If You Were a Horse. . .

I have been a Texas public school teacher for the last 16 years. It can be an incredibly rewarding career, but frustrating too. The first four years of my career, I worked at a tiny, very poor school district in northeast Texas. Enrollment from preK-12th grade was about 500 kids. The school was in a rural setting, so it was not uncommon for the Agriculture class to castrate pigs or kill chickens or for classes to be temporarily dismissed because someone's steer got loose. Classes were small, everyone knew everyone else, and one of the kids' favorite pastimes was to try to set up their single teacher with any man in sight. At first, it was kind of cute, like when they tried to pimp me out to the guy who made milk deliveries to the cafeteria. It was annoying when the constantly suggested that I get together with one of the two single male teachers on campus, one of whom was totally unsuitable for reasons political, cultural, and religious; and the other who was, unbeknownst to the kids at the time, gay. It got downright embarrassing when they asked a married referee at the basketball game if he would like to go out with me. One of my favorite students offered to set me up with her cousin, as long as it didn't bother me that he had just gotten out of prison. I was open minded enough to ask what he had been in for, hoping for insider trading or something that had left him millions of dollars in a Cayman bank account. I realize this makes me sound bad, but if I was going to date an ex-con, this is the type of crime I could deal with. Anyway, she finally told me that cuz had been in the joint because he was a grave robber and he got caught because he left his name-engraved tools at the crime scene! I politely declined her offer at this point.

One day, R. said he had a question he wanted to ask me, and I stupidly believed that it might have something to do with academics.
me: What's your question?
R.: Do you ever want to have kids?
me: What does this have to do with Poe's use of irony?
R.: Really, Miss, do you want to have kids?
me: I don't know; it's a possibility, but first I would like to be married and settled down.
R.: Well, I'm not trying to be rude. . . (which we all know means rudeness is a comin')
25 year old me: But?
R.: Well, it's just that if you want kids, I think you need to get started, because if you were a horse, you'd be dead!