Mrs. Costilow

I entered my third-grade classroom with the trepidation that always accompanies the first day of school. It was a new teacher, one my older sister had never had. Her name was Mrs. Costilow. She was sitting in a large black chair in the front of the room, and after the bell rang and we all recited the Pledge of Allegiance together, she told us to come sit around her on the floor. As we crossed our legs in front of us and looked up at her, she pushed a small knob on her chair and moved towards us. I knew it was a wheelchair; I had seen them before. Mrs. Costilow turned to us, and started telling us a story.

She told us that one day she had been going to a meeting with three other teachers. They were crossing a train track, had looked both ways, but when they were driving over the tracks something happened to the car. It was stopped. They tried to get it started, but it wouldn’t go. Then, she told us, they heard the sound of a train. The other teachers got out of the car, but Mrs. Costilow was caught in her seatbelt. She was stuck in the car and the train hit her. Her legs got hurt so badly, she had to get new ones, she told us. Then she reached down, took off her leg, and held it up for us to see. “This is what my new legs look like,” she told us. She passed the leg around, but I didn’t want to touch it. She sat in her chair, rubbing the part of her leg that was left. There was a sock-like thing around the end of her leg. She told us that was to protect it, and that sometimes the fake legs hurt. She told us they were hard to walk on, so she used a wheelchair.

Mrs. Costilow never really talked about her legs after that first day. It seemed normal to have a teacher in a wheelchair. She was a lot of fun. Sometimes she would run over our feet in her chair (it didn’t hurt). In the Faculty Follies, a show where the teachers act out songs that they like, she played “The leader of the pack.” She pretended her wheelchair was a motorcycle. One day she got a flat tire and we had to wait in the hall for the janitor to pump it back up.
I always liked Mrs. Costilow, not for her legs or her wheelchair, but because she was a good teacher. When I was a freshman in college, my mother, who is a minister, took a job at a different church on the other side of town. My first time there, I saw Mrs. Costilow. She walks with crutches now instead of using her wheelchair. She was still nice.

My third-grade teacher was my first obvious encounter with anyone with a disability. I had grown up with my uncle, who is blind, but we never out-right talked about that until I was older. Mrs. Costilow came right out and talked about being in a wheelchair. When I read through the website cripcommentary.com, I couldn’t help but think about Mrs. Costilow. Maybe she was lucky that my elementary school was built during the seventies, and the coolest thing about it was the long, sloping ramps. She seemed so good-natured and open about everything that had happened to her. Maybe she had to be, since she taught eight-year old children.