“but all these girls have cooties!!!”
And so it began. I started school half day. No more running around with mom to errands and the museum. It was like college in the respect that you were thrown into close quarters with a bunch of people you didn’t know. Except that these people you didn’t know didn’t recognize your personal space. And our poor teacher who had to be part lion tamer. Just like you, I have only dim flashes of that year, like far off lightning.
Everyone had their own mat for break time. I know she would play music when we ‘rested,’ like Love is Blue or Greensleeves. The library was very small, so she had to bring books to the room and read to us.
A small bathroom was just off the classroom, providing access to us and first graders. I do remember her having to work with kids who still hadn’t mastered the nuances of delivering your waste into the water.
What really takes me back was the white paste. There was a huge gallon jar of white paste to glue stuff together. A large jug just begging you to stick your whole hand into it. The paste appealed to our young tactile senses. It always looked better on your face or clothing than on the paper you were supposed to be gluing together. White paste was also not poisonous, so if someone covered their lips with it (daily!), she didn’t have to consult a Guide To Poisons handbook. As I recall, it didn’t taste good or bad. It just filled your mouth with white slop that made you speak like a Tibetan yak.
The weird part was I had totally forgotten the white paste until a beer-fueled college night when someone mentioned it while discussing a film called Deep Throat.
She had access to a kiln in another school building. This meant that you painted your glorious artistic endeavors on a clay saucer (and sign your art, of course!), then you’d get back something nicer than a piece of colored paper with crayon scrawl. She also had us put our hand-print in thick plaster, which then hardened. And of course, we signed this as well, like any good post-Modernist dilettante.
I wish I could remember that first day. Off kilter silences laced with fear. Those big kids looking down on you like so much vermin. The new clothes that you didn’t like ’cause they fit weird; they didn’t really belong to you. But you knew if you messed them up, mom wouldn’t be happy. Why couldn’t I be back in my field surrounded by nature and feeling that gentle welcoming breeze?
And the polio. Nowadays the word refers to an old disease in the past, like the plague. But in the 50’s this was real shit. The vaccine had been discovered a few years earlier. So you got fed a sugar cube laced with the vaccine. I smiled when I learned hippies put LSD on sugar cubes during the Summer of Love–where’d they ever get that idea from? Tricky bastards!
I can testify to the reality of polio. The best boss I had wasn’t inoculated and she had a a twisted, misshaped leg, hobbling her like Dickens’ Tiny Tim. She spent life pushing through it; luckily she was smart as a whip. She was also one of the few people I ever met whose home upbringing was worse than mine.