The Big Yellow Schoolhouse:7th and 8th

         

Bill   

I’m sitting in an unfamiliar classroom. It must be September. The start of every school year since kindergarten puts me in this situation, a new room to get used to. This year, though, there’s a twist. I’m only going to be in this classroom a short time, not all day. A bell is going to ring. When I hear it, I’m going to move to another new classroom, and then another after that.  Six or seven new ones throughout the day. I’m in transition. The classroom I’m sitting in is called a home room, a starting point for the day.  Welcome to seventh grade.

There was nothing different about the day when I got up this morning. Everything started on a familiar note. Dressing in school clothes.  Having breakfast with WHDH on the radio.  Keeping an eye on the clock.  Walking down the hill through Cleary Square. Even the school I’m walking to is familiar.  Because the local elementary school ended at fourth grade, I spent fifth and sixth grades in classrooms at the William Barton Rogers Junior High.  Because of all the yellow brick on the outside, in this series of school-oriented blogs I’ve labelled the Rogers the “Big Yellow School House.” (See The Big Yellow Schoolhouse/5 and 6.) Once inside, though, the similarities ended.  Dorothy, you’re not in 6th grade anymore.

I did have some inkling of what to expect in seventh grade.  My brother had just spent three junior high years at the Rogers before moving on to the high school.  He told me about home room, about walking from class to class, how I’d have to memorize a schedule telling me when and where each class was. There’d be no more eating lunch at my desk; lunch at the junior high was in a lunch room that had a name new to me, cafeteria.  Recess would be replaced by physical education which took place in a gymnasium. 

During the previous two years when I walked into my fifth or sixth grade classroom, I didn’t walk out again until the end of the school day. I knew the outside of the Rogers, the doors to use to get in and get out and I knew where the bathrooms were, but I wasn’t familiar with the building itself.  My brother said there was a system of bells to indicate when one class ended and when the next began. Once the first bell rang, you only had a specific amount of time to get from the class you were in to the next class you had to be in before the second bell rang. I worried that not knowing the building very well would make me late for class.  I didn’t want to be late. There were actually penalties for being late. 

I knew from my previous report cards there was a tally kept of both absences from school and the days you were late for school. The latter were recorded next to the odd word “tardy” on the report.  Besides late, some alternate meanings for this French derived word are “sluggish”, “dull” and “stupid”. The penalty for being “sluggish” too many times my brother told me was something called detention. Not a jail cell I learned but a room where you would go after school and be required to sit for an hour or so as punishment for this crime of dull sluggishness. But there was something beyond that, my brother somewhat gleefully informed me.  The rattan.

The rattan was a singularly nasty little devise used mostly as a threat to keep us apparently crazed junior high schoolers in line. One of several instruments of corporal punishment used in the Boston schools over literally the past two hundred years, the rattan was a thin piece of flexible bamboo used as a sort of whip on the outstretched hands of us twelve-year-old evil doers. The rattan was never used on me; I’m not sure I even knew a kid on whom it was used. The use of such punishments was just beginning to wane in the late 50s but still the threat was enough.  It left me confused and not a little apprehensive as to what behavior of mine might lead to this stinging abuse.  Maybe something extreme like throwing a chair at a teacher or pushing a kid out a window.  I knew I wasn’t ever going to do either of those things.  What about not doing homework though, or roughhousing in a classroom or being late for a class. Sorry, I mean sluggish. I guess I’ll soon find out. 

So it was with both excitement and apprehension that I walked into the Rodgers that September day in 1956.  Everything old was new again. Those first few weeks of September were a time for cruising the corridors, figuring out where all the rooms were, and trying to get to the next class on time.  The Rogers was several different buildings of varying architectural types constructed over the years as enrollment increased. The original building opened as a high school in 1902 and looked it. Creaky wooden floors, very little light, no renovation since the beginning of the century.  I rarely went through there in seventh grade but in ninth grade I would consider it the best and most interesting part of the school.  By ninth grade I was far from being the newbie of those first few months of seventh grade.  After all I’m thirteen in ninth grade; I’m only eleven in seventh. By ninth grade the Rogers had become familiar, comfortable, the building a second home. This blog chronicles the journey that will bring me there.

Those seventh and eighth grade years were spent in the newer part of the building, additions to the original built in 1920 and 1934.  This part of the school consisted of two floors of corridors that ran along two intersecting sides of a paved outdoor courtyard.  On good days the courtyard was used for outdoor gym. The corridors had large windows on one side and classrooms on the other. Even though seventh grade is entry level, I feel I acclimated quickly. There are the bells my brother spoke off, a short burst of a ring.  Time to gather books, get up and get into the corridor. 

After all these years removed from that experience I still remember vividly walking those corridors those first few weeks. Perhaps thinking we seventh graders would be so confused at the idea of walking from one class to another that we might end up lost in the furnace room in the sub-sub basement, lots of teachers were out in the corridors as guides to monitor these passings.  The admonishment from them was always, “Stay in line.”  You didn’t have to tell me. Following the trail of kids in front of me I hugged the windows on one side or the wall on the other. 

This precision didn’t last too long. By late September less teachers were assigned corridor duty and those that did watched from their classroom doorways or even sat at their desks with their doors open wanting those few minutes between classes for themselves.  By December the passage was much less formal.  A few times I even walked up the middle of the corridor on my way to French class! What a rebel.

Seventh grade is more a scramble of memories than eighth grade. Most of these memories are real, easily recalled. A few are more fanciful.  Maybe the best, the most entertaining, are a combination of the real and fanciful. After all the name of this blog is The Past Remembered Anew.

There were times when those two years seemed as one.  Many of the kids I was with in those first two years of junior high were the kids I knew since fourth and fifth grade. A few of them slowly changed from the kid in fifth grade who sat in the front row by the window to the kid I’d say “Hi” to in the school yard in sixth grade to the kid I became friends with in seventh grade and would go to his house after school in eighth grade.

I have difficulty remembering the basics, the things I must have done every day at school. The daily repetition has made such things forgettable. For example, I don’t recall if I had a locker in seventh grade.  It believe I kept my books inside my desk in homeroom. Maybe I had a locker for just my coat and my lunch.  I wish I remembered more about a locker, those moments recreated in so many movies where kids meet at one another’s lockers between classes.  There is a flush of excitement as you catch up, make plans to meet after school, or you find a note from someone tucked inside, or the girl at the locker next to you smiles at you.  It may be I don’t have those memories because none of these things ever happened to me.  Not in seventh grade anyway.  Poor kid.

Still there are moments of clarity from that first year of junior high. Incidents, learning experiences, special moments that stand out from the daily routine. 

Miss Hennessy was not only my homeroom teacher but also my English teacher.  One day she was talking about fables, “a particular type of short story,” she told us. That’s when I first heard the Stone Soup tale. She didn’t read it, but told it to us which gave a kind of first person, I was there, oral history perception.  As she related the tale I found myself right there in that village as well.

The story is a familiar one. Two strangers appear in a remote town carrying a cooking pot.  The villagers are initially hostile refusing to share any of their food with the strangers. The travelers fill the pot with water from a nearby stream suggesting to the villagers they can make a tasty soup out of stones.  A crowd gathers around the pot. “First we have to bring this water to a boil and then find several round stones to add to the pot.” Realizing their skepticism, the strangers assure the villagers this soup will not only taste wonderful but they’ll be willing to share it with everyone.  Curious, several villagers round up the necessary stones.

Where is this going, I am wondering? I am like the villagers.  My interest has been engaged.  How can stones taste good I’m asking myself? I loved reading fairy tales so perhaps the stones are magic, the water transforming into a large pot of Campbell’s chicken noodle.

The two strangers have a better, more practical idea.  “As good as this soup is going to be, one thing would make it better,” they suggest. “A few carrots.”  The carrots are produced and tossed into the boiling water. More villagers are enticed by the need to flavor the soup; one after another they dash to their houses returning with potatoes, squash, cabbage, seasonings. I am thinking of what I would contribute had I been a kid in that village. Maybe some peas or yellow beans. How about some chicken? What else do I like? Marshmallows. Marshmallows might work.

Soon the pot is filled with all manner of ingredients with the likely exception of marshmallows. Bowls and spoons are produced.  The soup is ladled out to everyone with all in agreement that never has anyone tasted a better stone soup.

I liked the cleverness of the story.  How initially both the absurdity of making soup from stones and the resistance of the villagers precluded any positive outcome to the story. Yet the villagers, one step at a time, are led down a path they originally had no intention of going. Unlike most deceptions, however, this one was altruistic. I liked that aspect of it as well. At the end everyone had a good meal.  

At the same time I was concerned about how the townspeople had been so easily fooled. I wondered if the same trick would have worked on me.  At first I felt the addition of the vegetables wouldn’t make stone soup taste any better. After all it’s stone soup, the main ingredients of which are rocks.  As the story went on I realized calling the soup “stone soup” was irrelevant.  Without the carrots and seasoning there is no soup. These ideas came later. As I mentioned, early in the story I believed magic would be the force by which the soup would become something edible. The power of magic would transform the stones into real soup.  Maybe there’d be a flash of light and a puff of smoke. No. As the story went on it became clear to me there was something more complex involved. The villagers coopted the strangers’ deception into cooperation which made me think the villagers weren’t fooled as much as the strangers may have thought. I even had my own penetrating observation.  Even though the soup was the result of a simple scam, it was the first time I began to see the difference between magic and illusion.  Things are not as they seem or even as I see them. The story, like life, has many levels, each mirroring, at times inaccurately, a different context.

Seventh grade was just one context of my life tangled up together with my life at home, my life with my friends, my inner life with myself.  Who can tell how these different levels interacted, how one influenced the other?  What a stone soup it was. Insecurities, learning curves, gender issues, physical disparities, all blended and mixed together with little hope the resulting hodgepodge would be something that might nourish me long-term. But like the stone soup story, somehow much of it works out in the end. Or so we like to think.

From soup to soap. Are they the same word with a single letter positioned differently?  Substitute an “a” for a “u” and you have the next seventh grade revelation. 

I have to admit as a kid I rarely washed my hands.  Maybe once or twice a day. It took so long to get the water hot, and soap does not lather well in cold water.  And then you have to rinse all the soap off, and then dry your hands.  Who has time for all that when you’re in the middle of something important like running around the back yard. C’mon.

So soap, and lots of other ordinary things, barely existed for me.  Until one day in seventh grade history class the teacher started talking about how soap was made. Soap. Not such a simple thing after all. That discussion somehow connected with me. An epiphany, but not just about soap.  Instead a realization about how things I took for granted actually work, and why.

