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Monday 22 October 2018

Chapter XII,1967,continued.

School.It was nearly becoming an obsession with me.While it was still spring,and the kids kept passing in front of our place on the way to school, I was being driven nearly crazy because I couldn't go.Not yet. school was a right of passage,and what I knew about rights of passage was that they marked you off as being very grown up, much more so than the other kids who,had to wait another year.

My parents talked about school all the time.They asked me if I was ready."Yes",I would reply,pretending it was no big deal."I'm ready". My education at home continued on a little chalk board.I learned,along with my sister,how to spell new words whenever my father was home from work:cat,rat,hat,bat,car,hen,dog pig,and a bunch of others as well.I also learned other small words like it,and,if ,or.Learning those words didn't seem to make sense to me,because I had no idea what they were.Of course,while I could speak,I had no real idea how the language actually worked,and I tended to think of every word as being a noun.So,while I Knew what a dog was,what in the world was an "and"? There was still a lot to learn.I recall the first two syllable word I learned too.My father said that it was a big,hard word,but that he knew I could manage it,so we started at the chalkboard.B-A-R,start with that.So I did.I wrote down every letter,then my father helped me sound them out.Not so difficult.But this word had another part.B-E-R.So I wrote it and sounded it out,then learned that I was to put the two words together.B-A-R-B-E-R. My father had another motive in presenting this word.We were off to the barber shop just down the street.So gradually I came to see words as conveying actual ideas.

I also learned a much more difficult lesson.At least it seemed hard at the time.Not every six year old,and certainly not any five year old could do it . But it was a task required before I could go to school.Since I don't ever recall there being velcro back then,I had to learn to tie my shoes. It seemed very difficult,crossing the laces and tucking one under the other then, pulling and making a bow. I worked at it everyday over and over,and at first I just couldn't get it right.I never really got frustrated at it,but I wondered what would happen if I didn't know how to do it by the time school started.Would I not be allowed to go to school? It seemed like school was such a short time away,so this worried me somewhat.But gradually I was able to do it.My parents liked to brag a bit,so every time we had a visitor,or anytime we went to visit someone I had to show them how clever I was by tying my shoe for them. This would always get me a lot of praise.People would say how very grown-up I was.My grandmother ,in particular would always make a big deal out of it.The first time I showed her I could do it,she gave me a dollar bill.She was not an educated woman,but she seemed like the biggest fan of our education.She also kept a big box of letters that she cut out with scissors, so that when we came to her house,we could all sit and play at making words. She made the biggest deal out of my being almost ready for school. In no way could you ever not realize that she was very proud of her grandchildren.

All that spring,we spent a lot of time home with my father.Sometimes he would sleep after working the midnight shift,then driving the eighty miles home.Usually he would go to bed around nine O'Clock.In those days,there used to be a show on the radio,that he liked to catch before he went to bed.The show played in the morning for fifteen minutes,either right before the news,or right after,I don't really recall which.The show was a Gospel radio show, and back then some of the radio stations still carried them.So my father would sit quietly in his big green armchair and listen.The shows were usually of men harmonizing,and were really strikingly beautiful to hear.Usually these shows had a sponsor who would advertise some product between songs. It was all wonderful to listen to.But I wondered why my father liked these shows so much,since they were all about Jesus and God.Because he would still sometimes talk to us about our souls or spirits, and kept talking to us about Heaven or Hell,which we were still not allowed to mention by name, but he would rarely ,if ever accompany us to church.

After my father went to sleep,we were allowed to watch television.mostly it was the CBC,which ran children's programs for most of the morning.The Friendly Giant, whom I still believed was truly a giant, and wasn't sure could really be friendly, since the only other giant I'd ever heard of was the one from Jack And The Beanstalk, and he wasn't at all friendly.After the Friendly Giant, Mr.Dressup came on,and we would watch that too,along with several other shows.Television was our babysitter for a lot of days,but it was a much safer world back then, so my father could catch the sleep he needed.About the only thing that I can ever recall happening while my father was sleeping was that one day I got a nosebleed.This didn't disturb me much, because when I was a preschooler,these things happened.I'd had several, maybe even a lot of nosebleeds,and it was never regarded as serious.One of my parents would just hand me some wet Kleenex to hold over my nose and eventually the bleeding would stop.No big deal.But on this one occasion,while my father was asleep and we were watching The Friendly Giant,or some such thing,I sprung a big leak that seemed to take a long time to stop.And the Kleenex was up out of reach,on top of the refrigerator where I couldn't reach it.So I started using the pages of a coloring book to stem the flow, but of course it wasn't wet,so the bleeding wouldn't stop.Finally,I asked my little sister to go wake up our father.I still wasn't worried much about the bleeding,but it was getting to be quite a mess. So I asked my sister to go to the bedroom and wake my father.I didn't really want to do it myself.Sometimes my father was grouchy right after waking up.Often,he wasn't really easy to wake either, and my sister either couldn't wake him,or was afraid to try. But on the way back,she stopped and grabbed some toilet paper,which immediately struck me as a great idea, because It had never really occurred to me that you could use anything but Kleenex for a nose bleed.But I soaked it in cold water,and managed to stop the bleeding.But there was still a big mess when my father woke and my mother came home for lunch.So my father asked me why we didn't wake him.

Sometimes,if the weather was good,we were allowed to play outside too.Or at least I was.It's hard to believe that I went out and around with such little supervision, but those were different days.What I didn't really realize was that my parents knew most everyone in the neighborhood, so I was getting a lot of supervision I wasn't seeing.Most of the time I went two blocks down the street to my friend Kenny"s place, and my parents had no problem with that at all.I would spend the whole morning or afternoon there and come home in time for meals.We were always well supervised, and Kenny's mother would always let me know just when to come home.

One morning,though,I didn't go to Kenny's.Instead,I set out on an adventure of my own.It never really occurred to me that I might get into trouble if I was caught, but I never really got caught. The issue of getting into trouble had to do with crossing the street.I was allowed to cross Willett Street,on my way to Kenny's, and sometimes I could cross over to Karen"s directly across the street, if my parents were watching.Really,my family and Karen"s were more like one big family most of the time,with people coming and going to and from both houses. So the way I got around the problem of crossing the street was to cross right in front of our house.I was off to the school.I wanted to see what actually happened there.Often we would walk past the school,and even look into it's windows, but this was different.This was when there were actually kids at the school.I wanted to see what they did.So I thought I might follow that kid who had burned up the ant that I'd met long before.Only I couldn't find him. I was still driving a tricycle then, but the school wasn't much farther away than Kenny"s house, so off I went. I pedaled up the street, but when I got there,there were no kids anywhere about.Getting right to the schoolyard required me to cross another street,and this one was a street I wasn't familiar with, so I stayed across from the school, where I couldn't see a thing.After awhile,I just turned around and went home disappointed. On the way I stopped for a better look at the fire call box on the pole.When I got home,I wasn't in trouble. Nobody even knew that I'd been gone.










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