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Lucky Me

6/23/2011

For some of us the great thing about grade school was the daily captive audience, with weekends off to develop new material.

The phenomenon of Show and Tell in particular was an opportunity I did my best not to waste.

I brought in my mother’s baton and tried to duplicate her moves as a former majorette. I presented my occasional poem, written in my best imitation of Ogden Nash (“History is a mystery/It makes me so forlorn/After all, why shouldn’t it?/It happened before I was born.” To this day I don’t know whether I actually wrote that, as I long believed, or whether it was a case of cryptomnesia -- inadvertent creative theft. Either way, it really went over). Although it was a classmate who read my epic poem about bowling; I’d refused, not wanting to be exposed in the event someone who’d actually been bowling spoke up correctively.

Then I came upon a treasure trove that was to be my guarantee of perpetual Show and Tell dazzlement. An avid outdoor explorer of limited geographical range, I discovered a patch in our backyard that somehow regularly produced four-leaf clovers -- sometimes five- and even six-leafers!

Toxic waste bed? Caffeinated leprechauns? Who cares -- we’re going to Show and Tell!

I took them to school flattened in books. I carried them in my hand or pocket. I brought them lining the rims of little, water-filled paper cups, trying not to spill on the bus. They never traveled well.

But the reason I finally stopped bringing my miraculous overflow of clovers to Show and Tell was my classmates’ mysteriously waning interest. What didn’t they get?

I could only conclude finally that I was making them sad, since -- it was obvious -- I was going to be the LUCKIEST GIRL EVER.

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Attention, Everyone ...

6/18/2011

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So many things you don’t get the chance to explain...

We were going about our first-grader business, whatever that was, when our teacher went to the door for a little confab. She let in some other teacher, who set up a record player (like an iPod -- look it up) and started playing marching-band music.

Then in came a whole class of fourth graders. Single-file, they marched the perimeter of our room, pretending to play invisible instruments. When the music stopped, they marched out without a word, followed by their teacher. No one explained it at all.

It was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen.

First of all, fourth graders, pretending? That was our purview -- surely fourth graders were too old for our nonsense. Heck, they were practically grown-ups! Still, they hadn’t looked like they were being forced ...

Second, we’d played real instruments (my specialty was grabbing for the triangle) back in kindergarten. How was it that fourth graders weren’t allowed to have them?

Long after our class had moved on to, again, God-knows-what and then God-knows-something-else, I sat pondering the implications of that strange pseudo-performance.

It must be a matter of money, I thought -- so many kids, the school probably can’t afford an instrument for all of them. Surely we could remedy this, if we all put our heads together ... say, if everybody brought in whatever instruments they had lying around at home ...

Now, I knew we didn’t have any musical instruments lying around at my house. But maybe there was still something I could do to help, to kick this thing off ...

And that’s how I came to waggle my raised hand in the middle of some subject, get the teacher to call on me (she sounded a little impatient, God knows why) and, once I had their attention, volunteer to the whole class:

“I have a baton ...”

When everyone’s laughing at you, with the spluttering teacher standing ready to make some kind of point once the room dies down, you don’t get the chance to explain.

I surmised only many years later that it must have been a lesson on using your imagination.

Still, they really should have explained it.

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Teaching Teacher

6/18/2011

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One morning (again) back in kindergarten, I stood at the end of the line pondering God-knows-what. Eventually I grew curious about what we were lined up for, but the other kids wouldn’t talk. Suddenly I was the only one left, facing the looming Mrs. Hammond.

“Raise your left hand,” she commanded.

Huh? Now hands have names? Apparently from her expression this was something she’d mentioned before. Oh well, one guess is as good as the other. Tentatively, I lifted the hand that seemed to want to go first.

Wrong. Mrs. Hammond grabbed my other arm and forced it out of sight.

What the--?

Behind her back, she squashed my spread hand into something cold and clammy and held me helplessly in place. (Another jellyfish?)

Turned out to be one of those clay handprint plates you had to spray-paint gold and bring home in those days. To me, however, the moment was the kindergarten equivalent of an alien abduction. I brought the thing home but didn’t, for once, want to talk about it.

