9:55

An Age of Innocence From 5-to-10

My first teacher, Miss Blossom, welcomed us into kindergarten on a chilly but sunny September morning in ’45.  I liked the place.  We were on the first floor with large windows facing the playground on the west side of the school.  The most memorable feature was a large mural of the south wall, above the coat closets.  There was a little girl dressed in blue and white, sitting on a little stool eating oatmeal.  A few months into the curriculum I learned that the stool was a tuffet and the oatmeal was actually curds and whey.  To this day I’ve never seen a tuffet nor tasted curds an whey.  Nor have I experienced the hallucinogenic scene painted above Miss Muffet.  There was this large, smiling cow (a Holstein) jumping over a smiling crescent moon.  I couldn’t believe it. This school stuff was really weird!

I’m sure lessons were offered and I learned something, but I don’t recall too many details.  What did stick in my mind was that the milk and graham crackers were better than the orange aide. I never got much sleep during nap time.  Five year olds, unlike 70 y.o.’s, are too wound up to appreciate the concept of nap time.  Besides, even with the thin blanket, that floor was pretty cold.  But it sure was better than grades 1-3 when we had to nap or rest at our desks with our arms folded on the desktop and our heads buried in our arms.  God ‘amighty those desktops smelled bad!   

But back to kindergarten. I have two distinct memories of the year.  First, we had these huge hollow wooden blocks.  We could build steps, forts, etc.  One day I was sitting in a fort with Susie Hartwell.  Lloyd Smith thought it would be fun to climb on top of the fort and bombard us with blocks.  The first block his Susie in the head and she bawled. I crashed right through the wall, ala Superman, and lit into Lloyd.  My 5-year old fists didn’t do much damage and Miss Blossom broke it up immediately.  But the reason I remember it to this day is because she made both of us stand in the corner or in the coat closet. This was a '40s version of "time out". I thought that was unfair since I was simply defending a fair maiden.  Chivalry died at age five. The other memory was that the playground was lots of fun but dangerous.  The swings had steel bars with loops rather than rope.  If you held on near the loops you could get a hellofa pinch and blister.  And as much fun as it was to go fast on the merry-go-round thing, it always resulted in nausea.  

 I failed to see the connection between playing and throwing up.  Years later, teenage drinking often brought about a similar lesson.  One of life’s paradigms I guess.

Grades 1-3 came and went with me becoming more bored and spending a lot of time watching clocks.  Our clocks would just sit there until the minute hand clicked to the next minute.  Around two or three in the afternoon it took forever between clicks. All the clocks were controlled by a big clock in the principal’s office.  It had a large pendulum, a second hand, and was enclosed in a oak and glass case.  It sat right above the secretary’s desks and made a steady clunk, clunk, clunk sound.  Those poor secretaries.  I didn’t spend quite as much time in the office as they did, but it was a maddening hell with that clunk, clunk, clunk.  If I wasn’t watching the clock I was watching the windows.  Grades 1- 3 were on the east side so I got to watch cars and buses, and the woods to the east.  I sure wished I could spend more time in the woods.  I was dying to be outside, regardless of the season.  So were the flies.  There were always flies laying on their backs and spinning around in a death dance among the pencil sharpener shavings and chalk dust.  The only respites were lunch and gym ...  later, band practice.

Mrs. Trimmer ran a friendly but orderly 4^th grade.  She was old.  Grades K-3 were staffed by relatively young ladies.  But Mrs. Trimmer was probably in her 30s or 40s.  Not as old as Miss Snyder but old.  And, like Teddy Roosevelt, she carried a big stick … a yard stick.  She used it as a pointer and as an attention getter.  But only once, (unlike the nuns at St. John’s, or so I heard), only once did she use it as a weapon.  There was that memorable day in early the Spring of 1950 when Jimmy Heinlein wouldn’t behave.  [See, I wasn’t the only rebel in the class.]  When Mrs. Trimmer was up to here with Jimmy's antics, she called him up, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck (where is the scruff?), and started whacking his backside with the yard stick.  After around 4 or 5 whacks, Jimmy got hold of the stick and it broke in half.  Then he started whacking Mrs. Trimmer’s backside.  Round and round they went.  It reminded me of a scene in my Golden Book, "Little Black Sambo".  They didn’t turn to butter like the tiger and Sambo, but we all melted into uncontrollable fits of laughter.

By grade 5 (age 10) I knew they were getting serious.  I had a male teacher, Mr. Huggler.  I had a tough time conning men.  But I’ve got to say, I absorbed a little bit more and the year went by quicker.  And after five years of most always being late for school (a little over a half-mile walk with lots of distractions), our family built a new house.  That cut my travel time down to 2 blocks or around 170 yards and improved my attendance record somewhat.  

For some reason I was the subject of bullying around then.  Nothing much happened on school grounds, but on the walk home, I was always getting taunted, teased and occasionally beat up a little.  One afternoon I was attacked as I passed our new property.  They were just surveying and digging the basement.  I high-tailed it for the lot and told my attackers that they couldn’t hit me now – I was on my own property.  Wrong.  A man’s home may be his castle, but not when he’s 9 and the castle hasn’t been built.

Age 9 was also the year I experienced my first of two instances of pedophilia.  One day on my way home I was kidnapped by a couple high school guys, taken into their house, and forced to have oral sex.  It wasn’t a fun time.  But unlike all the damaged young Catholic boys who are suing the Church and making a lot of lawyers rich these days, it also wasn’t a devastating, life-changing, traumatizing event.  It happened.  I didn’t like it.  It rather confirmed I'm hetero. The other incident occurred a couple years later.  I was at summer camp for two weeks at Camp Cory on Keuka Lake.  While in the latrine one afternoon, a counselor signaled me to join him in a stall.  I passed and ran out of there.  Case closed, got over it, moved on. End of story.