The teacher began by telling us that if your hands are dirty and you wash them in plain water, hot or cold, they are going to remain dirty when you finish. Your hands are oily, she said, and the dirt is trapped in that oil. Oil and water don’t mix, she continued.  Now that rang a bell. I remember my father spilling some car engine oil on the driveway.  When he threw water on it, the water broke up into tiny droplets and the oil was glazed with a rainbow sheen.  

Meanwhile the teacher is telling us that soap contains fats and lye which react together to attract dirt and oil in such a way to enable water to wash them away.  Fat won’t clean your hands; neither will water.  It takes both said the teacher.

She then went on to tell us how pioneer women made soap.  Lye came from wood ash.  Plenty of ash around then, the teacher explained, since wood was burned for heat.  The fat came from animals.  Fat from cows is called tallow also used in candles, but that’s a whole other process, and fat from pigs is called lard.  The fats had to be rendered, or cleaned, and the lye had to be converted into a liquid form called potash. 

I quickly began to sense the making of soap was a complicated process, and a lot of work.  The teacher said soap making was a community event usually done in the fall when the animals were butchered.  Not a pleasant image. The fat was added to pots of the potash liquid and boiled. With the fires and smells and tending required, outdoors was the safest place to make soap. This is where the community aspect came into play. Everyone working together to make soap. Lovely.

My teacher pointed out, and I’m wondering now how she knew so much about soap, that the soap produced was not the hard soap I was used to.  Instead it was a liquid most resembling a brown jelly.  This is the soap the pioneers used day to day.  Hard soap required the addition of salt which back then was too valuable a commodity to waste on soap. Eventually the chemical processes required in soap making became more refined allowing for mass production of the bar of Ivory soap I took for granted. Present day I use liquid soap for hand washing.  The more things change…

Nonetheless, that simple lesson on soap making had an impact on me. I began to wash my hands more often, in steps, thinking of the various stages required to remove the dirt and grime.  First the wetting of the hands with hot water, then the lathering with the soap, rubbing the hands together to make as many bubbles as I could.  Bubbles were not actually a required part of the getting clean process; it just gave me something to do while I waited for the soap to do its job. During the rinse I imagined all the dirt trapped in the lye and fat as the soap bubbles streamed down the drain. 

My suspicion that the world was more complicated than I imagined was also bolstered by that soap history lesson. I began to look at other simple things, the milk I poured on my cereal, the cereal itself, even the box the cereal came in, as things that someone had to make before I could use them. Everything had a purpose, all requiring the inventiveness and effort of many people over time. 

Another moment of insight happened in geography class. I always liked geography more than history.  But it was during this particular geography class I understood how the one subject connected to the other. It led to a reevaluation of history and eventually I grew to enjoy studying it in school, and long after on my own.

We had been looking at a map of Europe, comparing it to a map of North America.  It was easy to determine the number of countries in Europe was far greater than the three countries that made up North America even if they extended all the way from the Arctic to Central America.  Europe with many more countries was smaller. Just by eye I could see all of Europe fitting inside just the United States. Yet, the teacher pointed out, Europe is made up of some 30 different countries.  

Our teacher asked us to list how these countries might be different from one another. They all had different shapes, we determined.  One looked like a boot. They all had different names including one, I thought, that had been named after the bird we had at Thanksgiving. One particularly smart kid, not me, said that some countries were landlocked, having no outlet to the ocean or a sea.  I wasn’t sure how this would affect anything but the concept of being landlocked conjured up a sense of being shut in, and shut off.  I was beginning to slowly sense how important geography was to a country’s power and influence. 

“How about differences that are not obvious from the map?” the teacher suggested.  Well, I knew that in France they spoke French and in Russia they spoke Russian.  So different languages. The Irish were Catholics and Russians were communists, so on that basis someone offered religion as a difference.  Someone else thought of different clothes.  Men wear skirts in Greece I am informed.  I know about the wooden shoes in Holland. I am up on my Hans Brinker stories. What about food? They ate spaghetti in Italy and sauerkraut in Germany.  I liked spaghetti but not sauerkraut.  Another reason to dislike the Germans. The teacher noted other distinctions. Different governments, different laws and customs, different holidays.  So a lot of differences in such a small space. The question was why?

The teacher pointed out how geography was a big factor, the placement of each country relative to those physical elements that determined a country’s position and accessibility relative to other countries. You can’t tell by looking at this kind of map, she said, but by looking at a map that shows the geography, the way the land actually looks, you’d see the mountains, the valleys, the lakes, rivers and seas that over time have become the boundaries that separate one country from another.  For a long time, she continued, before cars and trains and planes, people didn’t travel much.  Very few knew what was on the other side of that mountain or across that river or beyond that valley. The topography separated people causing them to develop their own language and culture and identities that were often very different from people who lived just a hundred miles away on the other side of the snow-covered peaks.

Then she said something that to me brought this whole concept of separateness caused by geography to life. Most people in Europe before modern times, she explained, grew up, lived and died a few miles from where they were born. If people never left their own neighborhoods, she contended, there was little chance of being exposed to new ideas and  contrasting ways of life. Anything new would be strange and unfamiliar, even dubious and suspect.  

Over the next few years my understanding of history and geography was grounded in this idea of characteristic distinctions as the result of physical separation. Geography to a certain extent determined history.  Nationalities rarely meeting anyone not a member of their own distinct culture allowed for prejudice against others which led to conflict and war.  I began to see how the people of one country could be manipulated into a divisive antagonism toward the people of another. These divisions had deep roots extending into my own future. 

It also struck me based on this classroom discussion that somewhere on the map of Europe was that village where those two strangers arrived under a cloud of suspicion but left overwhelming those prejudices with a hot bowl of stone soup. Perhaps they were two Frenchmen in the far away country of Bulgaria, or a couple of Italians stranded in the mountains of Romania.  One culture clashing with another but in this instance the commonality of food brought them together.  This lesson definitely got me thinking.

As it turned out I didn’t need the people in the countries of far away Europe to demonstrate the poison of prejudice. I didn’t have to look any further than my own homeroom/English teacher, Miss Hennessy.  Of stone soup fame. She also had a penchant for going off topic.  

I don’t remember how she transitioned from the English topic she might had been discussing.  I was probably slouched over in my seat, my head resting in my hand, my mind somewhere else.  Then I realized she’s talking about black people and Cadillacs. Where did this come from? A moment before she might have been talking about pronouns.

I clearly recall her saying how “colored people”, the polite phrase from that time, “loved their Cadillacs.” Pink or yellow ones in particular. I am now listening intently to figure out what she is talking about. She went on to tell this class of impressionable boys and girls how black people in Cadillacs loved to be seen in their flashy cars driving around their neighborhoods.  Even though I wasn’t aware of the blatant stereotyping inherent in her rant, I did think there was something odd about the topic, especially her negative tone. The distinct impression from her was how dare people she obviously considered inferior drive around in such nice cars.

Some research shows that in 1949 Ebony magazine printed an article “Why Do Negroes Buy Cadillacs.” The answer also applied to the reason why whites in the country at the time went for showy cars. Like whites, blacks shared a passion for cars. After a war in which the production of automobiles actually ceased for several years, people wanted to get back to normal.  Having a nice car was part of that.  For everyone, the better the car the more implicit was the notion that you had “made it.” For black people, who as a group were prevented from making it as part of inherent racism, the Cadillac was a prime symbol of having made it. Time to show off your status, pink, yellow, blue or even black. 

Poor people did not own Caddies no matter their color. Even if they could afford it, the reality for most African Americans in the US in the1950s meant going to a white-owned dealership, it required getting a car loan from a white-owned bank and often paying more for car insurance because of prevailing discriminatory practices.  I thought of Cadillacs as special, as expensive, as luxurious. It was a car rich people owned.  As my teacher continued her rant I began to think that if a “colored person” owned such a car then they had to be rich. My teacher was implying that not only did black people not deserve such a car but the only possible way they could acquire one was dishonestly. I didn’t really know.  My prejudice at the time was all black people were poor, that they all lived in Roxbury and Dorchester, and it was okay to be frightened of them. Now I’m thinking there must be rich black people as well. I wasn’t

frightened of rich people.  Maybe I shouldn’t be frightened of black people either.

Miss Hennessy’s harangue began to have another effect on me exclusive of race.  I had a friend or two who had a color TV.   Because of that I automatically considered their parents better off financially than mine. I began to wonder if they were showing off as well. Or is it only “the colored” who had that trait. 

At age twelve I didn’t think of Miss Hennessy as racist.  Racist people put burning crosses in front of people’s houses in the south. I saw that in Life Magazine. She was prejudiced.  So was I.  Boston in the 50s was a de facto segregated city.  My teacher’s diatribe was common. 

As Miss Hennessy spoke she seemed lost in her own personal reverie. Blacks were portrayed as flashy, dishonest, and without self-control. Not a petty picture. Still, she didn’t sway me to her side.  Instead she brought a little clarity to my typical confusion and ignorance over the whole topic of race in America.  I began to picture people I knew whom I considered dishonest. A relative or the parents of a friend. All of them white but still deceitful.  I even brought myself into the picture. Me, not black. Me, not much self control. Still, self control or not, I’m also thinking if you could afford it, who wouldn’t want a Cadillac, or a Lincoln or a Chrysler New Yorker, or best of all, from my point of view, a Corvette. 

At age eleven and twelve you’re vulnerable. You have precisely eleven or 1twelve  years experience. You’re trying to cope with so many things. You struggle to understand concepts like prejudice and racism and class even as you are part of the very social structures that give rise to them   If I was murky about race and prejudice, the dynamics of class were more nebulous. I have a story about that too.

One morning piling into homeroom we were surprised to see a man sitting at our teacher’s desk. Miss Hennessy was out today, he explained.  He was the substitute. A middle-aged man, a bit paunchy. From the way he spoke to us, quiet, almost haltingly, I thought of him as timid, a milquetoast. Now that I think about it, he reminded me of the actor Wally Cox as Mr Peepers.  The bell rings. I am off to my first class. I don’t give the sub much thought during the day. 

Mid-afternoon, my last class over, I’m heading back to homeroom.  The kids in my homeroom that last period were taking what today we’d call remedial English. Not that those kids couldn’t speak the language, they just had difficulty writing it, learning its grammar and reading it.  I’m already prejudiced against them.  My friends and I call them the “shop kids.” They spend most of the day in the basement of the school in the woodwork and metal shops.  I’m familiar with those places because as part of an effort to broaden our education we boys took shop a couple of times a week, woodworking and sheet metal shop.