Then there was the construction-paper jack-o’-lantern project. Again I had to guess what we were doing at the last second, so mine turned out like Cyclops. Refusing my pleas for another chance -- a mere second piece of construction paper! -- Mrs. Hammond tacked it up on the wall, where it stared out freakishly amid all the appropriately eyed paper pumpkins, ready for Parent-Teacher Night.

I suppose Mrs. Hammond can’t be entirely blamed for all this torture. There was, after all, the time she hushed us and got very serious about a certain slip of paper. We were each to receive one and it was VERY IMPORTANT, we MUST NOT FAIL, to not only take this piece of paper home but to return it, with a parent’s signature, the very next day. Not in two days, not never.

The other kids sat silent, blinking and seemingly stupefied.

Again, was she not seeing what I was seeing? These timid little snivelers barely knew where they were or how to keep from wetting themselves. Whereas I (you know it) could certainly complete the task, clearly it was beyond the rest of them.

Well, I pitied them, even if she didn’t.

Feeling genuine sympathy in the chilling wake of Mrs. Hammond’s hopeless directive, I addressed the room in a deeply patronizing tone.

“Well, TRY ... ”

I can still see Mrs. Hammond’s jaw dropping as she zeroed in on me for a little, ah, discussion.

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Embracing Olive

6/15/2011

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I am (yam?) of the generation that used to run home after school every day to watch Popeye cartoons. Beyond the short-lived delusion that having had spinach at dinner meant I could defend myself against the bully across the street, the strange world of Popeye held a lasting fascination.

My most enduring image is this: Olive Oyl goes off one night on a sleepwalking tour of a skyscraper construction site. Eyes tight, arms out, oblivious, she strides perilously high among moving girders and swinging wrecking balls. Popeye, awake, follows desperately, trying to protect and save her and suffering multiple disasters along the way.

Yet even as she takes one unconscious step into the void after another, steel beams slide gracefully, unfailingly, under her feet to support her.

Olive Oyl remains perfectly unharmed.

For many years I was that Popeye, desperate to stay alert to dangers, hypervigilant on behalf of my four younger siblings, each seemingly programmed to self-destruct in various and even creative ways, and every new turn of our lives seemingly bent on encouraging it. Thus, in my early days, I was driven to always know -- and enforce if I could -- the one “right” path.

The short version of how that worked out for me is it didn’t.

Codependency 101 aside, I’ve come to think that life at heart is about letting go of Popeye.

And embracing Olive.

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Tour of (Kitchen) Duty

6/10/2011

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I recall my first tour of the kindergarten room, being led to the child-sized kitchen where it was presumed I, as a girl, would play.

What? Certainly the only fun my mother ever had in the kitchen was talking on the phone. What else have you got?

Pretty soon I’d done the painting thing -- one blue line across the top for the sky, green along the bottom for grass, the spike-rimmed yellow circle above, the box house and stick people. It was time to branch out.

I went straight to where the action was: the huge pile of shoebox-sized cardboard blocks, printed to look like bricks, that never stopped being arranged and rearranged into forts or what-have-you.

Let me at ’em.

But they wouldn’t let me at ’em. The busy little block hoarders pointed out something I’d somehow missed: they were boys, and blocks, so they said, were only for boys.

So that's how you want to play it, eh, boys?

Confident in the support of the beloved new angel who’d been sent from heaven just to spend her days teaching me (oh yeah), I ran across the room. What was her name again? What did that matter? She was my glorious new personal discovery: Teacher. And that’s what I called out as I ran up behind her. “Teacher! Teacher!”

There was a pause, one I instantly learned to look out for. She turned her blond head furiously and bent her reddening face into mine. She actually shouted at me, her voice colder than any I’d yet heard: “My name is NOT ‘Teacher’! My name is Mrs. HAMMOND.”

Well then.

Didn’t she already know about the propensity of kindergartners to wet their pants? I’d seen that right from my first day. She was only lucky in my case.

Eventually, through my persistent wheedling -- still learning to say the right thing, or at least the right name -- the boys on the blocks were forced to accept me. But they were hostile behind the back of my former angel, and I soon gave up.

Where are those little testosterone-testing blockheads now?

