In the autumn of 1969, I entered kindergarten. Five things were true. I wore my hair in two tightly woven braids with matching ribbons. I carried a beige leather purse over my shoulder on a silver colored chain. I rode bus number 36 and my parents mentioned vaguely that my bus driver was ‘rough’. I was terrified of my teacher. There were 50 children in my class.
There were 50 children in my class. There was one, very thin and stringy strongly built custodian who came into our room dutifully day after day and lifted down 50 cots from the high shelves in the cloak room, set them up and again at the end of the day, picked them all up again and re-stacked them on the same shelves. Both of his ears at the tops folded down and back in the wrong direction as if caught in a press at an earlier time in his life. I watched his ears every day and wondered what had gone wrong.
The room was very large. There was a piano and a huge drab looking rug at the end of the space by the windows where we gathered daily to sing. I do not remember a single song learned on that rug. I came from a musical family so there was already plenty of music pouring into my ears at all times both with accompaniment and acapella so I didn’t care too much about the school musical offerings. I was too busy trying to find my allotted space on a rug with 50 children.
We ate lunch in the room and a hot meal cost 25 cents. A carton of milk cost 2 cents. Ice cream appeared on Wednesdays and cost 10 cents. One of the boys seated next to me at the lunch table blew my white paper napkin off the table onto the floor. I did not like him. One of the boys napping next to me in our sea of blue cots, looked over at me one day and promptly vomited under my cot. From a physics standpoint, it was quite a feat since there could not have been more than one inch between our cots and he missed me, but I was not impressed.
There was a boy who smelled like a barnyard and my parents explained there were a number of children in my class who came from families who worked on the land. I understood it better but I still didn’t like it. There was another boy in my class whose cousin sat at my table. He had a Green Hornet coloring book and would not share the book or the crayons with me but he did share them with his cousin. I understood that it was a good thing for families to stick together but I had never had a cousin who was my age or one who attended my school. For me, cousins were family members who had to live at least two states away.
During naptime, all of us were handed gray, itchy wool army blankets that could have come from the Korean War and perhaps further back. My Dad saw them once and remarked he had used a similar blanket during his military service in World War II. There were a couple of students napping among the ocean of gray wool who were lucky enough to have allergies. They were given beautifully colored purple, white and blue striped cotton blankets and they lorded it over the rest of us. I told my parents I wanted an allergy and they told me I didn’t know what I was talking about.
Out of 50 children, there was one boy who was visited regularly by one of the special education teachers and who eventually disappeared from our ranks having been spirited away to another classroom where there were no more than six students. Those students seemed genuinely happier than the rest of us when our long winding line passed their open door and we all caught a brief peek into another world. There was a whole lot of color happening in that room and the teacher wore open toed sandals and had all her fingernails painted brilliant candy apple red. She wore bright Hawaiian print dresses and a lot of lipstick and her hair was piled high up. After various vague comments about school attire and too much ‘flash’ my parents decided that children who were in special education classes needed a lot of bright colors because it helped stimulate their thinking. It was comfortable having a rationale as to the appropriate use of color in school and on one’s professional person and things settled. There were still 49 students so we hardly missed that one boy.
Kindergarten was sort of a wash and my parents told me later that I could have done without it. I could have told them that. On my report card, my teacher wrote in careful looping handwriting that I acted in a manner which showed that I considered myself to be superior to my classmates. I deny it. The teacher did not like me because I was quiet and that made her suspicious. I was just looking for my space on the drab colored rug with the rest of the herd and was busy wondering where the one boy went who slowly got swept up in the tide leading to the special education room where they all seemed happier.
690 Saint Paul 