My biggest gripe though was how they treated my desk  Coming back at the end of the day I’d find candy wrappers inside, broken pencils, my books askew. For a neat kid like me, ugh! It’s true there were a number of different classes inside that room during the day but my class prejudice required I blame the shop kids.  So I did.

This particular afternoon as I neared my homeroom there were the sounds of some sort of commotion. Entering the back door I was shocked to see the substitute teacher grabbing one of the kids by the collar and literally kicking him in the behind launching him out the front door. I knew that adults often yelled at kids but this kind of physical fracas was shocking to me.  What had the kid done to deserve this?

Apparently quite a bit. I learned later from someone I knew in one of the shop courses that even though they didn’t give the regular teacher any trouble, they were terrors when it came to substitutes.  Especially this one. Talking back, ignoring his instructions, walking around the room and even more aggressive behavior like threats and intimidations. One kid’s favorite rejoinder when refusing to do what was asked of him was, “What are you going to do about it?”

Well, how about literally kicking him out of the class. I’ll always remember that image. This balding man, red in the face, his leg high in the air, connecting with a kid who somehow had precipitated this major rage moment. This is what my violent temper meltdowns must look like to other people. Out of control, blind with fury, in some ways laughable.  This was a teacher though. An adult. Not a kid. I am thinking less of teachers.  How disappointing they are ordinary, like me. Emotional, unable to control themselves. And not black.

As for the shop kids themselves, I felt it best to stay out of their way. If they could provoke a teacher to lose it, then they would have less misgivings about bullying me.  My feelings melded into a combination of fear of them and anger toward them. They were out of control themselves, not caring about the rules of society, about getting along with other people, about “being nice.”  Later in junior high becoming friendly with one or two of them, I would modify my portrayal into something more realistic but for now my view was informed by just that one incident between the sub and the shop kid.

The substitute teacher episode was just one of the many things that happened those first two years of junior high. Some perplexing, some intimidating, some alarming. Because of how young I was, I lacked the context that would have aided my ability to understand such occurrences and not be overwhelmed by them. Because they happened, I had to assimilate them into my basic belief system. It was often a struggle to do this since every new experience required a reordering of the older experiences.  Now that I think of it, a process very similar to alphabetizing.

I always felt homeroom dragged on far too long.  I’m silently screaming at my teacher, “Take the attendance, read your announcements and let us get on with our day.” In an ideal world maybe. But no. There it was. Just about every day. Written on a corner of the blackboard.  The insidious busy work. It was meant to keep us deranged kids occupied until the first bell.

Having an English teacher for homeroom meant the tasks all had to do with words.  Not words strung together allowing for context and analysis but a list of single words.  Words to look up in the dictionary, words to use in a sentence, and the worst, a list of words to alphabetize.

Now this wasn’t a list in which some of the words began with a B, others with an F or an R.  No, that would be too easy in the arcane world of alphabetizing.  Instead there’d be a list of ten or fifteen words, all beginning with the same letter, A for example. To alphabetize the list you had to go to the second letter, maybe another A or a C or an L, then to the third or fourth letter as you struggled with putting them in order. After a while I began to lose any sense of the words having a meaning; they became a string of letters of which the third or fourth might be the key to inserting them correctly in my evolving alphabetized list.

I have to admit if there were a girl sitting next to me I’d glance at her list to see if “abode” should be listed before or after the word “abnormal.”  And where “abrupt” might fit in.  I’d always look at a girl’s paper because I believed they were generally a lot better at these tasks than any boy. Eventually after “agonizing” over making my list, I’d “arbitrate” with myself that it was done, “acknowledging” the fact that the girl in the “adjacent” seat knew I was cheating by “abruptly” covering up her paper.  All this stress before school even started!

Every once in a while I struck back at an educational system that considered busy work, rote exercises and memorization the principal components of learning.  Miss Coyne was our history and geography teacher, both subjects I liked and did well in. Seventh grade.  We’re studying the American revolution.  (We were always studying the revolution. Boston’s claim to fame.) The Constitution actually.  Our homework that night was to memorize the Preamble to this document. 

I didn’t think much about it until I got home.  I always did my homework in our cellar room in the afternoon.  I was usually done by five in time for supper. Any reading I had I put off until 7 or so.  This memory assignment, though, has confused me. Will just reading it a few times be enough? Should I do this now?  I decided to put it off until 7 as well.

Back in the cellar room at 7 I look through it.  It’s very brief. “We the People…”   I read it through several times but when I try to recite it from memory I don’t get past those first three words. I’m becoming irritated. I rationalize.  “What’s the point of memorizing this anyway?  It’s right here in this book if I ever needed to see it again”  I close the book and go upstairs to watch television.

Remarkably the next morning I’m not particularly concerned about not having done the homework.  The teacher’s not going to call on me anyway.  In class the first person she does call on is a girl who, not surprisingly, recites the Preamble perfectly, word for word.  The next person she calls on is….me. I remember very clearly standing up and saying, “I didn’t memorize it.”  Even more distinct in my mind is the look of confusion, even shock, that appeared on Miss Coyne’s face.  It’s as if she wasn’t able to comprehend what I had just told her.  The kicker to all of this was my reply when she asked why I hadn’t done the assignment.  “I didn’t feel like it.”  I then sat down. I felt good.  Better than good.  Awesome in today’s idiom. I had struck back at the system.  It wouldn’t be the last time.

Maybe it helped that there was no fallout as a result of this tiny act of defiance. No, “You better memorize this by tomorrow young man.” No detention.  It didn’t even effect my grade. I still got my “A”.  Even if there had been consequences, they would have been worth the look of disappointment on the teacher’s face when it became clear one of her best students had defied her, the course of study, the school system, the board of education, the universe.  Yeah, I’m getting carried away. Still, like the Empire, Bill Strikes Back.

My occasional boldness was a reaction to the increased burdens of junior high. Although I met most of them, I still felt I could never relax in seventh or eighth grade.  I think, initially, I missed the less demanding nature of elementary school.  Yes, sitting in that same fifth or sixth grade seat hour after hour in the same room did get boring at times but there was a soothing familiarity about the grammar school environment as well. When we left the room at the end of the day it was to go home. In junior high when you left a room is was to go to another room, a different subject, a different teacher, new issues, more stress, more homework. To deal with it all I began to concentrate on the clock. I became a clock watcher at least in the rooms where the clocks worked.

As the teacher drones on I glance up at the clock. I see it’s ten minutes before the bell. More droning. More glancing. Eight minutes. I begin a countdown in my head as the clock clicks to three minutes before the bell. I’m not even listening to the droning anymore. I stare at the clock anticipating the next click forward of the minute hand.  Two minutes to go. Click. One minute. Click. Ring. Then I start the same thing all over again in the next class.

There were other alternatives to passing the time when the clock in a particular classroom was not working.  (I thought it very funny when a kid in one of those classes told me even broken clocks gave the correct time twice a day. Even wrong things can be right, I thought.)

So even with no working clock, even right twice a day, no worry.  I always had my ballpoint pen. Both styles.  Retractable and twist pens.  Both were great for fiddling with. I probably played with my pens more than I used them. I loved to take them apart. Out would pop the little spring and the ink chamber which I called the refill. I don’t recall stick pens back then.  Every pen I had would eventually run out of ink which then required the purchase of a refill.

Ostensibly I’d open the pen to see how much ink was left; mostly though I deconstructed my pen because I was bored.  I’d leave the spring out just to see if it would work without one. Or I’d take the little plunger out to see what would happen. There were times my desk would have scattered about it all the pen parts. Once in a while I’d take apart both the twist-to-open pen and the retractable pen and then try to figure out which pen got which part when I reassembled them.  It didn’t take much to keep me amused.    

I knew I had a good teacher when I found myself listening to them more than I fiddled with my pen or watched the clock.  The best teachers superseded the clock entirely. A good teacher made a good day better, even could save a bad day. What’s a good teacher?  Everyone has a different opinion based on their experiences. To me it was a teacher who was kid friendly.  Someone who understood that as an 11 year-old I didn’t know very much. My ignorance was a condition of my age.  Don’t criticize me for my lack of knowledge. As a teacher you might have to come at me from a slightly different direction. Humor works.  Examples work. Relevance works.  Make what you are teaching interesting to me.  Not an easy task but if you’re willing to try then so am I.  

I had a math teacher in seventh grade that wasn’t very good and a math teacher in eighth grade who was particularly good. The difference between them was as great as the difference between finding the square root of a number and calculating profit and loss.

As I have groused in these blog pages previously, math was not a favorite.  It wasn’t so much the math itself but the lack of any in-depth knowledge of what math actually was along with the endless exercises and the enormous amount of repetition to the point of senselessness. In seventh grade we spent several weeks finding the square root of numbers; that is, that number multiplied by itself that results in the original number.   Why would I ever need to find the square root of a number in my life?  That was never explained.  “Just follow the steps,” I was told.  

So many steps.  The number you were trying to find the square root of was put in a division box.  Then there would be a series of repeating steps which included but were not limited to doubling numbers, subtraction, multiplication, placing numbers in the correct places as you worked through the computation.  You also had to estimate by finding a number whose square was less than or equal to the first few digits of the original number. You had to estimate in your head but then prove that estimated number was accurate by multiplying it by itself.  That required even more multiplication as I usually came up with numbers that were too big. The horrors of over estimating. Finding the square root of 41 or 87 wasn’t too bad but you could spend a lot of time pencil scratching on several sheets of paper when you are trying to calculate the square root of a number like 32,489.  Then once you went through all the initial steps,you had to repeat them for the next series of numbers!  When will this end?

We tackled this algorithm without much introduction.  It seemed to be just another way of doing arithmetic exercises like subtraction and multiplication.  The point of it all, applications in real life or in sciences like chemistry or physics, weren’t discussed.  I never did realize the relationship between the square root and the number it was the square root of.  In math, as in life, relationships are everything.  So you can see why finding square roots was the equivalent of another root, a root canal.

To my eighth grade math teacher, I think it was Mr. Leonard, math was more than numbers to be added and divided endlessly.  I mean we did that too but this teacher would also branch out.  I was in the college prep course and due to classism tended to look down on the kids in the other courses.  Shop of course but also the business courses. I was about to be shown how wrong my prejudices were.

When I went to the store I’d hand the clerk money and then walk out with what I had bought.  To me the amount of money I gave the clerk was important.   The less the better.  I wasn’t being economical; I was being cheap. Beyond feeling good or bad at how much money I had left after the transaction, I didn’t give it any more thought. Mr. Leonard showed me there was a lot more to it than that.

