SCHOOL DAYS

CHAPTER TWELVE

SCHOOL DAYS

For me, starting to school was not the dreaded experience that comic strips make it out to be. Many of my friends were already in school, and somehow I looked on it as a kind of promotion out of babyhood. So it was only with the slightest trepidation that I trudged up Morningside Hill in my new brown corduroy knickers.

One of the things that I remember about that first day was the smell of new crayons. Each of us was given a small box of them, together with a clean sheet of paper, and instructed to draw and color a picture. I drew a tree on a green hillside (shaped like a circular arc) against a blue sky. The trunk and limbs of the tree were brown, and it was covered with blossoms created by dotting the paper with my pink crayon.

Another thing that I remember about that first day was that I fell in love. Her name was Lillian, but her parents had nicknamed her "Billy", because they had wanted a boy. How ironic! The reason that I had noticed her was that she was the most feminine thing I had ever laid eyes on, both in appearance and deportment.

The best way that I can describe that romance was that it was a precise analogue of the Charlie Brown attraction to the little red headed girl. I worshipped her from afar. Sometimes she would catch me staring at her and smile, but I doubt that we exchanged more than a dozen sentences in the four years that we shared the same class. During one summer vacation I wandered over to her neighborhood a few times, hoping to catch her outside at play. I'm not sure what would have happened if that strategy had worked; but it didn't, and I eventually gave up the effort.

We had a school bully. I don't know what grade he was in, but he was a little older than I, and definitely bigger. His name was Buford. Once, during recess we got into a tussle, and he beat me up. He didn't actually hurt me much - just threw me down and sat on me. When the bell rang to end recess, he let me up. Lillian, her face and voice full of sympathy, inquired if I was hurt. That little exchange provided an incentive, and after that, I began to take on Buford on a regular basis. When a teacher caught us fighting, it was almost always Buford that got the scolding, because he was winning, and because he was already looked on as a "problem pupil".

As time went on and I grew older, stronger, and heavier, the tide began to turn; and one day I managed to outlast Buford and wound up on top of him. To my vast disappointment this feat failed to earn me the hero image that I thought I deserved. On the contrary, it appeared that I had lost the popular status of "underdog", and was in danger of being viewed as a bully myself. With that disturbing revelation, I eased off and let Buford defeat me a few times before calling it quits altogether.

I started in the first grade in January. That meant that my school year would be out of phase throughout my public schooling. I would be promoted to the High First in September and eventually finish high school in the middle of the winter. For the first year or two, we only attended school for a half-day. We were either a morning student or an afternoon student. I learned later that the school attempted to apply a system whereby the brightest students attended the afternoon session because it was shorter. Apparently the teachers couldn't make up their minds about me, because they kept moving me back and forth, but at least I ended that semester as an afternoon student.

I didn't know how well I was doing academically, because we were not given letter grades. Our report cards consisted of a long handwritten paragraph written in a kind of code, with the words "excellent", "good", "satisfactory", "poor", and "failure" serving as euphemisms for the brutal reality of letter grades. Not understanding the code, I reasoned that if my work was "satisfactory", that meant the teacher was satisfied with it, and so there was no reason to improve on it.

However, the reading skills I had developed by reading comic books and fairy tales stood me in good stead. The school library contained two rooms - one filled with children's books, for grades one through four, and the other containing books about adults, for the two higher grades. In the third grade I was issued a handwritten note authorizing me to use the "grownup" part of the library. The first book that I checked out was The Golden Spur. It had a dramatic picture on the cover, but turned out to be pretty boring. The second book that I got, Runner of the Mountaintops, was a different story in more ways than one. It was a fascinating novel about an inventor who, I believe, was a fictionalized counterpart of Cyrus McCormack.

I received some encouragement in my scientific interests from Mrs. Cox, my teacher for High Third and Low Fourth. She loaned me her college biology notes, which contained some beautifully drawn and labeled microorganisms. I copied her diagrams of an amoeba and a paramecium, but I couldn't match her craftsmanship.

