Kindergarten

Welcome to an embarrassingly candid exposure of how I got to be who I am! Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be hunting down my various awkward school pictures and sketching a little background about what was going on that year. I got this idea from the brilliant Alice Bradley over at finslippy, who is participating in a project called DonorsChoose.org where readers can contribute directly to classrooms in need. I am not affiliated with any such noble cause, but if the painstaking documentation of the horror of my school years inspires you, feel free to hop on over there and make a contribution through Alice's site.

Here we go:

Kindergarten was a good year for me. I was in Mrs. Quick's class at Casis Elementary, coming off the heels of a two-year stint at the University of Texas Lab School where I had established myself as something of a ringleader for playground gang wars, and may even have figured prominently in someone's Master's Thesis, probably on the rather chilling topic of tyranny's roots in imaginative play. Refined sugar is a hell of a drug.

Anyway, Mrs. Quick was a fabulous teacher, and what I remember are three instances of forgiveness on her part that amounted to grace, because had I been in her place I'm not sure I could have avoided profanity.

1) She forgave me for rewording a passage from the vinyl recording of Moby Dick that we sometimes listened to at nap time thusly: "Thar she blows! A hump like a snow hill! 'Tis Moby Quick!" (Mrs. Quick was a large woman, and I had yet to learn that this was a sensitive topic-- I actually asked another large friend of my mother's around this time if she was happy to float so easily in the pool).

2) I had a best friend in kindergarten, a boy named Paul, and our favorite game was to affect deep, gravelly werewolf voices and tear apart the "playing house" station in the classroom, laying waste to its baby doll occupants and sucking their blood. Ejected from the "house" one day by a group of overly sensitive girls, we went to the classroom pets station and got out the two gerbils, put them in a shoebox, and popped them up and down in the box repeatedly, claiming we were popping up a delicious snack. The gerbils died the next day and Mrs. Quick took us both aside and explained how playing "popcorn gerbils" had led directly to their demise. Somehow, we all ended up having a good cry over this, and Paul and I resolved to limit our classroom pets engagement to simply watching the snake eat his monthly mouse.

3) At the end of the year, there was an outside party of sorts and someone laid out a slip 'n slide. All the parents came and we played in the hoses and ate snacks, but what I remember most was Mrs. Quick's brave decision to christen the slip 'n slide by running down its length. As I've said, she was a large woman, both in height and girth, so when her feet went shooting out from under her, first one and then the other, straight-legged and at a right angles from her torso, the resulting fall was both acrobatically spectacular and comically brilliant. Unfortunately, it also had to hurt quite a lot, but kids don't understand this sort of thing, and so we laughed. No, we guffawed. We hooted. We howled like savages, and we couldn't figure out why the parents were so shocked and trying to hush us and being so solicitous of Mrs. Quick. All I can say now is that we must have thought it so in character with her warmth and sense of humor that she would voluntarily undertake this amazing prat fall, purely for our amusement and delight, that the very real possibility that she was either hurt or deeply embarrassed just never occurred to us.

One other moment I remember: one day we all went outside on a mission to find a "special rock" in the wooded area directly behind the school, and a kid named Duke spied the same piece of quartz I did and shoved me aside on our scramble to claim it. Unfortunately, we were on a steep hill, and when he shoved me, I rolled down it on my side like a log until my head met up with a stump, which knocked me out cold. It was maybe the second or third in a series of knock-out blows I would sustain, inexplicably, in the course doing rather mundane things over the years, but it was the first time I would wake up to a ring of concerned faces hovering over me, Mrs. Quick's included, and I remember another little girl asking as I came to, "Is she dead?" I remember feeling pretty special, having risen like Lazarus, a little punch-drunk and subdued, and been rewarded with the kind of deep, soft, all-emcompassing kind of hug only Mrs. Quick, scared shitless and grateful for my consciousness, could have given.

What do you remember from kindergarten?

And up next: the one and only appearance of my teeth in formal photography for the next six years, plus a budding penchant for the trappings of high nerdery: First Grade...