“Where do you think the money goes that you spend at the store?” he asked us one day. There were a few scattered answers. “To buy more stuff the store can then sell.” “To pay the people who work there.” “To the bank.” “The owner of the store uses it to buy Cadillacs,” I should have piped up. The teacher started listing our responses on the board  All but that last one about the Caddies.

“To make money at anything,” he told us, “you have to spend money. After you have paid all your bills what you have left over is called profit.  If you don’t have anything left over then you’re operating at a loss.”

This is fascinating. I am learning that in order for me to walk into the corner store to buy a bottle of tonic, soda or pop to the rest of the country, first of all the store has to be open. “It’s open because the owner pays rent,” explains the teacher. That’s only the beginning.  “The expenses in running a store are called overhead,” I am told.  Money to pay for electricity to power lights and keep the water in the cooler cold.  Money to buy the cooler and the tonic to put in it. Money to buy all the other things in the store.  Not just soda but counters and cash registers.  Money to pay people to work at the store.  “And other things as well,” he continues.  Money for water use, for insurance, a telephone, and taxes.  How can anything be left over for profit, I am thinking, after my puny dime purchase of a bottle of tonic?

The blackboard is full of all these things categorized under the titles, profit, expenses and overhead.  Then we start to do computation. Adding up lists of expenses, determining how much a store has to make to pay all the bills, coming up with formulas to determine how much business a store has to do to make a specific amount of profit. Also, how much loss a store can endure before it has to close.  “Most people borrow money to open a business,” the teacher is saying.  “The loan has to be paid back with something called interest. Here are some formulas to determine interest.” 

I’m amazed that I’m adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing with enjoyment. I’m even getting into percentages with what seems like enthusiasm. This is what arithmetic is for. All that busy work over the years of adding and subtracting random numbers has a purpose.

We stayed with this topic a couple of weeks.  The numbers we crunched were not attached to abstract ideas.  Mr. Leonard talked about the differences between running a grocery store and running a clothing store.  Buying in bulk, setting prices, keeping customers interested in what you sell. Mr. Leonard was a genius.  How can he know so much about these things, and more to the point, how did he keep me interested in doing math day after day?   Well, because it was relevant, interesting, and participatory.  I’lI always remember those few weeks of “business math” as among the most interesting I ever took. It also engendered a new respect for the kids taking the business courses.  My aversion to the kids in the shop courses, however, remained. 

The shop rooms were down in the basement level. It’s where the shop kids hung out when they weren’t harassing the substitute teachers. I didn’t really want to have anything to do with any of it.  Yet the state Board of Education in their all consuming efforts to give us a rounded education required courses in the industrial arts: machine shop, woodworking shop and, in 9th grade, drafting.

So there I am in metal shop, seventh grade, trying to figure out how to solder a piece of aluminum to some other metal. The teacher has been telling us about tinning, coating the surface with solder before soldering them together.  I’m trying but it’s not working.  I’m told the soldering iron isn’t hot enough.  This not a soldering gun you plug in, wait a few minutes and it’s red hot.  This the 1950s. To get this iron hot you have to heat it in a flame. It’s a time consuming process since the iron doesn’t retain its heat very long. To solder, the iron had to be very hot. Scary hot.

On one side of the room is a bank of open-flamed furnaces.  Fed by gas (I presume), the flames are intensely hot. It’s as if you turned a gas burner up to 11.  Noisy too with a whooshing sound.  I lay the tip of the iron in the flame to wait until it turns yellow/red. On both sides other twelve year-old kids are doing the same thing. The boy on my right pulls out his iron to inspect it before thrusting it back into the incandescence inside the burner. Then impatient, he pulls the iron out again, quickly brushes by me, the hot iron only inches from my face. 

Facial burns weren’t the only hazard. Kids would lay their irons down on wooden benches which would soon smolder.  Hot solder would drip off a project onto the floor. The air would become acrid as the smoky sizzle of tin and lead solder drifted up toward the ceiling.  It was kind of crazy that we were even in that sort of environment no matter how much the teacher talked about safety.  Still we did learn about tools, how things we took for granted were made, and even gained experience from the risks we took working with open flames and hot irons. (The twelve year-old girls did not take shop. They sewed and cooked.  Still, needles and hot ovens.)

With the iron glowing hot I secure the pieces I am soldering on a bench. Using one hand to hold the thin tube of solder and the other to hold the hot soldering iron, I tin both edges.  If I am skilled, the tip of the solder will run liquid on the surface of the two metal joints as I apply just enough heat from the iron to make a smooth uniform connection.  Well, that never happened.  My joints were rough and grainy. But as long as they stuck together I was happy.

Machine shop was a little safer. Maybe. Instead of dealing with open flames and hot irons, we dealt with lathes and punch machines, drills and metal cutters, benders and crimpers.  Maybe machine shop wasn’t safer after all. 

It seemed to me my project in machine shop was making a metal watering can. It sounds like the sort of project adults might think would be appropriate for a twelve year-old. They didn’t know me apparently or a classmate like John B., a kid that wore glasses and was bullied a lot. John B. was a particularly good representative of that subgroup of kids in the junior high class hierarchy.  As far as I was concerned, John was okay.  Because both our last names started with B he often sat right behind me in many classes. Smart as he was, he didn’t possess much in the way of social skills. Shop was not his thing.  (Phys ed was worse. I’ll get to that in the 9th grade blog.)

I knew I wasn’t particularly good at fabricating a recognizable product from a square of aluminum so when at times I am showing John how to use a drill press or cut a piece using metal shears, then you knew there something was wrong.

Inadequate as I was at working with the machines, at least I  wasn’t afraid of them.  My father was mechanically skilled so I had an idea from him how to use tools.  In shop I did use the drill, the crimper, maybe a lathe which I liked only because of the long ribbons of waste metal it would produce.  Using the shears was difficult.  I didn’t have the hand strength nor the ability to cut precisely along the line drawn on the metal.  Still I managed a B for the year in industrial arts for both 7th and 8th grades.  John was always on the honor roll so he somehow managed a good grade as well. Maybe I should take a little credit for that.

There was one shop class in eighth grade in which I actually excelled, a little bit. Wood shop. No hot irons, no crimpers, nothing to burn you or get your fingers caught in.  Primarily we used saws to do initially shaping and then glue, hammers and nails to hold everything together.  I did use a lathe which instead of metal filings produced wood chips and sawdust.  Much more natural. My father had all sorts of tools on the work benches in our cellar with which I was familiar. Actually I was pretty good at using a hammer. Most kids in my 8th grade college class weren’t. Bent nails, dinged wood, the usual. My real skill though (if skill is required) was at using the vise. (Again, at home, each work bench had a vice attached.)  Most kids would put a piece of wood in, tighten the vise and quickly imprint the wood with a pattern of the vise. You had to be careful in the amount of pressure applied. Just enough to hold the wood piece you were working on.  Or wrap the wood in cloth to mitigate the effects of the vice on fragile wood.  I sound like an expert!

The project was a lamp in the shape of an old-fashioned hand water pump.  The handle acted as the on/off switch. There was a base, a little spout and a separate trough for the “water.”  It turned out well, recognizable as a pump and worked as a lamp.  The trough was the highlight.  I worked carefully on that.  I patterned the five small pieces out of maple, cut them with a hand saw and then sanded and shaped them before glueing them together. The edges were bevelled and smooth.  I stained it red/brown. I was proud of how accomplished it looked when it was finished.  I still have it.

The main pump/lamp wasn’t bad either.  Not as finely assembled as the trough, but still it was better constructed than anything I did with metal.  The main part of it, the cylinder, required a hole to be drilled from top to bottom to allow for the wire to connect to the lamp socket. I enjoyed making it and was likely surprised when I tightened a bulb into the socket, pressed the handle/on/off switch and actually had the light come on.

You’d think if I could hone from bits and pieces of wood a recognizable and working lamp I’d also do well with something a lot more kid friendly, a sheet of paper. Paper wasn’t just for writing on.  From a sheet of paper you could make a paper airplane or something called a cootie catcher or a paper fortune teller.  I loved each of those things. What got in my way of making my own was my inability to fold.  On my report card there was always a large “F” in the space next to Folding.  I had to rely on others’ folding abilities.

I thought paper airplanes were beyond clever.  From something as simple as a sheet of math paper and with a few folds, the paper transmuted into something to glide across the room. To me it was a small miracle.  The secret was a point at the end, large “wings” and a small fold underneath by which to launch it into the air.  The success of the launch depended on not flinging the plane into the air but to propel it by using your whole arm, not just your wrist and hand.  

I wasn’t awful at achieving flight but some kids were masters.  The arm back, release and a sheet of paper with a few folds is gracefully sailing by the windows. Other kids would try to hurl it in the air.  Not a good tactic.  The plane would land nose down on the floor two inches from the hurler.  There was a worse fate than a crash landing for a paper airplane.  The teacher.  Some ignored them or laughed.  Sometimes a kid would be asked to bring the airplane up to the teacher’s desk, not for the teacher to try their skill at flying it, but to crumple it up, walk over to the waste basket and drop it in. So mean. All that skill and craftsmanship undone in a second by a teacher who seemed incapable of remembering their own childhood. 

Girls were the best paper fortune teller makers. A simple paper air plane might require six or seven folds.  A fortune teller required about a thousand, or so it seemed to me. The four outside corners are labelled with words for colors; the inside consists of eight flaps each concealing a message or the fortune. You open and close it as you spell out a color on the outside and then open and close it again based on the number on the outside of one of the inside flaps. For me the fun of it was using both hands to open and close it, up and down, side to side.  For a paper contraption, it worked like a well-oiled machine.

Since girls were responsible for making them, most of the fortunes had to do with love and marriage, seventh grade version.  I’d spell blue, open and close four times; pick the number 6, open and close six times.  Then pick one of the four flaps.  It might read, “You’re going to be married and have three kids.”  I’m only twelve! Or, “You’re going to meet someone special next week.”  Not likely. I don’t even have a locker.  If a boy were to make a fortune teller, and I don’t know of any that ever did, I suspect the fortunes would be cruder and funnier. Probably to do with cooties and farting.  I’ll leave that to your imagination.

I remember those paper fortune tellers, the good teachers, the rattan, the clocks, working or otherwise, those bits and pieces that stood out from the ordinary tedium of the day to day.  There was the time we came into homeroom in eighth grade to see the word “thimk” written on the board.  That isn’t how you spell “think” we were saying to each other. Mr. Leonard let us puzzle about it a while and then told us if he had put the word “think” on the board no one would have noticed.  By changing the “n” to “m” it got everyone talking and remembering to do what both words implied, to think. Mr Leonard was ahead of his time in using misspelled words to focus our attention.  Think of “Miller Lite”, “Play Doh”, or “La-Z-Boy.”