In short, my early school years rolled along smoothly and almost effortlessly - with one big exception: music. Three times a week we left our regular classroom and filed into the music room for an hour's music instruction from a Mrs. Peck. Since she also taught a regular class, someone had to fill in for her while she taught music. One year she formed a Kazoo and Triangle Band; but most of the time she just taught us songs, for which she provided the piano accompaniment. They were mostly folk songs, like "Sleep, Kentucky Babe", "Spanish Cavalier", and "Do Ye Ken John Peel?" I loved the music and the singing. But I had a poor conception of pitch, so she began to yank me out of the class whenever a singing session was scheduled. Foo had the same problem. We had to sit in humiliation in our classroom while the rest of the class was in the music room singing.

One day Mrs. Peck played a recording of Saint-Saens's Carnival of the Animals, in which each section is a musical description of a different animal. Then she gave us a test, mixing up the sections and having us write down the animal corresponding to each of them. It was the first test that I ever flunked. I couldn't tell the musical version of a lion from that of an elephant and, to me, the idea of a musical description of a giraffe made no sense whatsoever. Mrs. Peck took my inability to learn music basics personally. She may have thought that I was just being recalcitrant, but it was clear to me that she actively disliked me. To make matters worse - just at this low point in my musical education - I was scheduled to be promoted into the High Fourth, where she would be my regular teacher. This dark prospect threatened to cast a shadow over my whole summer.

But then, in a totally unexpected way, Lady Luck smiled on me. Mrs. Cox, who apparently sensed the friction between Mrs. Peck and me, suggested to my mother that I skip High Fourth. I would have to pass a qualifying test during the summer, but she felt that would not be a problem. Mom had mixed feelings about it. She had been warned about the problems of a child interacting socially with a class of older children. On the other hand, she saw the advantage of getting my schedule in phase by starting the Low Fifth in the fall semester; and she knew that I feared Mrs. Peck. But most of all, she liked Mrs. Cox and trusted her judgement.

Accordingly, one warm morning that summer, she walked up Morningside Hill with me, and waited while I went into the examination room. One other student was there to take the test. He was trying to skip High Fifth. Although he wasn't in my class, I knew him. He wasn't considered an exceptional student, so I suspected that his mother was "pushing" him.

The results were not revealed directly to us, but to our parents. Mrs. Cox told my mother that the other boy had indeed demonstrated that he could perform at the Low Sixth level; but that my score indicated a Low Seventh capability. Mrs. Cox seemed especially excited about that. Of course, I was happy just to skip a half grade and escape Mrs. Peck's clutches; although I had negative feelings about having all new classmates, and about no longer being in a class with Lillian.

More good news was to come. It so happened that Mrs. Cox got promoted to the Low Fifth along with me and would be my teacher for the full school year. One day, early in the fall semester, Mrs. Peck walked past me in the hall and didn't even acknowledge my presence. I felt so confident and happy about slipping through her fingers that I turned and was about to thumb my ears at her back, but I was afraid some of the other kids would see me and tell on me.

Now, thinking about it in retrospect, it occurs to me that passing that test to skip High Fourth was just the first of a number of similar episodes that would take place over the next dozen years. Fortunately, it was more of an achievement test than an IQ test. We took IQ tests periodically, but the Freedom of Information Act was not in place at that time, and our scores were not usually revealed to us. However, my high school Biology teacher once made a remark that led me to believe that my IQ was only slightly above average. Nevertheless, the ability to score well on generalized tests got me out of serious trouble in at least two other instances; and in two or three more, it opened doors that otherwise would have remained closed. It was almost as if some wizard had given me a magic talisman that I could pull out to save the day just when I was in a desperate situation and needed it most.

