I had tested into Zenith, our district’s gifted program, during kindergarten standardized testing (which is insane if you think about it—standardized testing for five-year-olds? Deciding who’s “gifted” in kindergarten?), so on the first day of first grade, I got on not one but two buses for an hour-long ride (both ways), one of which involved sitting near terrifying middle schoolers, to get to the school where the gifted program was. Already painfully shy, I was supremely proud of myself for going up to the principal once I arrived and asking her where my classroom was. One of my first serious personal accomplishments.
My teacher was Mrs. Ciferno, and I loved her. Unfortunately for me, Mrs. Ciferno was pregnant and would soon be going on maternity leave. The day she announced she would be leaving was heartbreaking. I mourned on my long bus ride home and planned, when my mom asked me how my day had been, to declare, “Bad.” But to my chagrin, she didn’t ask me when I got home, and when I couldn’t take it anymore, I burst out, “I had a bad day!” and sobbed for what felt like hours.
Miss I forget her name, our long-term sub, was no replacement. She was dour and insensitive to the needs of first graders. In later years I had no problem imagining why she had been a Miss instead of a Mrs. Right before Christmas, Miss Whatever handed out books as presents, a chapter book about an anthropomorphic pig named Oliver for the boys, and an activity book filled with snowflakes to cut out for the girls. But she had the gall to give me the pig book, because, she said, she knew how much I liked to read. To heck with reading! What did I want with a talking pig? I wanted snowflakes! I spent the indoor recesses begging pages of snowflakes from the girls so I could join in the cutting and pasting.
I also spent my indoor recesses cleaning my desk. I loved cleaning my desk. Our desks had tops that lifted up and generous storage areas. I adorned the underside of my desk top with my art projects, held up by the sticky tack that I also stole from the teacher’s walls and played with on my bus rides home. Ronald, a red-haired freckle-type kid, did not love cleaning his desk. His desk was so jammed with papers and books that it wouldn’t close—he had to sit there trying to write on the upward slant. Miss So and So once said to him, “Ronald, why can’t you keep your desk clean? Look how nice Kaitlin’s is!” I felt, even at the time, that that was uncalled for. She also once asked him what was taking him so long to complete a project we were working on, pointing at me and indicating that even though I had started after him, I was already finished. What part of that did she think was pedagogically helpful?
We had an extensive playground, including the kinds of monkey bars that are now largely banned. I regularly swung and flipped on the monkey bar dome, and once I landed on my stomach and completely knocked the air out of myself. I had never felt that before and was terrified. It was such a horribly helpless feeling, like when I would awaken in the middle of the night and be unable to lift my head or move my body, a phenomenon I found out years later is common in children and was the absolute worst physical sensation I have probably ever had. Having the wind knocked out of me was a close second. That didn’t happen to me again until fourth grade, when it wasn’t nearly as scary but just as painful.
My classmate E.J. and I decided it would be fun to start kissing each other on the playground. Our P.E. teacher thought we were hilarious, pecking each other on the cheek and whatnot, but our parents were rather upset about it. I didn’t kiss another boy until I was 19. Not because I was traumatized, but really because the opportunity didn’t present itself again until then. Carpe diem.
I held my pencil with two fingers over the barrel until midway through first grade. It would be my only N (needs improvement) on my report cards until sixth grade, when I came back to school after having pneumonia, which gave me a new devil-may-care outlook on life and prompted me to giggle and talk to the boy across from me in science class. My science teacher, who quite liked me, was severely disappointed in me and gave me an N for classroom conduct. He retired at the end of that year, and I always felt like I was in part responsible for that, being such a large disappointment and all.
I was left handed, and it was hard for me to imitate the teacher’s pencil holding. I figured it out eventually, though, and became quite proud of my penmanship. We had sticker strips showing how to write the letters of the alphabet at the top of our desks, and one day when we had a sub for Miss Long-term Sub, the rebellious boy next to me took a paper clip and ripped rows through my sticker strip. I was very upset about this and made sure to tell on him when Miss Etc. came back so that it was clear I would never deface my desk that way and so that I could get a pristine new strip.
When we still had Mrs. Ciferno, she gave us a brief writing assignment (which, in first grade, is a single sentence) in which we were to identify our favorite music. I knew mine immediately: Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. I had figured out how to use my parents’ giant stereo system at home, which could play like six CDs at a time, and I spent hours exploring their music collection. The Seger CD contained such hits as “Old Time Rock ’n’ Roll,” “Hollywood Nights,” and “Night Moves.” I rocked out to it after school all the time. (Incidentally, while retrieving that Wikipedia link, I discovered Seger now lives near the Detroit suburb I used to commute into. Meant to be.) Of course, being six, I couldn’t spell “Seger,” “Silver,” “Bullet,” and probably “Bob” or “Band,” for that matter. So my teacher was mystified by my assignment. I gladly read it to her, and I’m sure she probably still didn’t know what I was talking about.
When we learned about Martin Luther King, Jr., there were no black kids in our class. So our teacher gingerly explained to us what it meant to discriminate based on the color of a person’s skin and outlined the history of such in the United States, but not all of the kids quite got the social context. Some of them looked around when she mentioned dark skin and started pointing at a girl whose parents were from southern Italy. “You mean like Andrea? Dark skin like Andrea’s?” Our teacher was flustered. I felt really bad for Andrea, who was my good friend. I could tell the difference between Italians and black people.
I had at least three friends over for my birthday that year, and we took a bunch of adorable Polaroids that I’ll have to digitize someday. You can tell which one is me by the ring of what looks like Kool-Aid around my mouth. I had started licking my lips in an effort to compensate for the dry winter air, even pressing my mouth (this is pretty gross in retrospect) against the condensation on the bus windows to try to moisten them and relieve the dryness. This launched a lifelong obsession with chapstick. Luckily, Lip Smackers were gaining prominence, and I quickly amassed a sizable, flavorful collection. Mmm, Dr. Pepper chapstick.
By the end of the year, I was very good friends with a little girl named Grace. Her mom would often take us to Dairy Queen after school, which was an unmitigated delight for me. I loved going to her huge house and playing with her interesting, endless toys and crafts, things I had never seen before such as Lincoln Logs and American Girl dolls. Grace’s birthday was in June, around the time school ended. On the way home from her party, my mom gently told me that Grace’s mom had cancer, and then tried to explain to me what that meant. It wasn’t hard to grasp the severity of the situation, and it was the beginning of three years of hope and finally sadness where I would watch news segments on new cancer treatments and think they were on the cusp of curing Grace’s mom and later try in my limited little way to be a good friend when it was clear they weren’t ever going to. It was my first glimpse of the kind of senseless pain and suffering that you become so accustomed to as an adult.
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