Miss Hennessy of Cadillac fame continued her inconsiderate ways when we were studying Huckleberry Finn. I’ve always felt that book was better suited for college with its themes of emancipation, satire, black comedy and racism than seventh grade. It’s not a kids’ book in the way Tom Sawyer might be.

One day Miss Hennessy decided it would be appropriate to read aloud from the book.  Not a lovely passage about sailing down the Mississippi on a cool summer’s night, languid and serene.  No, she read a portion of the book in which the destructive word “nigger” appears several times. (It’s a word that appears over 200 times throughout the book, by the way.)  We had a black girl in the class.  Yes, just one black person in the whole class. This is 1957 in Boston. Diane Hinds. The several times Miss Hennessy read the word pretty much every kid in the class looked over to where Diane was sitting to gauge her reaction. I did too. She just sat there, without moving, almost rigid.  Awful.  I felt bad for her, embarrassed actually.  It seemed like a cruel thing for the teacher to do knowing Diane was in the class. 

After finishing the reading we went on to something else.  There was no discussion about what we had just read, the significance of it, the use of that word in modern America. I’m not sure how I could have contributed to any discussion and Miss Hennessy had shown she had neither the skill nor the inclination to lead such a discussion but the whole thing left me with a bad feeling.

Later I remember some kids talking about it.  “Did you see how she just sat there?” they said referring to Diane’s unsettling reaction.  I also got some sense of empathy from what these kids said.  “Yeah, I’m glad that wasn’t me.”  It was another piece, another bit of school that had nothing to do with the curriculum and everything to do with the disarray of the real world swirling around us, a world for which there seemed to be little preparation or training. I’m deep in that world in seventh grade without any sort of life jacket, floundering at times. Like Diane, I can feel trapped as the world moves around me without explanation or accountability.

In 8th grade we had a black gym teacher, at least for a short time.  Mr Freeman was a young guy, an idealist perhaps. Even though I was decidedly athletic, I was not a big fan of gym. I rode for miles on my bike, ran around a lot, often moved in a straight line, over fences and walls, not around them. I enjoyed climbing trees.  Occasionally I fell but that didn’t stop me from climbing back up. The point is I was doing this on my own time at my own pace without interference from rules and regulations and other kids.  That was not the case in gym which I always felt let bullies get away with practicing their mayhem under the guise of physical exercise.  “He just elbowed me.”  “No, my arm slipped when I was going for the ball.”  That sort of thing.  Dodge ball was the worst.  I’ll have more to say about all of this when I write about senior high.

Aside from throwing a  basketball around or doing sit ups, another function of gym at the Rogers was health assessment. For example, we were weighed and measured at the beginning of the year and then at the end.  Maybe it was a new directive from the  ubiquitous Department of Education but at the beginning of eighth grade there was a new emphasis on such things as wearing appropriate gym uniforms, shorts and t-shirts, the correct sneakers, everyone participating, even, if like John B., you were afraid of the ball.  Personal hygiene was also taken into account.  Mr Freeman apparently was going to take all of this very seriously.

There was a gun storage room in the back of the gym at the Rogers, this from days gone by when kids took military drill class using dummy rifles. Now the area was used as a storeroom for athletic equipment.  Mr Freeman’s first mistake may have been gathering the class in this room at the beginning of the period one day early in the year.  There must have been thirty of us boys in there.  It was a bit confining.  We weren’t grouped by homeroom in gym class; it was a mixture of kids from eighth grade, the college courses, the business classes, something called the general classes and even some of the shop kids. 

Mr. Freeman’s second mistake was to close the only door to this cramped space.  The restrictive nature of the room was also reflected in the dim lighting and the aromas of a bunch of eighth grade boys. We had been gathered together for, and I’m not making this stuff up, fingernail inspection. We were to line up against the walls and then individually walk by Mr. Freeman with our fingers spread apart so he could inspect our fingernails.  Was he looking for dirt under our nails, kids who had a nail biting habit or had the word gone out from physical education administrators that kids with long nails were scratching other kids during the rough and tumble of a basketball game?  I didn’t know. I did think it was odd though.

A couple of kids moved forward to begin the inspection.  A voice came from the back of the room. “I’m not doing that.”  It was one of the shop kids.  I knew him from seeing him in the corridors.  He was not someone you would mess with.  Not me anyway.  I’ll call him Joey.  The teacher stopped what he was doing.  “Come over here.” he told Joey. I suddenly realized the room was dead quiet.  Joey walked toward Mr Freeman, his hands by his sides.  “Let me see your fingernails,” the teacher said. Joey stood there, his hands still by his side.  What the hell, I’m thinking.  Mr. Freeman’s third mistake was to reach for Joey’s arm.  Joey stepped back, knocked Mr Freeman’s hand away and said, and I’ll never forget this, I thought I was in a movie, “Don’t touch me, you black bastard!”  

Everybody froze. Several pins dropped. I heard every one of them.  Abruptly light flooded into the room. Someone had opened the door. Kids started running out into the gym, including Joey.  Whoever opened that door, I give them credit. That was a smart move even though it may have been opened by John B. in panic mode.  It defused what was an escalating situation and may have prevented an actual attack by Joey on Mr. Freeman in that crowded space. 

I was never aware of any upshot. I rarely was aware of consequences. Adults didn’t talk with kids like that. I did see Joey in the corridors a few days later so he wasn’t thrown out of school.  Mr Freeman was our teacher for a few more months until one day we showed up for gym to discover we had a new gym teacher, a white guy,  One other thing. After those tense few minutes in the gun room, we never had fingernail inspection again.

In the fall of 1957 there was an outbreak of Asian flu, the first major pandemic of the century since the devastating outbreak in 1918. The ramifications were far less than that earlier contagion and by summer it seemed to be on the wane in the northern hemisphere. Then in late October there was a resurgence particularly among children.  That would describe me.  It hit me like a ton of bricks.  Maybe a ton and a half.

I’d always gotten bad colds. I had whooping cough in fourth grade. This was the worst of all. The breaking point came on a Saturday morning. I am upstairs in bed, asleep.  I am dreaming.  With a start I wake up, fling myself out of bed and start screaming, “I killed him. I killed him.”  What an uproar I am causing.  My father dashes up the stairs and grabs hold of me as I am running around the room in delirium.

By this time I had awoken. Shaken, I climbed back into bed as my father went down to get some aspirin to deal with the fever.  My younger brother remembers that moment to this day.  I both scared him and amused him with my antics.

It took a while to recover.  I spent most of my time in bed that last week of October becoming increasingly bored as I regained my strength. But as it turned out this flu wasn’t done with me as I found out one afternoon in, of all places, music class.  

Imagine getting eighth graders to listen to classical music especially at a time when the culture was in a popular music renaissance with the blossoming of rock’n’roll and rhythm and blues.  Some of this music wasn’t particularly good but this was also the time of Elvis, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, the Platters, Chuck Berry, and lots more to come especially women artists of the early 1960’s.  Mr. Breen was asking us kids to listen to Beethoven.  Not a symphony or piano concerto.  Just a march. Still, Beethoven. Most of the kids would have preferred the song about Beethoven rolling over.  Not me.  I liked Buddy Holly and what Elvis was doing.  I liked Blueberry Hill.  Here’s a confession.  I also liked some of the songs by Pat Boone.  I also listened to so-called classical music. So-called because the classical I liked were ballets, incidental pieces, marches, overtures, what you might call theatrical music.  My enthusiasm for the more complex pieces, symphonies, sonatas, came later. 

My father was the one who kindled my interest even if his preference was for opera, a form in which I never developed an interest.  Mr. Breen didn’t play us any opera as I recall.  He kept it simple.  A waltz by Strauss.  A selection from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Mendelssohn. A piano piece by Chopin.

Nothing too long.  Five to eight minutes.  I loved hearing them in this class setting since I was so familiar with them. Still it was a difficult class as some of the kids were particularly vocal in their hostility.  “Why do we have to listen to this for?” “Not piano!”  It was as bad when the piece was played.  Noises. Rude sounds. I would have thought the kids would have appreciated the fact that music class wasn’t math class or English class.  It’s the only class where you might be allowed to close your eyes as you “listened” to the music and take a nap.

It was during one of Mr. Breen’s music classes in December that I had my first episode of dissociation.The teacher may have been playing part of the Nutcracker Suite. I was sitting in my seat by the window, looking out, listening to the lilting melody, thinking of Christmas when I noticed something happening to me. At first I thought it was a change in the room lighting. Then I realized it wasn’t just my sight but also my hearing that was being affected.  The music sounded flat and then somewhat muffled, losing its clarity. As I sat in my seat I felt detached from everyone else in the room. The people around me, even the room I was sitting in, felt distorted and unreal.

Surprisingly I didn’t panic. I rode it out.  After a few minutes the feelings began to fade.  Mr. Breen is asking a question about the music.  I stood up and answered just as a way to move about for a moment. I may not have panicked but I did feel confused and sad with a certain melancholy descending upon me.

It happened again a week later also in music class. Somehow the music was triggering this aura of disconnectedness. I was not one to talk with my parents about anything important.  After another episode or two, however, I did tell them what was happening.  I never had any tests. Were CAT scans even around then? The doctor said it was likely an after effect of the fever I suffered during my bout with the flu.  Sort of a junior grade PTSD.  These fugue states eventually disappeared but looking back, having them in music class, and not in gym or French class, was a bit of a blessing in disguise.  Having that familiar music playing while I was temporarily out of my self was similar to the intentional desire of marijuana smokers at a rock concert.  I was way ahead of my time, dude.

I liked music.  I took it seriously.  I was trying to do the same thing with poetry.  Again my father liked poetry, even if they were mostly the romantic poets of the 19th century: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Whittier. Later I’d enjoy reading Richard Wilbur, Gary Snyder, Sharon Olds, poets with a more modern viewpoint.  In junior high two poems appealed to me, the one a bit more modern than the other.

I walked into seventh grade homeroom one morning to find “In Flanders Fields” written on the board. The teacher would often chalk on poems or verse for the class to discuss before the first period bell. This was Miss Hennessy again but now in real teaching mode, not opinionated, prejudiced mode.

John McCrae wrote the poem in May,1915, the day after a close friend of his had been killed by German shelling during the battle of Ypres in Belgium during the First World War.  It took him just a few minutes.