On my first day in Low Fifth, I was a little nervous, to say the least. It seemed that every time I looked up from my reading or writing, the other students would be staring at me. They all knew me, and they knew that I had skipped. About midmorning we were assigned an art project. Each of us was to make a collage by cutting certain types of pictures from a stack of old magazines, and paste the pictures onto a blank sheet of newsprint. I was not very adept at that kind of craft, and somehow I managed to lose one of my pictures. I began to hear a few soft giggles in the room; and then I saw, out of the corner of my eye, one of the girls tiptoe up to the teacher and whisper something in her ear. Suddenly the teacher said, "Raymond!" But when I looked up she was grinning. "You've got something on your elbow."

Sure enough, there was the missing picture hanging on my shirt sleeve at the elbow, where I had managed to deposit a dab of paste. I turned red with embarrassment, while the whole class laughed. But that little incident broke the ice, and from then on I was accepted as a regular member of the class.

That was also the year that my mother helped with the preparations for the school carnival. Unlike most present-day carnivals, it was to be held inside the school building during the evening, and children were not expected to attend. However, two girls, Lorraine and Virginia, in my class were asked to be in the carnival. This project involved their staying after school nearly every afternoon, and they even had to rehearse one Saturday. They were sworn to secrecy and would not reveal anything about their roles. Furthermore, Mom wouldn't tell me anything about it, but she did say that the part of the carnival that involved Lorraine and Virginia was her favorite.

I was monstrously curious, and I did my best to figure out what they were up to. Lorraine was a dark haired girl of average size, rather nice looking and brighter than average. But Virginia was a small girl with a round face bordered by blonde ringlets, and a mediocre student. She reminded me of an overgrown doll. I kept hanging around Mom trying to guess what their act was; but on each guess she would just shake her head and grin.

On the day after the carnival she let me in on the secret. She and Mrs. Cox had synthesized a "Dancing Dwarf" by fitting a little dress over Virginia's arms and torso, with Lorraine's arms and hands, clad in socks and shoes, protruding below. Virginia sat on Lorraine's lap behind a dark screen so that the only parts of their bodies that were visible in front of the screen were the parts that constituted the "dwarf". While a phonograph played a short rhythmical selection, Lorraine's hands danced in time, while Virginia smiled and made appropriate gestures with her arms.

After fifth grade, I had only one year left at Morningside. Mrs. Slater, my sixth grade teacher, was fat. Not extremely fat, but her obesity had an unhealthy appearance - a soft, gelatinous flesh with no apparent underlying muscle tone. One afternoon, while the class was working quietly on an assignment, she called me to her desk and told me in a whisper to go to her car, fetch the box of chocolates she had left there, and place the box in her personal closet at the front of the room. In exchange for my trouble, I was to select one of the chocolates for myself. I did as I was instructed, but when I deposited the box in her closet, I noticed a half empty case of Coca-Cola bottles on the floor. It suddenly dawned on me that she was addicted to the candy and soft drinks. She had always had the mysterious habit of disappearing into that closet periodically throughout the day, and now I realized that she had been munching candy, and drinking the soft drinks without any benefit of ice or refrigeration.

I didn't think too much of her teaching abilities either. But one rainy afternoon, she read to us A Cask of Amontillado in her most dramatic voice; and that inspired me to read the other stories of Poe.

Elementary school left its mark on me in another, less obvious, way. During those years I wore corduroy knickers to school almost every day. One of the problems with corduroy is that it doesn't wear very well, and the bottoms of my pants were nearly always shiny. But the worst problem with the knickers was that they were noisy. They made a swishing sound as the pants legs brushed against each other with each step.

By the time I was promoted to junior high school, knickers had pretty well gone out of fashion, and when I got to high school, I didn't even have to wear regular pants made of corduroy. After that I wouldn't even look at anything made of corduroy until I was over fifty years old. Then I happened to run across a corduroy sport coat that was exactly the right size and color, and reduced to half price on a Washington's Birthday special. Thinking I had matured enough to overcome my prejudice, I bought it and wore it two or three times - then stuck it in the back of the closet and eventually gave it away.

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