Ah, first grade! The beginning of ACADEMIA! All the trappings of high nerdery were to be mine-- leather-bound books, medals of honor, stamped scrolls, a smoking jacket and a pipe... but wait! In an absolute cold sweat panic, I realized as I walked down the hall to my first grade classroom on the first day of school, I CAN'T READ. I almost threw up. I don't know who was with me, if it was my dad or my mom, but I remember insisting that I be taken home right then. It was worse than those dreams where you realize you're naked, and when it was explained to me that this was the purpose of school, that I was supposed to show up utterly ignorant and that these things would be taught to me, I think that may have made it even worse-- you mean I show up UNPREPARED and they KNOW IT?
Anyway, my teacher was Miss Seidel, and I think she was a former Lady Longhorn basketball player. She was very pretty and had impossibly perfect penmanship, which I threw my nerdy little soul into mimicking. I remember getting funneled into the accelerated academic groups, a program called Aim High, which was dangerous because it made me drunk with power and anxiety, and every test became like this Everest quest of Me Versus the World. Of course, the math end would all come crashing down in a few short years, torpedoing my haughty sense of world mastery, but look at it now! The dress with my name on it! The perfect helmet of shiny brown hair! The Casis Honor Student Badge, which only Super Cougars were allowed to wear! I am like a little Kim Jong Il here: the sun rose this morning because I commanded it so, and all is right with the world.
This was also the year everyone got checked for head lice, and predictably, I took the news that I had failed my hygiene test particularly hard. I remember lying on my back on the kitchen counter with my head in the sink, a towel rolled under my neck and the most evil, scalp-searing crap smothered all over my hair, feeling bug-ridden, crampy, and nauseous and praying for the oven timer to go off, at which point my mom would return and drag a teeny comb through the roots of my reeking hair. I took the infestation very personally, and the only thing I can liken it to years later is the look on our family Golden Retriever's face the summer when he got his glorious coat shorn so he wouldn't overheat. His head, by comparison, suddenly looked huge, and his giant flag of a tail, utterly ridiculous. It took one laugh from an adult and he retreated to his doghouse for the rest of the afternoon.
I had a small group of friends this year that I tried very hard to mimic as well. They had perfect little teeth and curly hair and sweet little singing voices, which was also dangerous because my descent into Kafka-esque dental hell was just about to begin.
My spectacular injury of the year was in learning how to ride a bicycle without training wheels, and my maiden voyage was down a street that curved next to a high gulch that led to a creek. I hadn't yet learned to turn or brake, but that's what happens when you learn, right? You start out doing the thing in question and somehow it just happens in progress, on the fly, like reading? Wrong, little nerd, wrong! I rode straight down the hill, gathering speed until the curve, doing absolutely nothing but worrying with greater and greater intensity, and then plowed into the weeds, flipped over the handlebars, and rode my face the rest of the way down the side of the gulch where I was caught by a nest of poison ivy and poison oak. My forearms and face were a mass of blisters, bruises and scratches, and the next day in school I got sent to the nurse's office for fidgeting and scratching miserably through reading group, where my fellow Sharks (we decided on a predatory name to reflect our prowess), scooted their chairs away from me. My mother received a call from the school secretary that was laced with more than a hint of indignation at my sorry state-- apparently every secretly abused kid blames the bike-- and she came and picked me up immediately and ferried me to the pediatrician for an official review of my injuries and bona fide sanctioning of her parenting history.
The only other event of note I can remember from this year was a car accident involving a classmate of mine, Candace. She was out of school for a week and when she returned, she had a giant red scar down one whole side of her face and her cheek was swollen up like she had a baseball in it. She cheerfully pointed this out, the swelling, and encouraged the baseball metaphor with a big, lop-sided smile. As a class, we were prepared for her return in hushed tones-- her mother's leg had been broken and a horse in their horse trailer had been killed-- and we were especially warned against staring, but for the whole time I knew her, Candace seemed to treat her scar like it afforded her a certain celebrity, which it absolutely did. I would even go so far as to say it suited her. She was from a wealthy family and had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of clever hair bows that managed to both distract from her scar and compliment it. (I totally envied her collection, as well as whatever it was that made her hair so magically obedient to French braids while mine went all limp and slipped any binding except headbands. I had a favorite that year that was pale blue and had a little puff of organza on the side, and like most fashion trends that I thought looked good on me, I threw subtlety out the window and wore it every damned day until someone threw a kick ball at my head and the headband broke.) She confided once that her mother had plans for her to see a plastic surgeon as she got older, and maybe take the scar away entirely, and she said she would miss it. I've always wondered if that ever happened, and if she did in fact miss the thing that catapulted her into her special place in our world that year.
What do you remember of first grade?
Up next: the year I played Martha Washington in the school play and realized historical accuracy in costuming is NOT necessarily a good thing...
