We started our morning with the requisite photo on the front stoop. Fresh haircuts, clean lunch boxes, goofy grins. The looks on the boys’ faces show signs of eagerness, anticipation, and pent up squeals as they await the delight in seeing their friends. They show no signs of melancholy. They shriek while I sigh.
Today marks the first day of school. Bird is in fifth grade. It boggles my mind. Deal is starting third grade. How can this be? Time plays tricks on me year after year, and I am always surprised by its stealth ways. I have vivid memories of fifth and third grades. When my sons are creeping up to age 45 they too will remember these years. I wonder what the pockets of their minds will hold…
My own memories are random and peppered with what would be the beginning of unhappy family times.
In third grade we sat in neat rows of desks, and my feet dangled just above the linoleum tiled floor. I stared at a green chalkboard and shuddered every time the teacher missed a spot in erasing her lessons. I found it almost debilitating and actually pinched myself to keep from running up to the board to grab the eraser and do a more thorough job. I was OCD from a young age, and a poorly erased board still paralyzes me. My most clear memory of third grade is when I scratched my older brother’s Gordon Lightfoot album after I begged him to let me bring it for show and tell. He kept saying no, but our mom made him let me take it after I whined and pitched a fit. He caved because he had to, not because he wanted to. It’s been an I-told-so sore spot ever since. It was totally not worth it anyway because no one in my class felt the weight of the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Those 8-year olds were never erudite enough for my precocious self. Hmph. I spent hours in third grade compiling a list of all the words I knew. I wrote neat columns of words as they popped into my brain and I filled composition books with this eternal task. I’ve always been a list maker. Needless to say, that endeavor didn’t last. My classmates thought me a buffoon and a braggart. True on both counts.
I remember making relief maps of the US in fifth grade. We were messy with paper mache and paint in Nancy Yancey’s class. Those were the days of turning film strips at the beep and putting hand outs up to your nose to sniff the mimeograph ink. I remember growing mold in petri dishes and being ever so grossed out by the thought of penicillin. I wonder if students still get their hands dirty in school. (The most telling indicator about how education changed for my sons last year is that they both came home from school clean.) Fifth grade also marked my time as a safety patrol die hard. I donned the orange helmet and sash pinned with silver badge as I proudly held out the red flag for kids to cross the street at bus stops. I recall feeling pretty badass. Fifth grade is also when I changed schools in the middle of the year. My only new friend was an outcast at school so she was happy to have me join the class. We were misfits who didn’t even like each other. Our marvelous teacher Mr. Kleiner left an impression on me, and I am inspired by him still. He played guitar in class and wrote and directed our school play. It was a fantastic musical trip through the decades that I remember with utter joy. My family memories are not so rosy. They are foggy yet crisp at the same time. Mr. Kleiner was instrumental in helping me unlock my talents, even to make me realize I had any. Such is the power of teachers.
I wonder what nuggets will stay with Bird and Deal. Will their memories be of a happy, loving family? Will they remember and appreciate my volunteer time in the classroom? Will they know that Mac Daddy wrote lunchbox notes to them and left his office in the middle of the day to play football at recess? What random memories will they carry? What stories will they tell their children one day? Who will be their Mr. Kleiner? We are here on center stage in the prime of our children’s memory making.
As we bid farewell to another summer, I think of the promise each school year brings. It brings to mind something I saw on a tourist’s T-shirt at Sagrada Familia in Barcelona this summer. “Education is not the filling of a vessel. It is the fueling of a fire.”