Despite attempted handsaw homicide, I passed kindergarten and was passed on to first grade and to a different building, a one-story, just-built-of-brick, neighborhood school. And, praise whomever I was praising at age five, there was to be no more size-large yellow bus. The new school was close by, and I would be “a walker.” The new school was lovely, clean and airy, surrounded by unscarred cement walks and lots and lots of green grass. All the furniture was right out of the box and even the pencils, paper, rulers, and other accoutrements seemed bathed in this aura of newness. Having lately come from a dreary, dark mausoleum of a school where you couldn’t be sure what might be lurking in any given corner of the room, this must have felt, after the first fifteen minutes, just fine. And so after the first fifteen minutes of my first grade year (see below) I passed the next two years of school in a tranquil stasis. The opening inning of that first day, however, was dreadful and, perhaps, emblematic of school days to come absent the happy ending.
The first fifteen minutes? Let me set the stage: My parents worked at a local private school whose vacations were always more generous than those of the public schools where I attended. To my parents the public school’s vacation parsimony was no reason to cut short their own respite fun. So the week after Labor Day, while the other kids were forming alliances, establishing the pecking order and otherwise learning the ropes in the new school, we would still be vacationing in Maine. I started on the following Monday having missed the first four days of school. That Monday I set off for the new school – joined en route by other neighborhood kids. We trouped all together up to the front of the school and milled about. Owing to the parental insensitivity and abuse that led to my enforced four-day absence, I had no idea of the routine for entering into school. As I was wont and rather than look about me, I pondered what to do. As often happens, my pondering became “deep pondering,” and by the time I finally “pondered” to the conclusion that I had no idea what to do, all my schoolmates had vanished, and, but for my brand new Roy Rogers lunchbox with matching thermos, I found myself standing alone in front of the school without a clue. And while I was often clueless, the stakes here seemed overwhelmingly high. The first day of school! What should I do? “…tigers, and bears, oh my!” Distraught, then flooded, I turned to an old, tried but true, strategy. I turned on the tap and began crying. Crying pretty vigorously. The more I cried, the more I cried. I got quite worked up and fortunately, just as I hit full spate, my racket must have been heard through an open window because it drew forth someone from the office. She came, took my hand and ushered me inside. Despite the psychic breakdown, I was able to recall and state my name, and soon I was seated in my new classroom. In middle school my howling and teary visage might have drawn considerable attention, but, as it was, my peers, if they took any notice at all, chalked it up as something that could happen to anyone.
Beyond my hysteria and dramatic entrance, I don’t remember much of my time at this school. My teacher, Miss C. (no Ms. in 1956) was not right out of the box. She was short, round, tried, tested, white haired, and very nice in a fashion that brooked no nonsense. And indeed I don’t remember there being much if any nonsense in the two years, second grade as well as first, that she was my teacher. My mother, a reading teacher, said we did a lot of phonics. That might explain my relative facility with eastern European names. If you went to use the bathroom, you took a spool strung on yarn from the nob of the water bubbler, put it around your neck, and the absence of the spool signaled to everyone that the bathroom was occupied and they had to wait. If an atom bomb was scheduled to fall, we went to the interior wall, crouched down on our knees, and put our hands over our heads. (I bet all of the first graders in the Soviet Union were using the very same highly effective strategy.) And that’s about it for two whole years of school. I had a lot of friends. I got in a fight with Ronny once, but fortunately there were no hand tools to hand so we just postured, then rolled down a hill, and started laughing. Time passed uneventfully until third grade when I returned to the size-large yellow bus, the gloomy recesses of the Penitentiary and the Tolliver.
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