“In Flanders fields, the poppies blow between the crosses, row on row…” At first I liked the imagery of poppies in the wind.  This after the teacher told us what poppies were.  It was the middle stanza though that affected me.  “We are the dead. Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved: and now we lie in Flanders fields.”   A poem about dead people killed in a war. The poet seems to be in sympathy not just with the fallen but also with the idea of the futility of war. Alive one moment, dead the next. 

In the final stanza he reverses this idea calling upon those still alive to “take up our quarrel with the foe,” hold the torch high, not break faith with those who were killed. Do this, he says, or “We shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders fields.” Interesting the poet considers the extraordinary carnage of World War One the result of a “quarrel.” Odd too that while he feels grief for his friend, he’s also adamant that his death should be avenged by killing more people. Certainly the poems of Owen and Sassoon from the same period were more complex but aside from the image of poppies amidst the crosses, what I took from the McCrae poem was that people have many ideas and even beliefs that contradict each other. My parents. My friends.This poet. Myself.

Perhaps my father would have been more in agreement with the poem that our English teacher, Miss Roddy, introduced to us in eighth grade, Evangeline by Longfellow. The first thing that struck me was how long it was. How am I going to read all of this or even understand it?  “A narrative poem,” the teacher tells us “is a poem, often lengthy, that tells a story.” 

Looking at the first few stanzas, expert that I am, I conclude, in spite of the teacher’s admonition, this isn’t really a poem.  Poems have words at the end of each line that rhyme. (Just like that sentence does.) This thing doesn’t rhyme.  Miss Roddy sets the class straight.

“Poems do not have to rhyme.”  Now you tell me. “Evangeline doesn’t rhyme but it does have a rhythmic pattern called dactylic hexameter. That’s how you read it.”  A look of worry settled on my face. Then Miss Roddy started to read.

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and hemlocks,

bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight…

Wow. Whatever hexameter was, Miss Roddy knew how to convey the words of the poem to her unsophisticated students.  Some of us anyway. I didn’t understand all of it, but the cadence of her voice brought me into that ancient forest and, as she read us other parts of the poem, into the story of Evangeline, the man she loved, Gabriel, and their separation as the Acadians were forcibly expelled from Nova Scotia leading to a life-long search by our heroine finally reuniting with Gabriel on his death bed. Not the ending I might have wanted but there it was.

We did not sit as a class and read every line of this long poem.  Instead Miss Roddy guided us through it, pointing out the highlights, and teaching us how the words Longfellow chose to describe the natural wonders of forests and mountains and rivers and oceans also illuminated the emotional journey Evangeline undertook as she searched over many years to find Gabriel.

The poem is an English lesson, a history lesson and a geography lesson all in one.  Looking back through the poem today I remember certain passages Miss Roddy read aloud to us. Those I recall were all about light, how it appears at dawn, at dusk, in the mountains, in the bayous of Louisiana. 

The sun from the western horizon like a magician extended his golden wand o’re the landscape.   Or. Twinkling vapors arose; and sky and water and forest seemed all on fire at the touch, and melted and mingled together.

Read through my blogs on the seasons and you see from an early age I had both an awareness of light in all its moods and glory as a natural phenomenon along with an appreciation of how light shifted and changed depending on the time of day and time of year.

Experiences like studying Evangeline made me want to write my own stories emphasizing style over structure. I had already moved in that direction with several class assignments.

Still I was overwhelmed in seventh grade when my geography teacher told us we had to write a multipage paper on South America. We were instructed to choose three of the continent’s countries for our subjects. I chose Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador. 

Initially, being very literal, I started the Brazil part of the report by writing, “I am going to give you a detailed report on the biggest South American Republic, Brazil.  First I’ll tell you about its history,” which I proceeded to do. Then I wrote, “Now lets talk about the geography of Brazil.” Then I went into that.  Its neighboring countries. Its largest lake. Its population. As I was writing, I realized even I was getting bored by this approach. That’s when I decided to try something different.

My inspiration was summed up in the next sentence I wrote. “To see more of this country, we’ll go by helicopter.”  Suddenly it gets interesting.  Rio de Janeiro.  “From this air view we see the large and beautiful harbor. We look down at large railroad terminals and large steamers.” (Large was apparently the only word I knew for relating size.) “We skim over buildings. Flour mills, textile factories and cotton mills.  We fly over large storehouses, full of coffee ready to be exported.” This description sounds so exciting I want to go there.

The next city is Sao Paulo. I describe how we reached the city at sunset to gas up our copter. I knew nothing about helicopters but did assume they flew on gas like a car.  The next day the chopper is skimming over the great canopy of trees above the tropical rain forest. As I wrote I imagined what this view would be like as if I were actually flying over such a place.  I’m getting into this.

In the jungle, I write, “We find a clearing and land.” I mention the ground, soggy and wet. Nearby “a small antelope is trapped and sinking. A large snake is directly above it. The antelope sees the snake but it’s too late. The snake shot its head down and in an instant, the snake’s fangs are deep in the antelope’s back.” A little violence to get the teacher’s attention. Then I wax philosophical. “This is only one in a million things that happen here each day.” Deep thoughts.

We keep flying. Over the Tara River, over a rice plantation, until we approach a rubber tree forest. Based on a previous class week of studying rubber, I considered myself somewhat of an expert. We hover over a “native” with a large knife hacking his way toward a rubber tree. Once there he drills a hole from which sap drips into a bucket. “This is just the first step.” I write. “The sap has to be thickened, heated and molded. After all that,” I continue, “you have a beach ball or a pair of sneakers.” So the “native” must have had a small stand nearby where he sold such things.  As I said, I was an expert.

The Amazon is the world’s largest river system, the health of which impacts the entire planet. I didn’t mention that in the paper. The one thing I cared about was that the Amazon was home to “millions of man-eating fish.” As the helicopter circles I’m looking down on “a man in a boat with a rifle which he is aiming at something in the water.” I write, “He goes to the edge of the boat and fires. The gun kicks back and he loses his balance and falls.”  After the two native guides he is with pull him out, I continue, “He is unharmed. He is lucky.” Then I go on to relate a story about a substantially less lucky woman washing clothes by the river. She too falls in. “In the next instant she was dead, eaten by these dreaded fish of the Amazon.”

I am zipping through this report thanks to the helicopter I am riding in.  I have two more parts to go—Chile and Ecuador.  Back to the chopper.  “We gas the copter, press the starter, and we are in the air.”  All made up. I had no idea if a helicopter had a starter button. 

Flying low over Chilean cities like Alameda and Valparaiso reveal wood cutting mills, furniture factories, large frigates unloading in harbors.  Now we are in a mountainous region.  I write, “We stop our copter in midair directly over the mouth of the crater of a volcano. We look down into the pitch black crater and hear faint rumblings. We decide to leave this particular volcano alone and fly onward.” Good advice.

Next stop is a city called Valdivia. I write, “As we fly over a large lake our heads are swimming at the beautiful sight. Beyond are the snow-capped mountain peaks. We just can’t believe we’re on earth.  We must be in heaven.  Earth couldn’t have this beauty.” Obviously I must be on retainer from the Chilean tourist board. 

A few hours later, we are flying over the desert region in Northern Chile, “We looked down and not a blade of grass is to be seen for miles and miles”. Then I go into a detailed explanation of how nitrates are mined. I should have had a career in manufacturing. Soap, rubber, now nitrates. 

Our final flyover is the Andes Mountains.  I write, “Ahead of us is a small speck.  It grows larger and larger and larger and larger.   It is Christ of the Andes.  We land and get out.  There’s a plaque which reads, ‘Sooner shall these mountains crumble into dust than Argentina and Chile shall violate the peace they have pledged at the feet of Christ the Savior.’”  I end the report with this optimistic assurance.  “I now know that Chile will live on and on and be free and independent forever.“  Well, we know that didn’t happen.

In the Ecuador section of the report I write, “We are going to Quito, the capital, by way of helicopter. That noun is getting familiar to my readers I hope.”  I now have readers? I fly to to an area called the avenue of volcanos.  I write, “We’re way up in the icy and snowy peaks. If the copter’s spinners get iced up, we’re lost.” Fortunately that did not happen. Unfortunately, for all my flying skills, I only got a B on the report. 

In eighth grade the topic of the report I wrote was Japan, Land of the Rising Sun. By now I had become more confident in my writing ability so that the entire tour of Japan is by, you guessed it, helicopter. “We warm up the copter,” I write, “and load on food and supplies. We get in and we’re off.” 

The first stop is Mount Fuji, the Magic Mountain. “We fly down closer on its eastern slope and we see hundreds of Japanese climbing this bold mountain. For this is the month of July, the annual pilgrimage to the top.  As we glide above we can see their pure white costumes and their cone-shaped bamboo hats.  We push our throttle. Up, up we go. Below us like ants crawl the white pilgrims. Then everything is pure white when the climbers hit the snow field.”

Fuji is an active volcano. “Up, up, up we climb until below us stands the crater,  Black and deep as all eternity. A great swirl of heat hits us. Our copter blades are impatient so let us find some other wonders of Japan.”

More wonders follow including this opportune moment. I am flying over a small farming village. “Suddenly there is a great roar and a wooden house crumbles to the ground.  A tree falls. A large crack shoots through the earth into the rice fields. This means only one thing. Earthquake!  We can only hover above and watch helplessly. In a minute it’s all over.”   Nice person that I am, I land the copter and “in a couple of hours we have helped the wounded.”  

I end the report with a return trip to Fuji. Flying to the top “we look out toward the Pacific. A streak of light appears.  Suddenly the whole sky is star-spangled, the sea a silver mystery. Out of the Pacific springs a streak of fire, and then the great, glowing sun. We are lost in rapture.  Deep in our souls and hearts we thank God for making the world and Japan.”  Longfellow would have been proud. The teacher too recognized writing greatness.  This paper received an A.

We also received instruction on letter writing.  Both business letters and letter to friends.  Technical components included where to put the recipient’s name and address, your name and address, the date, the greeting or salutation, the body of the letter, the complimentary close, and your signature. 

Again, the formality of all of this mitigated against my own ideas of creativity and straightforwardness.  I called my friends Paul or Louie at school.  If I wrote a letter to either of them according to the rules, I would have to address them as Dear Paul or Dear Louie. That seemed contrived and artificial to me. “Dear” is a word grandmothers used.  Even worse was ending the letter with a Yours Truly. I didn’t even know what that meant. Your Friend works better.

Since I couldn’t change the rules, I decided to come up with something unusual for the body of the letter. Not a congratulations letter or asking for information.  How about something like buried treasure.

                                                                                March 26, 1958

Dear Jack,

Well, we found the treasure last Monday thanks to that dream you had. John, Bill, and myself searched in that area for weeks.  We didn’t leave a stone unturned.