Corporate America, presumably, or Hollywood.

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Thou Shalt Not Covet ...

6/4/2011

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I really can’t blame anyone for how I turned out -- there’s too much evidence of my scowly nature (much modified now) in photographs of my earliest years. Slouching and glaring at my grandmother’s side. Humorlessly clutching my naked rubber doll (I refused all offers to clothe her) with her perfect, frenzied hairdon’t. And if, captured beaming over my new baby-doll carriage, I appeared at all cute, you should know that I invoked the toddler equivalent of “Touch it and die” to anyone who got too close.

I defended my baby-doll carriage because I knew the kind of emotion it could inspire -- as it had the first time I’d seen one, in the backyard next door to my grandparents’. Despite the fact it was being pushed around by the little girl who lived there, I had only one word for the thing once spotted: Mine.

While the adults all around surely expressed their opinions of me and the single word I shouted over and over as I chased and swatted at my rival, I heard only the faint voice coming from my own head. Perhaps something is vaguely amiss here? it whispered, more sense than language. Is “mine” really the right word for this occasion?

I didn’t have time for such ponderings -- she was getting away.

I don’t recall -- and can’t imagine -- the hell I put everybody through from those moments until I had my own baby-doll carriage to claim, in those short years before my multiplying siblings made making such demands impossible. And I don’t even remember who got it for me.

But I bet they drove pretty fast.

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Change in the Whether

6/2/2011

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Not too long after the jellyfish incident, I was standing in our kitchen, talking to my father. It was kind of a big deal, as I was still learning how.

I have no recollection of what I was saying, but it must have been a little too much, because my father stopped me and said, in a tone new to me, “Are you asking me or telling me?” He seemed to feel that I had somehow challenged him. (At the time he was in his midtwenties, back when it might have seemed perfectly normal -- necessary even -- to intimidate your toddler daughter.)

I didn’t know what my father was talking about, I only knew something big had shifted. One response was right and would keep me in his good graces, the other was wrong and would lead to who knows what. When I couldn’t answer, he asked me again and again, which did no good; he must have thought he was teaching me.

But what I learned was this: the love and acceptance you had assumed were yours forever can disappear in a moment if you don’t know the right thing to say. The lesson became a largely subconscious obsession, yet in many ways a valuable one. I learned a lot by trying to always say the right thing -- even made a career out of it, corporations being always in need of help that way. (I knew I’d gotten there, obsessionwise, one day when I caused a roomful of coworkers to gasp by topping a rude remark before the speaker was able to discernibly deliver it. It had shocked me too but I didn’t let on.)

And finally, eventually, I learned to stand up and fearlessly (usually) speak my truth. I also grew to see “free speech” with someone as a sign of real love.

I suppose just a few pages in it’s already psychologically obvious why I’m writing: still trying to explain myself enough to be loved, a lifetime later.

I do hope you’ll get something out of it too.

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Apocalypse Goo

6/1/2011

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One of my earliest erroneous conclusions:

I was hazily aware of the bright and multiple pleasantnesses of summer -- probably wearing something called a “sunsuit” -- and getting about in a neighbor’s garden, fresh new green scents coming from everywhere. I could walk, though I was new at it; the ground was tricky and there were rocks. Other people were nearby, and that’s about all I knew.

Then I felt something cold and icky. I lifted my bare foot to see a red goo of something squashed, on my foot and on the stone beneath.

The horror, the horror . . .

Now our suburb wasn’t anywhere near the ocean, and certainly I’d have had a lot more to worry about than goo had I been correct, but it was clear to me then that I’d stepped on -- what else? -- a jellyfish. I was somehow old enough to have come across the word, though apparently not to have seen a picture, let alone its habitat.

And I shuddered over recollections of that clammy encounter for years and years and years.

Now I would love to shift this tale to an intelligent musing on how long we entertain the hasty reasonings of our youth.

But you’ll be better prepared for what comes along here if you know that even at the time I understood I was standing in a strawberry patch. . . .

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Lucky Me

Attention, Everyone ...

Teaching Teacher

Embracing Olive

Tour of (Kitchen) Duty

Thou Shalt Not Covet ...

Change in the Whether

Apocalypse Goo

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