5 Elementary Stories
My first day of kindergarten was a disappointment. Our teacher, a white-haired woman named Mrs. Helen Smith, was by the time I joined her class in the 1960s had no doubt been teaching since before World War II, and I’m sure nothing about a group of five-year-olds was unfamiliar. When our classmate Jane, who could not bear to be parted from her mother for the few hours in the afternoon for our half-day classes, began the class with sobs and whimpers, Mrs. Smith promptly dispatched her to the art closet, ensuring the rest of us would be undisturbed by her distress. When, sometime during the year, my classmate Doug swallowed some pennies, she knew to calmly call the Principal, who drove him to the hospital.
My brother, who had his first day a year previous and who, as far as I was concerned had demonstrably achieved greatness in all things Kindergarten-related, proved to me that school was a busy, happy place, full of art projects and alphabet practice – and familiar playmates. I didn’t know the children surrounding me on that first day, but I would. Most of them would be my companions for the next twelve years, and more than half would remain known to me for the rest of my life. Of the hundred or so kindergarten kids, split into four classes – two in the morning, two in the afternoon – perhaps seventy-five or eighty would be together at high school graduation. Thirty years after that, about forty would gather for our class reunion, many of them with grandchildren already attending the very same school.
Mrs. Smith promised us that our first day would be an easy one: some play time, a song or two, a brief introduction to the fun we’d have during the year, a snack, and – if we had time, she assured us—a nap. The rest of the agenda happened as promised, but the nap never materialized and I went home with the cocky self-confidence of a five-year-old who knew already that sometimes teachers are wrong.
Never mind, soon I was caught up in the daily rituals of school. In those days, none of us entered kindergarten with any experience with the alphabet, or with numbers, so there was plenty to learn.
The best part of school was the toys: trucks, wooden bricks, and guns for the boys; a pretend kitchen complete with pots and pans and fake plastic wigs for the girls. I don’t remember recesses outside. Maybe we didn’t have any: in the cold Wisconsin winters it would have been a big project for Mrs. Smith to dress up all those kids, send them outside, and reverse the process when they came back in. No matter: I wasn’t much of an outdoors type, and playing with balls or other sports wouldn’t have appealed to me. I preferred to play in that pretend kitchen, with the girls, though eventually Mrs. Smith corrected me and made clear that I needed to be with the boys. Oh well, that was okay too.
