Ida, our ceramics teacher, is a woman with perfectly waved white hair, tall and upright, well known in her neighborhood, which she walks through morning and evening with Dino, her lively long-haired dachshund. She taught in kindergarten for many years, and she has forgotten nothing from those days: the children, her colleagues, the methods she used to teach them.
Today she tells us, delighted: "Yesterday I saw Adriano on television. I recognized him right away, even though more than thirty years have passed!"
"Adriano who?" some of us ask, because this name has nothing to do with the clay painting and image-collaging we are working on.
Ida smiles and tells us the story.
"He was five years old, born with phocomelia—he had only two small stumps instead of arms. His parents didn't feel able to care for him, so he was placed in a foundling home, where he lived. When they enrolled him at the Green Nursery, where I was teaching, he didn't speak and couldn't walk yet. He would drag himself happily across the floor, pushing himself as best he could. I became so attached to him! I always talked to him. I would hold him under his arms and teach him to walk, and he learned my name almost at once: Ida, Ida—he was always saying it, always looking for me, always calling me. After a few months he could walk, and how he could move! Then he left us to continue school. But that's not the end of the story. Two years later, a girl came to do an internship at our nursery—she worked with children at the foundling home. I told her we'd had a boy there with them, a child named Adriano.
She stopped me right away: 'So you're the mysterious Ida!' she said. 'Adriano is certainly a lively boy, he's still with us, and he often says the name Ida...Ida. We couldn't figure out who this woman was that he kept calling for. But one thing is certain: he never forgot you!'
"Two years had passed and he still remembered me." And here Ida's voice catches a little—and who wouldn't?—then she goes on: "And yesterday morning I saw him on the screen, and what a fine young man he's become. But his face is the same. They were interviewing him on a television program because—can you imagine?—he's become a boxing champion in the disabled category, with the help of prosthetics. What a strapping young man, and I was the one who taught him to walk and to say his first words. He called for me and wanted me always.
You see, Adriano? Even though you've grown into a strapping young man and a boxing champion, your first teacher Ida remembers you and would love to see you again and embrace you. See if you can make her happy! And congratulations on your career from all of us at the Hive!
Pennablù, 2008