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.

Water Sports

Water and I go way back.  My hometown is Spencerport.  Port refers to being on the Erie Canal (NYS Barge Canal).  We are one of many ports; Fairport, Brockport, Middleport, Gasport, Lockport.  I stayed pretty close to home in the village of Spencerport at first.  But once I graduated from crawling to walking, I was off exploring.  My Mom put me in a leather harness and tied the harness to the clothesline in the side yard.  But my greatest teacher, necessity, soon taught me to untie knots and slip out of a harness.  What a fantastic world for discovery stretched out past 309 South Union Street. I was all of two or three.

South Union is a rather busy main street.  It was an ongoing parade of cars, trucks, Greyhounds, and other sometimes exciting vehicles like fire trucks, the police car, and delivery folk; milk, dry cleaning, coal, ice (more later on the ice).  Most if not all were powered by horsepower vs. horse power by the time I arrived. As a toddler I used to sit on the curb and wave to the folks. And they waved back.  Come summertime it would get awfully still, hot, and humid.  I would strip, and sit on my clothes on the curb.  Not only would folks continue to wave but soon the phone would ring and Mom would come running out of the house and scoop me up. I was told it was not proper to take your clothes off and sit on the curb and wave to cars.  Even if it’s hot and humid.  But I soon grew tired of traffic and struck out to find and enjoy a quieter time.  Behind our house was The Swamp.  It was a large overgrown oasis of shade and secluded green.  The lifestream of this Eden was the west branch of Northrup Creek.  I spent many an hour in the early years exploring mossy banks, crabs (crawdads), water skeeters, pollywogs, dragon flies, groundhogs, muskrats… all sorts of swamp residents.  Fortunately, for a 2-year old, there weren’t a whole lot of snakes, crocodiles, or other wildlife threats. Except mosquitoes!  But my pre-school education in the swamp included more than botany and zoology.  Thanks to my curious nature and my trusting neighbor friend, Donna, I also became quite proficient in human anatomy and sociology.

By the time I was three or four the trips got a little longer.  The Erie Canal was “downtown”, just under a half mile north of my home.  On the large rock banks of that waterway were millions of lessons to be enjoyed.  At first I’d just wander about and wait for the bell to ring, signaling that the lift bridge was going up to let a barge and tug pass under.  I’d run to the center of the bridge and jockey into position so the smoke from the tug boat would hit me.  Then I’d run to the other side and wave as the bridge went down again.  Life’s simple pleasures. Come 5 o’clock someone would usually pick me up and drive me home for supper.

There are comfortable concrete alcoves under the Martha Street canal bridge with plenty of shade or protection from wind and rain where I could daydream, nap, wave to tug boat crews, and learn to smoke. My first experiment with that vice consisted of one of my Dad’s pipes and some Lipton teabags, a much milder introduction than Prince Albert or Mom’s Pall Malls or Winstons. 

We didn’t swim much by the Martha Street bridge.  As I recall there was a rope swing on the south side but since it was within eyesight of the bridge tender at the lift bridge on South Union, we didn’t use it much.  He’d get all bent out of shape and have Charlie Ballard (the police department) come up and shoe us away.   Once I was old enough to ride a bike we journeyed east 2 miles to the Gillette Road flood gates. That place was heaven on earth for a kid on a hot summer’s day.  It was out in the country so nobody bothered us.  It took awhile to master but jumping off the flood gates was good for hours of danger, i.e. fun.  The bottom of the gate was around 20 feet from the water.  The top was maybe 40 feet.  If you didn’t hit the water just right, it hurt.  A lot!  I’ve seen kids forget to tuck in an arm and pop the skin on their forearm like a Zweigle’s white hot.  It wasn’t a good idea to expose cuts and scratches to the canal water (or swallow it!).  Even back then, the Erie Canal was a far cry from Adirondack Mountain Spring water!  We all knew to watch out for dead cows or pigs before we jumped. I never actually saw one, but that was the tale.  Now that I think about it, cuts and scratches were the norm for a boy. The immune system of a 7 year-old in the 40s was a marvelous thing.

Heading East from my home was the east branch of Northrup Creek.  It had an easier time of it than the swamp side.  After gurgling along through open pastures, it turned west for a bit and went through an old geological depression. Mr. Noble, who owned the land thereabouts, used that depression to make a living.  He blocked up the creek in the fall and created a large pond.  After it froze, it was cleared (a board dragged behind a tractor), swept and provided us all with a large skating rink.  At night there were a few lights atop phone poles and a rickety old shed with benches along both sides, a pot-belly stove in the center, and a small counter with sodas, candy, and a couple lace hooks to cinch up skates.  I didn’t have fancy lace up skates though.  Mine just attached to my goulashes with leather strips. What with strap-on skates, four layers of clothes under a padded snowsuit, I wasn’t at all graceful or on my way to the Olympics.  But then, it didn’t hurt to fall either.  I remember well the smells of wet wool, pulling snow balls from my mittens and throwing them on the stove to watch them dance into steam.

Once winter was coming to an end, Mr. Noble would harvest the ice, pack it with sawdust in his ice house, and provide villagers with refrigeration till next year.  Come to think of it, he delivered on a horse powered wagon.  I remember the canvas apron on his shoulder to keep dry and those big, nasty looking ice tongs!  You wouldn’t believe how great a fresh piece of ice tasted on a sweltering August afternoon.  Kids today … aw, never mind.

Just north of north of Mr. Nobel’s spillway the creek went over a small waterfall.  It was and is my home-away-from-home.  I can still hear it and feel the coolness. If I can wangle permission (or not), my ashes will someday rest next to that waterfall.   As a youngster the falls seemed a good size.  But when I visited it in my 50s, it isn’t much at all … maybe all of 3-4 feet high and 5 feet wide. Just a trickle these days.  At the bottom were grassy banks, lots of rocks, lots of creek-like marine life, and pure, natural, peace and contentment.  It must have been a place like this that was the inspiration for spas, yoga, back to green movements and tranquilizers. One big problem was that it is located about midway between home and school.  As a result, I was very frequently late for school and late for supper.  Now that I am older … a lot older … I believe the time was a well spent part of my education. But at the time it was not seen that way by teachers and parents.

I had no real solution for my teachers.  After awhile they tired of sending notes home, making marks in attendance lists, or sending me to The Office.  No, I stand corrected. They never tired of sending me to The Office.  I don’t know why it never occurred to me to leave home earlier in the morning.  All I know is that the teachers didn’t think if it either!

As for being late for supper, that was usually covered.  First of all, my doctor/father was frequently late due to patients, house calls, etc.  Secondly, I had a plan.  Between my house and the falls was Fairfield Cemetery, another quiet and peaceful place.  If I was lucky, I could borrow an armful of fresh flowers to give to my Mom when I was running late.  That worked a few times --  ‘til I forgot to remove the RIP ribbon.

   TBC.

  

New Name, New Design, New Purpose

  To tell you the truth, it's been so long since I checked in here I was surprised this blog still exists!  Since signing on, Blogger has changed quite a lot.  Me too.  I decided limiting it to my foodie chats and going on about Mexico was limiting. And boring.
  So I went wild with changes.  A new design.  Hopefully a larger font (gettin' on!). And most of all, a new name and objective.  Starving Gringo will now be called OFIM.  I'm Old and In México.  You figure it out. ;-)
   Instead of just talking about food and cooking, I'll write about whatever.  That way, just maybe, I won't get bored/boring.  And, also just maybe, I'll update my ramblings more the once a year!  Let's see que pasa.