Then I got the letter you sent me. It tells exactly where the treasure is. Then I found out you wrote that letter when you had yellow fever.  I nearly flipped my lid when I found out.  By law we have to give half the treasure to the Peruvian government, (I spelled that Peruan. Teacher corrected to Peruvian.) But that still leaves enough for John, Bill, myself and you.

I’ll see you back in the states. And oh yeah, have pleasant dreams.

Your friend,

Indiana Smith

(That last bit is a joke, not precognition.)

I remember my eighth grade teacher Miss Roddy fondly.  She didn’t even begin teaching at the Rogers until January of 1958, well into my eighth grade year.  She cared about kids, teaching us with skill and empathy. We had monthly book reports.  In March of 1958 the book I read was Roaring River which took place on the Barak River in India following World War II.  The formality of each report required a listing of title, author, setting, chief characters and something called Incident:

“The most exciting part was when they are running from the savages. They had only one rubber boat left.  In a couple of minutes they were shooting some dangerous rapids. The author explained this sequence so vividly  that I could almost feel the water spray in my face.”

When Miss Roddy handed the report back to me, she said, “I could almost feel that water spray too.”  Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t, but she did know what to say to a twelve year-old to encourage his writing adventures. Good teachers are rare and during their time their abilities and awareness often go unrecognized.  I sensed it then and remember it now.  Thanks Miss Roddy.

My friend Howie Butler was instrumental in encouraging me to write independently of school projects. As we were both in our early teens, what appealed to us were stories about criminals, adventurers, people down on their luck, and individuals in over the heads in what can only be described as third-rate Hitchcock.  I’ll correct that, tenth-rate Hitchcock.  I was also interested in science fiction stories and straight adventure stories.

I continued writing for fun and no profit through ninth grade. Within that blog I’ll give more specific details.  Howie was also responsible for a writing project that I will detail now, an enterprise  I kept at from the second part of eighth grade all the way through the end of ninth grade, a daily newspaper.  Howie started it with his “Glob” newspaper. (The Globe was Boston’s main newspaper. It remains today as the city’s only newspaper.) When he showed his paper to me on that Thursday afternoon in December 1957, I was so enthused that when I got home I put aside my homework, pulled up a stool at the little bar in our cellar room that I had taken over the year before as personal space where I did all my homework, to start my own newspaper. 

In school we did math computation on two sizes of thin brownish paper.  From a note book I took the smaller of the two, folded it in half, and commenced to write the name of my paper, The Headhunter, and the date, December 12, 1957, Thursday, and the price, 5 cents. The price was to emulate real newspapers.  Nobody ever paid me a nickel for my paper, or any amount for that matter. It was technically free. My friend Louie suggested the name. He had a dark sense of humor. 

The enthusiasm with which I began this project was astonishing. Over the next few days, not only did I write a Thursday paper, I wrote a Friday paper, a Saturday paper and a Sunday paper. I clearly took my job as editor of a major William Barton Rogers Junior High School daily newspaper seriously. I wrote this paper seven days a week for the next five weeks straight from that first paper on December 12 right through, excluding Christmas vacation, the middle of January 1958. After that I continued it until June as a more manageable twice a week project

An infinity of light years between my paper and the Washington Post, for example, should give you an idea of my skills as a newspaper publisher.  I’m twelve years old. The papers were full of teacher insults, uninformed parodies of popular culture and outrage at the efforts by other kids to write their own newspapers.

Here are some examples from those first few months of the Headhunter.

Poor Miss Dunphy, the French teacher, was a particular target of my sophisticated barbs. In the very first issue I claimed she was a Communist spy. A couple of days later I followed that with the aspersion that “Miss Dunphy of room 205 is not an earthling, but a Martian. She may also be a Communist spy as you know.” As it turned out Miss Dunphy disappeared from school about this time. We found out later she was in the hospital with a serious medical condition. I still wrote nasty things about her.  A headline in a January issue proclaimed,  “Miss Dunphy is not a human being.”  I guess I was going for funny, even outrageous, cutting edge.  Most of it is just mean.

The newspaper was a pretty silly enterprise. Along with a selected group of teachers, I also wrote uncomplimentary stories about other kids. John Blake, the kid from shop class, was a particular target. In an article titled “The Birth of Blake” I describe a scene at the city dump where he appears from a pile of rubble following an explosion. Or this. “Blake becomes Olympic champion. The United States loses Olympics.” Sometimes if I had a blank space to fill in the paper, I’d write, “John Blake is a nut.”  In spite of it all I remained friends with him. I guess he took it as I meant it, good-natured jabs. Maybe.

I tried to be jokey. Headline. “A plane crashed into a good luck charm factory yesterday.”  Or tried for parody. One article offered a sampling of advertisements by famous people. “How to grow hair by Yul Brinner.” (A famous bald-headed actor of the 50s.) Yeah, that’s how I spelled his name. “City for sale. Waterloo. Napoleon.”  “For sale. Cheap. The Brooklyn Bridge. Anonymous.”  And one title from the ever-present Miss Dunphy. “How to forget French.”

There was even some news. There had been talk about extending the school year by a month.  My headline read, “Eleven-month school year, maybe.”  I editorialized, “If there is an eleven-month school year, there will be more detention and more work!” Issue settled. I reminded kids when tests were coming up and the due dates of school projects.  One headline blared, “Only 3 days until vacation.” For those who may have forgotten.

Some of it was surrealistic.  I had TV listings of imaginary shows. “Lipstick and You”   “Sawdust is Fun”   “The Dogs Are in the Streets.” That last one actually sounds like something I would watch.

A great deal of the paper that eighth grade year was given over to war with my competition. Louie had a paper, The Skull.  Peter Pagington had one, The Page Express, into which he put in a lot of work, at least initially.  Then there were a few that lasted just a couple of issues as the kids who wrote them quickly lost interest.  It didn’t matter to me.  With the exception of Howie’s paper, The Glob, I was against them all. One Headhunter headline declared, “Warning to all papers. Get out of circulation or else.”  The story continued, “Beat it or I will fight and fight hard.”  I think I meant I would offer a much better paper and overwhelm all the others with my brilliance.  Or else hire goons to intimidate the other editors. (Actually some of the shop kids might have done that for free.)

It was during lunch that everyone would pass around their papers for others kids to read. Eating in a lunchroom was something new in junior high. The tables were heavy planks of wood.  Think of

picnic tables on speed. The seats were wooden circles that swung out on metal hinges; our comfort apparently not an issue for the person who designed the lunchroom. The table I sat at every day with my friends was at the back of the lunchroom in a small alcove by the windows. 

I always sat at the end of the table away from the window. There were about twelve of us at my table. I’d give the kids about ten minutes to start their lunch before passing out the single copy of The Headhunter. I left it to them to pass it to one another. 

Meanwhile at the other end of the table my chief competitor, Peter Pagington, editor of the Page Express, did the same thing with his effort that day.  I had a couple of faithful readers, Louie and a kid named Ralph who read it every day.  Some kids glanced through it; others ignored it. One day in March the “paper wars” came to a head.  The previous day Peter claimed his next issue would be “150 pages long.”  It was that long but each page had only one word written on it.  I had to agree with Peter that all this competition was getting ridiculous. After that I wrote less about the other papers and made more of an effort to spruce up mine by adding photos cut from magazines and inviting other kids to write for it including one who did a weekly comic strip.  More on all of that in the ninth grade blog.

The stress at lunch wasn’t just getting kids to read the paper, it was also making sure a teacher didn’t come over to see what was going on. Most of the teachers supervising the lunch room wouldn’t notice or even care what we did but there were a few cranks among them. Remember, my paper was full of less than kind things about several teachers. I’m not sure how they would have reacted to seeing themselves portrayed as dope peddlers  or aliens but better safe than sorry. Peter in fact did have a run in with a teacher. He had a stack of his old papers when a teacher asked to see them. As it turned out the teacher liked them, returned them to Peter and told him he also wrote a paper when he was in junior high.  I even wrote a story about it the next day in my paper. I ended with the cynical line, “Some story.”

There was more going on at lunch than passing our papers around.  It was at lunch more than any other place in school that animosity among us kids would show itself.  Most of us would have bagged lunch our mothers would have put together that morning.  (The wonderful innocent 1950s).  For years I had one of three kinds of sandwich: peanut butter and jelly, cream cheese and olives or roast beef or ham depending on what the Sunday dinner was.  There’d be cookies for dessert, sometimes fruit and occasionally a hermit. No, not the guy living alone in the woods.  A hermit was a soft bar cookie with spices, raisins and sometimes nuts.  My friend Louie thought the name was also nuts.  “It’s cake!” he’d say. “Who’d call it a hermit?” 

Billy Nelson’s mother was one of those housewives who worked hard to make sure everything was perfect in her house.  Including perfect lunches.  Sandwiches cut just right, cut up carrots, a nice cupcake for dessert.  Unfortunately at lunch Nelson sat next to this short kid who also happened to be a bully.  Just as soon as Nelson would pull out the sandwich from his lunch container this kid would smash it with his fist.  Nelson tried to protect his food as time went on but this kid, I’ll call him Richie, only became more devious at what became his singular concern at lunch, smash Nelson’s sandwich.  Sometimes he’d sit there. “I don’t care about his sandwich,” he’d tell us.  But as soon as Nelson let his guard down, slam!  Mrs’ Nelson’s meticulous work that morning now a mess. Nelson would dutifully eat it regardless.

With all the bickering over whose newspaper was best and food being crushed along with the usual cacophony of hundreds of kids chattering, laughing, yelling, the lunchroom could become quite loud. I liked it. The camaraderie, the at times goofy give and take with my friends, the catching up, getting ideas for the next day’s paper, even trying to protect Nelson’s sandwich. We kids didn’t care about the noise we made but apparently someone did.  One day there was an announcement that from now on during lunch, there would be no talking, no noise at all.  Talking would resume for a few minutes toward the end of the lunch period.

What!  In class, in homeroom, in the corridors, it’s always, “Quiet. No talking.”  Now at lunch too.  It was odd that first day of “quiet lunch.”  I remember sitting there, eating my food. We’d chew, glance over at the kid across from us chewing, and shake our heads at the absurdity of it all. And there was still noise. The lunchroom seats squeaked.  Lunch bags rustled. Spoons dropped on the floor. These sounds seemed louder separated now from the normal clatter of kids.  Behind it all was the low murmur of young teens trying to be quiet. It was all very odd. 

