Hi, Jinx!

Jinx could have been a boy's name, but it wasn't. Jinx could have been beautiful, but she wasn't. Jinx could have been slim and trim, but she wasn't. Jinx could have been dull and boring, but well, she just wasn't.

Jinx never married. But it wasn't because she had no offers.

Sam Smith offered to marry her once, on a dare.

Jinx was fertile enough, but never had children, partly because she loved all of us.

Sam Smith went on to actually marry Beatrice Forsyth. Soon afterwards Beatrice became an alcoholic.

Jinx never touched the stuff, but she made the best chocolate chip cookies in town and not for sale.

Some say Jinx was that, just jinxed.

Jinx wouldn't have said that. She always thought she was lucky, and not just because she had told Sam Smith, "No!"

Jinx loved kids so much that she took and held the job of school janitor for 32 years, and was once elected president of the PTA, a position she held much of the time she was a janitor.

Once the State PTA was so impressed with the number of parents who joined that PTA, they even wanted Jinx to go on a tour of PTA groups in her state and train other PTA leaders in how to get more members.

Jinx had said she was too busy keeping the school clean and planning group activities to take the time away from her school.

Now it wasn't Jinx's fault she wasn't beautiful and wasn't slim and trim, though perhaps her wonderful chocolate chip cookies might have added to her comfortable lap the small children loved to sit on and chat.

No siree, Jinx was just comfortable with who she was and why she was.

She even assisted the church janitor at the church most town folks attended. Everyone in town knew she was the school janitor, and from time to time someone would ask why she didn't just enjoy the Sabbath and let the church janitor janitor.

When that happened, Jinx would reply with a wink that said "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" though none could remember the church janitor helping Jinx at the school.

Jinx surely had a mother and a father, but when the town named October 23rd as "Jinx Warburton Day" nobody else was old enough to remember what the mother and father had looked like, or how they managed to raise such a loving and self-sacrificing daughter.

Jinx apparently had no brothers or sisters that anyone could recall, and when townfolk asked Jinx about relatives, Jinx simply said "I've had a school full of them every year."

When school let out, and even the teachers took a break, Jinx still checked the school each day and could be seen shooting baskets with a lot of kids who showed up to play. When they clustered around the drinking fountain, they always let Jinx have the first swallows.

In fact, it was during such a basketball pick up game that one hot summer day Jinx died.

Though the fastest runner among the kids ran lickety split to the firehouse across the street and got the Assistant Chief to run back with him, Jinx just lay there where she had collapsed with the same smile still on her face and her chestnut brown eyes looking up, as if she could still see something in the sky.

Epilogue

As you might expect, the school was renamed "Jinx Warburton Elementary" and though Jinx was only just the school janitor and PTA president, speaker after speaker at her funeral said that same thing: "Jinx was the best teacher I ever had."

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© 2016 Demas W. Jasper All rights reserved.