very peculiar questions and in the end making him cry (he even started hitting himself, and she seemed to find this all the more annoying: he could not, by all means, be a victim, not even of his own self. He was a villain. He had to be, end of the discussion.
It finally had dawned on him one morning at the age of thirty-six and a half, when he bumped into his classmate Anne Winterbottom.
She had told him how her mum had moved; this had given her time to go through old school exercise books and she had found this book with all the transcripts of the assemblies she had. Jerry had even been secretary of the assembly sometimes, writing and signing the final report. He had totally forgotten about all that.
Maybe Adele wasn't so bad in some way. Maybe, if she hadn't been so unpleasantly critical and negative, he would have been a less resilient person, less adaptable, less... himself.
So, in the end... he started seeing things under a rather different light.
Jerry wasn't very religious. He considered himself an agnostic or an atheist. In spite of this, the sentence that he had overheard whilst watching a film about St Francis's life seemed particularly fitting.
" love your enemy and pray for the ones who persecute you..." or something like that. And Jerry didn't consider Mrs. Adele an enemy; just someone who hadn't brought the best out of him. At least, this is what he had thought until that sunny Winter morning.