When the word came we could talk, all that stifled energy burst forth in an immediate roar as the talking enthusiastically resumed.  This policy of imposed silence would come and go, the rule being lifted and then a month or two later imposed again. Then lifted.  Not a lot of consistency. I mention all of this because it was during one these imposed silences that I was accused of the major crime of disrespecting the quiet injunction. Me?  Nice behaved innocent me?

Among the teachers Mr Ostermann was the one who was the most formidable.  He could have easily handled an English class of shop kids.  He was an imposing figure, no nonsense. I don’t know if he liked kids or not but his manner suggested he didn’t.  His philosophy was that teachers were in charge. Period.  No talking back, no explaining, no questioning.  Do as we tell you. If we tell you there is no talking at lunch than you sit there silently.  Well, I thought that’s what I was doing that afternoon he accused me of flagrant misbehavior.  

It could be that someone, Louie maybe, crumpled up a napkin and tossed it in my direction. I may have flicked it back.  Maybe I made a sound as I did it. That’s a felony in some states, and an obvious infraction in the junior high lunchroom. Ostermann saw me and heard me. I froze.  He walked by me, then turned and came back, dominating my personal space as he leaned over.  “You will be in my room five minutes after the close of school today.”  Then he walked away.  I am in trouble now, I’m thinking.  Everyone is looking at me. Most display expressions of shock and then sympathy.  We all knew what a visit to Ostermann’s room after school meant. The rattan.

Now I had all the rest of the school day to think about what awaited me at 2:15.  Louie was helpful.  “Maybe he’s just going to yell at you,” he reassures me.  Another kid isn’t so sanguine.  “The rattan hurts so bad.  It stings like hell.”  Thank you Peter Pagington.  My friend Paul who saw everything in terms of humor and parody, he loved Mad magazine, suggested the rattan would snap in half after one swish.  Then by some unwritten rule I could run out of the room absolved of any further punishment. 

None of these suggested possibilities helped much. I was confused as to what I had done to deserve all this anguish.  As I thought about it I became angry.  I rationalized that my crime did not fit the punishment, whatever it might be. The clocks ticked by particularly slowly that afternoon.

At the appointed time I walk up the stairs to Ostermann’s classroom. Along with me for moral support are Louie and Paul. I give a tentative knock on the closed door and walk in.  Mr Ostermann is behind his desk.

He stands up.  “So you’re the boy who thinks rules don’t matter.”  I’m in the back of the room as far away from him as I can get.  I plead my case.  Maybe there’s an apology, or even a “I didn’t do anything” defense.  The rattan is in the corner.  Maybe I think the teacher is making a move toward it.  These words come out of my mouth.  “I don’t know what I did but I’m not going to let you hit me with that thing.”  This was not a statement made in a crisp, clear, forceful voice. I may have been at the edge of tears but I was also determined not to be physically abused for the infraction of acting  like a 13 year-old. Nonetheless, I had challenged Mr Ostermann’s authority. I stood there. He stood there. He blinked first.  “Be quiet at lunch,” he said. “Follow the rules.”  

“What happened? What happened?” both Paul and Louie shouted simultaneously as I came back out into the corridor. It’s likely my account played down the fear I felt and played up my bold rejection of this archaic punishment.  Both Paul and Louie treated me like I was a hero. I had stood up to Ostermann. And lived to tell about it.

I’m not sure what I would have done if he had taken up the rattan, told me to come up to the front of the room and put my hand out.  I may have tried to take it away from him. Or worse.  I have written about my explosive temper in previous blogs, a temper that was most likely to erupt when I felt I was being treated particularly unfairly.  This would have been one of those times. Maybe Mr Ostermann realized this interaction with me was becoming volatile. Maybe he took pity on me.  Maybe he liked kids a little after all.

I‘m glad Louie and Paul were there when I came back out of Mr. Ostermann’s room. Especially Louie. He was my best friend right through high school. There must have been a good bond between

us because after ninth grade he went to English High School while I attended Hyde Park High. During those years we’d meet every Friday night at his house.  A blog aptly named “Louie” is in the works.

One incident sums up Louie’s distinctive personality. In April of 1958, eighth grade, one of our teachers was gone for a few days. That Monday Louie brought in a clipping from the Boston American, a daily tabloid.  He was very excited to show us. It was a photo of our very own Mr. Leonard standing next to an attractive woman. His wife. The caption announced they had been married the previous Saturday in East Boston. Louie gave me the clipping so that I could put it in the Headhunter.  One of the kids who read the paper that day drew a mustache and toupee on Mr. Leonard.  My caption read, “Mr. Leonard got hooked Saturday.” (Did I mean hitched?) I also wrote, “Dig the bride.” 

About a week later Mr. Leonard was back in class. All day Louie had been telling me someone should ask Mr. Leonard how his wife was. It became a joke. I’d see Louie in class or in the corridor and I’d say to him, or him to me, “How’s your wife?”

Toward the end of the day we were in class with Mr. Leonard, math class I believe. It’s toward the end of the period. Louie’s behind his desk, last seat in the row closest to the window.  I glance over to Louie who is mouthing to me, “How’s your wife?” 

Now at age thirteen your voice is beginning to change, from higher to lower, sometimes both in the same sentence. Again Louie mouthed to me, “How’s your wife?”  Only this time everyone heard it.  Louie’s voice cracked just at that moment.  Instead of the whisper he intended, it was close to a shout. “How’s your wife!” 

Mr. Leonard had his back to us at the board. He either didn’t hear or more likely pretended not to hear even though over the next few days Louie contended we seemed to get more math homework than usual. The moment  became forever known as the “cracked voice incident.” We’d tease Louie at lunch.  “Do the cracked voice.” Or, “Oh my god, here comes Mr. Leonard, and his wife is with him. She looks mad.”  Or, “Say that in cracked voice.” as if it were a language all its own.  It didn’t take much to amuse us.

What helped save junior high from becoming just another several stifling years of school were the corridors. You were never stuck in a classroom for very long. The break between classes was only a few minutes but those few minutes allowed you to be on your own, under your own authority and not that of a teacher. Mostly corridors led to other classrooms but sometimes they led to some place good. The lunchroom, at least on talk days; maybe to a storage room to carry back an armful of books; ultimately the corridor led to an exit door, to the outside.

Once you had the school figured out you could take the long way around to your next class: down a corridor, up a flight of stairs, down the next corridor and back down the stairs.  Those brief breaks gave you time to think, to regroup, to pass a friend and say hi, or “How’s your wife?”  You could stop and look out a window to judge the weather. Will you be getting wet on the way home this afternoon?

The best was walking the corridors on your own, when everyone else was in class. That didn’t happen in seventh grade but by eighth and certainly ninth I had the trust of several teachers so that if they needed something brought down to the office I’d usually be the one to go.

It was amazing to be out there walking by classrooms full of kids. So quiet. Just me.  I can walk at my own pace.  I don’t have to hug the walls.  This is what a teacher must feel like. This feeling was even more remarkable the few times I went back to the school at night, usually accompanying my mother for a parent-teacher conference. While they talked I’d wander off, sometimes heading up the second floor where one or two of the corridors were dark.  I didn’t put the lights on, I didn’t know where they were, as I tentatively stepped into the shadows keeping my eye on a further window which let in some light from the street or the moon. What an odd feeling to stand there in the dark looking out a window down to the glowing corridors below where my mother was talking to my teacher. Tomorrow this spot would be bustling with kids back and forth but now I felt alone, subdued, at peace.

In seventh grade you were figuring junior high out, by eighth grade you thought you had it figured out, by ninth grade you did have it figured out. By June of 1958 there were only days left of eighth grade.  One afternoon after school Louie and I thought it would be a good idea to explore that part of the school we weren’t as familiar with, where our ninth grade homeroom was going to be. 

That section of the junior high was the original school, the one built in 1902 which served as the high school until the early twenties. As fit such an old structure, the floors were wooden, it was dim and dingy, the classrooms in need of new paint and lighting.  This is where I’d be spending more time in just a few months.  Louie and I wandered around, looked into classrooms, walked up to room 222, our soon-to-be homeroom. I think we may have gone in and sat at the teacher’s desk. Ninth grade. Already. So new. Yet already so long ago.

Room 222 had seen kids in and out of it since the turn of the century. Now it would receive a new group of kids, us, kids who in only a few years would be graduating high school as the 1960s began. There is always this movement forward built entirely on what has happened in the minutes, hours, days and years that make up the past. As Louie and I walked around that afternoon there was a shadowy presence of kids from 1907 or 1915 who once walked in this same space, going to and coming from classes in these same rooms. I tend to think of these kids as passive, under the control of many more teachers like Mr. Ostermann, teachers who demanded to be addressed as “master”, teachers who required their students to listen only, obey only, not question or advocate.  Yet there must have been a few who, at least in small ways, rebuffed such a condescending philosophy resulting in a future in which kids like me and Louie, even in 1958, could have some say, limited at times, in how we were educated. Maybe someone stood up to the Ostermann of that time, was able to change a rule that allowed kids more input into their school day, making their day more credible, their positions as students more respected. Those few kids back then were unsung heroes, unnoticed, unremembered for those modest changes that made my school day a little better.

I realized what was becoming old and what was to be of the future could intersect in quirky ways. One of those junctures was entangled in an unassuming popular song. 

It’s an afternoon in September, 1957, the beginning of eighth grade.  Along with everyone else, I’m sitting in homeroom waiting for the bell to ring.  As I sit I become aware of music.  Behind me there’s a group of girls listening to the song “Tammy,” a wistful, even poignant love song sung by Debbie Reynolds. 

This song would after a few years become an “oldie” and slowly fade away.  But not the device the girl was listening to, a transistor radio. Introduced a couple of years before, the transistor radio would become among the most popular electronic communication device ever made. Billions would be sold in the 60s and 70s. In subsequent years the transistor would make the modern computer possible.  And perhaps more to these teenagers’ hearts, the smart phone. That future, like the melody, hovered here in my homeroom class.

I have a very strong memory of being in that classroom listening to that song that fall afternoon. School had just begun. Outside it was still summer. While the schoolyard was half in shadows, the classroom was half in light. Just behind the girls, the back wall quietly shimmered in delicate hues of gold and cream.  

I slowly settle back in my seat. In all things I am now in the right place. A calm settles upon me. For the next minute I barely move. This light, this moment, this music, this me, coalesce. I feel released from time.There is no past.  This is no future.  Only now.   “Tammy…Tammy…Tammy’s in love.”

The song fades. There’s a single flutter as the universe decides what comes next. The bell rings. It’s decided. Time starts up again. The radio slips into a purse. We all move toward the door, toward the future. Only Tammy is left behind.