Before I continue with the story of our budding romance, I want to pause for a moment to introduce Shelly’s dad. I mentioned earlier that our parents all knew each other when we were born, since our dads both taught at the high school. By the time I was in high school my dad had long since moved away to the wine country along the Russian River, but Shelly’s dad was still there teaching physical geography and driver’s ed. I took his class when I was a sophomore. He was not a popular teacher. The most popular teachers at our high school had lots of personality, took an interest in their students’ lives and made their classes interesting and fun. Not so with Milan Staival.¹ He was a tall, slender man with dark hair and Slavic features — a little intimidating just to look at. He was born in Yugoslavia and moved with his family to Pittsburg while still a young child. His father was a baker. Neither he nor his father could ever return to the old country without risking arrest and conscription into the Yugoslavian army, but they didn’t mind serving in ours. Milan met Shelly’s mother, Cleo, when they were both in college in New York. Cleo was Irish Catholic from Iowa, trained as a librarian, but now a dedicated homemaker. Milan stopped short of completing his doctoral dissertation in physical geography and got his teaching credential for high school instead. I’m not sure how they ended up in Northern California, but they brought with them old world values that stood out in the 1970s. They were very old-fashioned. They were in many ways a contrasting couple: she being a petite redhead who talked a mile a minute, he being tall, dark, and quiet. She was Catholic, he was Eastern Orthodox. There was no Orthodox community where we lived, so he agreed to allow Cleo to raise their kids in a strict Catholic manner. I think he preferred to be relieved of any religious obligations.

Milan’s teaching style was dry and to the point. It would have been beneath him to try to appeal to the kids by being fashionable, cool, and groovy like some of our teachers. He simply lectured, sticking to the facts. One thing that caught my fancy was that he was still skeptical about the newfangled theory of plate tectonics. “I can see that it has a lot going for it, but I’m still not quite convinced,” he said one day in class. I found that amusing because everybody knew plate tectonics was a thing. (I had had a subscription to National Geographic magazine since I was eight and knew all about it.) Most of the students seemed to dread his class, not only because he was strict and gruff, but also because they found the subject dry and boring. Not I. I loved the class and paid attention to every word. I think I may have gotten the best grade of any student who had taken the class, and I think he was charmed by my enthusiasm for the subject. My intuition told me that the gruff demeanor was actually a cover for a shy and gentle spirit.

When I say that he and Cleo were very old fashioned, I mean they raised their kids in a very strict and orderly household. They were dedicated parents and very committed to their traditional gendered roles. Milan could fix anything that needed fixing and Cleo would enlist her daughters’ support (she had four) for the organizing of stacks of coupons each week before grocery shopping. But Milan did one thing that I didn’t anticipate: he baked bread. It was only occasionally, but I have to say the basic white bread his father had taught him to make was the most delicious, chewy, and delectable I have ever experienced.

I think the fact that he was an intimidating teacher might have been one of the reasons Shelly had never had a boyfriend, but I knew he liked me, which is why I was willing to take the chance.

1. Not his real name but same vibe. ↩︎