2000-08-19 - 04:15 MDT

August 19, 2000

Early Memories

Some of my memories, as are most of mine, not logged as to time and / or date. But they are there in my mind and heart.

In 1927 I started school. Where I got the idea of me being tough is not in my memory, but I suspect that my uncle who was living with us at the time was the party who put it into my mind as he was an ornery teenager then. My first grade memories started the first day or so. It was a succession of fat lips, bloody noses and facial bruises, all mine. In a couple of days the realization became obvious to me that I wasn't the toughest guy in the school. I sort of noticed that the bloody noses, fat lips, and facial bruises (euphemism for black eyes) were all mine and my opponents walked away unmarked. In this macho little dumbo's mind it did take a few days and hurts in the same spots for him to get the point.

Other than the fact that I looked on my gray, plain faced and plainly dressed old lady who was my teacher, who I soon loved as a super grandmother who had all knowledge, and expertise, my hands on experiences were completely fascinating. Using pictures which had been cut out of construction paper -- colored paper and thick enough to stand abuse -- we entered the world of - Making Something - with my creative energy going wild I found out the difficulties of making my imagination come forth on pasted paper. Gee though, still remembered vividly is the odor of library paste, that pure white, smooth, appetizing substance. I followed the example noted out the side of my eyes and tasted said preparation. Wow, that tasted good. From then on there was my judicious balancing of how much I could surreptitously eat and still get the paper pasting passibly performed. Those of us who were discovered to be eating too much were put to doing other things.

The romance of the blackboard and the things the teacher drew entranced us. I first saw and was taught the lower case cursive letters, I had only seen them printed before. Cursive capital letters had an attraction for me, it took awhile before a capital Q said cue to my mind, F and T were intriguing and the curlicues of the capital E were attempted efforts for me to try to achieve the perfection of the teachers style. So I learned that written words had as much fascination as the printed ones. I can't remember what the name of the penmanship exercises is, but the o's, l's, m's and the vertical part of t's done in those monotonous strings of connected repetition across the page were completely vexing to me. My hand would not obey the picture in my mind. As my fine motor control became more precise many things could be accomplished by me -- except neat handwriting -- which failing grades in the performance of fine artistry stay with me still. In first grade we learned to sharpen pencils, likewise to avoid sticking the sharp end in our eyes and that it was truly unacceptable to stick it in someone else's visual orb.

I think that it was second or third grade that we were at desks where the round hole in the upper right corner was filled with a bottle of ink and we had our introduction to work with pen and ink. We were taught to suck the nibs in our mouths for awhile, I guess to eliminate the light coating of oil on them from the factory. I did learn that it was necssary to do that because the durn thing wouldn't hold ink properly if holding in the mouth didn't last long enough. The insertion of the nib into the penholder without a painful piercing of the fingers was taught at that time. Then came the time that the girls mastered the art of ink writing readily, while the boys made great and longwinded, unintentioned, messy Rorsach imitations. I went home many a time with ink stained hands. Maybe about that time the discovery that there were things fasinating about learning and there were also some onerous aspects to the procedure.

It was the next grade when we all became the proud possessors of pencil boxes, each of us seemed to have a different kind and size. They were guarded with our very lives, the most precious thing we had. We took them home each night and filled many a Big Chief tablet with pictures rising in our imaginative minds. The girls populating the world with their own hand drawn and cut out paper dolls, the star diagrams, the compass artistry and the practise writing and arithmetic used up a bit of our spare time. Dad used to complain about the number of Big Chiefs being used, until one day I gave him the latest with each sheet covered with the contents of my mind. I remember that each September we would arrive at school with new pencil boxes, as elaborate as we could persuade our parents to buy. I really can't exactly fix the grade that we no longer used the pencil boxes to carry our pencils, pen nibs, pen holders, 12 inch rulers, erasers and with me were rubber bands to shoot at school mates and other fairly harmless items of contraband. Somewhere along the line we moved on to carrying notebooks, Eversharp pencils and fountain pens.

It was wonderful to be able to choose peers as friends rather than the relatives we were born with. The choice was great and finding out that some of the people were not interested in becoming friends with me - taught me early that most everyone has a choice, even in making friends. Then came the the grouping of friends on the playground and the the Scuffle Soccer where it was all legs, knees, elbows and not much organized sport -- just a bunch of noisy exercise. Walking home with friends who lived in the direction I went and stopping by the candy / novelty store if any of us had a few pennies was precious to me then because I was an only child and had no peer to be with at home to play and fight with. It took quite some time for me to adjust to the more or less normal hubris of living among peers that those with brothers and sisters learned from babyhood.

So many different memories of early school, most of which are happy memories and the few bad ones dulled by age now.

Early memories enable me to go back to the childish, expectant and exciting days of innocence visited often, especially in talking with my grand children about, "When I was a boy."

Blog