Promotion

Previous:  Back to the Grind      Next: Dr. Kooiker

My impression of first grade is generally happy, warmed by some one-on-one time with the sweet and amiable Mrs. Gooding. Towards the end of the school year she brought me aside a number times for tutoring while a trainee taught the rest of the class.

At the end of the school day I would arrive home and greet Mom in the kitchen. She would have the Jeopardy! trivia game show, then in its first year, playing on TV. For a while I got in a habit of watching it. As with the local news program, I was fascinated by the tightly ritualized structure of the show, with its game board taller than a person, and by the mechanical process it was put through by its hidden human operators. The scorekeeping and the daily winners and losers also had some interest, but in other ways it was like the TV weather maps and stock market displays again, a big, amazing machine with hidden operators doing mysterious things. Just as I didn't watch WKZO's weather reports to understand and plan for the weather, I didn't retain the Jeopardy! trivia either.

Mom may have intended to hand me off to Jeopardy! as kind of a replacement teacher, but really she did the better job.

Host Art Fleming on the original Jeopardy! set.

At the end of first grade's "field day" -- the outdoor recreation day topping off the school year -- Mom picked me up in the car by herself, and while we were still parked there she showed me a letter from Mrs. Gooding that said that I could advance to third grade in September, skipping second. Instead of handing it to me as a done deal, she presented the choice, on the spot, as my own; something I could accept or reject as I thought best. I remember her demeanor as quietly pleased, with a bit of feigned nonchalance.

As she did with the newspaper reporter at the time of the TV appearance, Mom was taking pains not to seem overweening. I don't know what other concerns might have been bearing down on the matter. Would it be sad to leave friends behind? I probably hadn't really made any, but we surely didn't talk about that. Would the advanced work load be too hard? Probably not, or else the public school would not have offered it. I don't think the discussion lasted more than a minute. Maybe more like ten seconds.

Although I wouldn't have thought it at the time, in hindsight my graduation from first grade is looking kind of like a simultaneous graduation from Mom. I don't remember a one-on-one exchange quite this cheerfully congenial with her, concerning a significant and potentially contentious topic, ever again. As time went on she receded to being mostly a cook and chauffeur -- and the enforcer of practice time!

I asked Mom much later what it had been like teaching me music and reading, and in her usual laconic manner, she said "oh, it was easy." Draw a letter of the alphabet, say the sound, repeat, go on the next, etc. My question to her was tinged with a bit of covert skepticism, since after getting to know her as an adult I couldn't easily see her having much patience for teaching. I've come to think that the reason we had that intense home-schooling period was largely a matter of luck. It happened to be just the right time for both of us, and that if it hadn't been "easy"for her, then it probably wouldn't have happened. But things were economically stable, Mom wasn't working outside the home yet, and I was a curious, bright and generally tractable and obedient three-year-old. Even the emotional crises that were brewing in the family conveniently held off their demands for attention and energy for awhile. They had reared up before then, and would re-emerge later.

Third grade, I suspect, was stressful for me, and it is not so much because of specific unpleasant memories, but because of the very lack of many memories of significance. I remember no transactions whatever with the teacher, Mrs. Cunningham (I had to retrieve her name from old papers because I didn't remember it). Evidently I said some memorably strange random things in class -- later, in high school, this was remarked on. I have a vague impression of marking time by myself a lot in that classroom, shutting things out. Generally, through primary school and beyond, I had no interest in conversations around me that didn't directly involve me, and that was socially limiting, all through my school years. But I did have two (for a while, three) regular playmates outside of elementary school. To one of these, Johnny, I probably owe much of my sense of humor, and whatever appreciation of irony I've acquired. He loved MAD magazine, which we often read together.

My sisters, meanwhile, were spreading out in a much larger house, growing up and going their different ways. One by one they quit piano. My music became more of an inward-looking endeavor. We stopped going swimming together as a family on summer weekends, and instead it would be me, Johnny and our mothers, with my mother later dropping out. The friendship lasted several years, long enough that Johnny could later introduce me to a few of his parents' Playboy magazines as well as a book or two that seemed to straddle (or intentionally blur) the line between hard porn and clinical descriptions of sex, both mainstream and "deviant."

Our new elementary school happened to be built just two doors over from Mrs. Kent's house, so until she moved away that year, I was dismissed a bit early from third grade and walked right over without even crossing a street.

And as Mrs. Kent was preparing to go, she and my parents were arranging for another piano teacher.

Star Trek, in its original run, was a favorite of my sisters.

Previous:  Back to the Grind       Next: Dr. Kooiker