I had a long visit yesterday with Anna's kindergarten teacher, who came to see me, bringing some wonderful homemade jam and also a story I had asked for. She is retired now, but still very involved with education-related projects, friends and family. When I learned a couple of weeks ago that she had not read Searching for Anna (she didn't know the exact title or my maiden name and thus couldn't find the book on Amazon), I ordered a copy for her. She brought me a story, "Three Girls", she had written for a workshop. It was about Anna and the two other girls who went missing from the same kindergarten class.
I must stress the fact that the three incidences are not related in any way except that all the girls were in the same kindergarten class. I knew very little about the one case and nothing about the other. Obviously it had been painful for Mrs. R to write this story, and it was painful to read, even though I wanted to read it. For one thing, I don't think I realized the extent to which the first "news" story in the Half Moon Bay Review (with so many errors and misstatements of facts) influenced people to simply write off Anna's disappearance and to assume she had drowned in the creek.
The emotional trauma to the kindergartners was much greater than I had realized. Mrs. R did not assume that Anna drowned, and on the contrary mentioned some things such as a cattle catcher in Purisima Creek "like a giant wooden comb placed across the stream to prevent a steer...from being washed into the ocean". "Anna's small body could not have slipped through," she wrote.
Mrs. R was hesitant to show me the story, because I think she knew how I would react. "Read this later," she said. But I welcomed another point of view, especially one from someone Anna liked so much and would surely remember. Once again I was grateful that Anna's brief sojourn in kindergarten brought her into contact with a Wise Woman in the person of this teacher.
I must stress the fact that the three incidences are not related in any way except that all the girls were in the same kindergarten class. I knew very little about the one case and nothing about the other. Obviously it had been painful for Mrs. R to write this story, and it was painful to read, even though I wanted to read it. For one thing, I don't think I realized the extent to which the first "news" story in the Half Moon Bay Review (with so many errors and misstatements of facts) influenced people to simply write off Anna's disappearance and to assume she had drowned in the creek.
The emotional trauma to the kindergartners was much greater than I had realized. Mrs. R did not assume that Anna drowned, and on the contrary mentioned some things such as a cattle catcher in Purisima Creek "like a giant wooden comb placed across the stream to prevent a steer...from being washed into the ocean". "Anna's small body could not have slipped through," she wrote.
Mrs. R was hesitant to show me the story, because I think she knew how I would react. "Read this later," she said. But I welcomed another point of view, especially one from someone Anna liked so much and would surely remember. Once again I was grateful that Anna's brief sojourn in kindergarten brought her into contact with a Wise Woman in the person of this teacher.
