1st Grade

[parasitegirl]

Oh, Facebook, just when I was treating you like you were only good for me to post hotty-mc-hotty pictures of myself for all the world (ok, High School Alum) to see…you go and get me back in touch with my elementary school days.

 

One of the girls I went to Henry David Thoreau elementary school (and onward into middle and high school) has been posting pictures of us from back in the day. One is a picture of what seems to be a 1^st grade “come dress as your favorite book character” which we first took to be “frontier day” because of the number of girls in bonnets…but frontier day (indeed, frontier month, roleplay, and diary writing with Mrs. McClure) was in 5^th grade and Steven Colby, my first crush, is clearly dressed as a cat. Discussion has determined that the bonnets were a result of too many girls loving Charlotte’s Web.

 

I am not in the book/costume photo because I was in the other 1^st grade homeroom, although I have vague memories of being Polychrome from an Oz book…go figure.

 

Her photo of our brownie graduation ceremony shot is memorable for capturing our “Our mommies aren’t the sewing or uniform loving kind of mommies so we have t-shirts that simply read ‘100% Brownie’ as our uniforms” general mood. There is also one girl who is wearing a bona-fide Brownie uniform in the shot. I remember her as being the overachiever who kicked our ass every year in cookie sales, and the only brownie who went out of her way to actually earn a badge, the rest of us were in it for the social life Brownies provided. That photo also captures that perm that I LIED to my step-mother about having permission for. How I thought that was going to work, I don’t know. I think I figured that when Dean Mommy saw my lovely new hair she’d admit that she was wrong…which…didn’t so much happen. A long talk about trust is what happened. You who were grounded may not appreciate the impact of Long Talks About Trust.

 

This classmate also posted some great pictures of birthday parties involving cabbage patch dolls. The other girls have remarked on how they packed more items for their dolls than for themselves. I was not in this picture, but the Cabbage Patch era was pretty close to the time when my sleep over party involved drafting a petition against our art teacher.

 

Prior to these pictures being posted I had been bonding with my closest elementary school buddy, Kate. We had 3 Kathryn’s in our grade (well, they had different spellings) and it was that Kate L, Katie T, and Kate R overload and the desire to not eternally be “Kate with…the…bad handwriting” in a classroom situations that caused me to use my Y and re-draft myself Kayt in Middle school.

 

Kate and I were the K&K Detective Agency…and newspaper...in our time together. We didn’t solve any crimes, but I think we convinced ourselves that a nearby house was TOTALLY haunted.

 

Kate and I had been joking back and forth a little about our two years competing, poorly, in the Madison Dairy Carton Regatta…an event where teams and pairs attempt to race boats made of milk cartons in the nasty duck-poopity water of Vilas Lagoon. Like being a Brownie, it was something that we were into, but not actually into investing time and effort into achieving anything. We were idea girls, very hip to our team name “The Dairy Devils” but not so good at collecting cartons and designing and building a boat. Our races were more about pushing a semi-floating object through duck-poopity waters than actually riding on anything. In retrospect, the fact that both of us were only children and that I do not drink milk did put us at a disadvantage as to how many milk cartoons we could have horded.

 

The pictures of the 1^st grade costume day has also brought us together. The photo is of Mrs. Morgenson’s class. We were part of Mrs. Conwell’s class. When I remarked that the students who had Mrs. Morgenson as a teacher were the recipients of my envy, because Mrs. Conwell was a horrid face-pinching front-tooth-always-stained-by-lipstick witch of a teacher..and I had not yet reached the point of drafting petitions against teachers when I was a 1^st grader. One of the Morgenson’s girls recalled that Mrs. Conwell was “sort of nasty” which didn’t cover it.

 

Well, I opined that I might have had a slightly worse Conwell experience than other students, but not by much. My babysitter, Cindy, had had bad Conwell times and had passed them on verbally to me: they involved pinching. Mrs. Conwell also one of those teachers who probably viewed me as damaged goods right from the start, because I was Dean Mommy’s daughter. She wasn’t Dean Mommy then, she was Elected Principal of the Alternative High School Mommy then…Shabazz High School…which is why I could identify Malcom X at a young age...he was on all the shirts! And she was a divorced woman! Conservative teachers tended to view Shabazz as a drug-fueled den of iniquity, sexual perverts, and scary mohawked misfits….and I was the child of the principal Over There. Me. That freakish child, calling her mother by her first name. I was always very proud of my mother, and it wasn’t until 4^th or 5^th grade that I started to pick up on the bad, undeserved, reputation of Shabazz.

 

The kinds of teacher who had mixed feelings about my mother were the sort that would have disliked me anyway, but it probably compounded the issues they had with me. Those who liked me, tended to also like my mother.

 

Dean Mommy, over the years, had picked a few fights that the Thoreau conservatives didn’t want picked on: “The library has to few books, why must you object to the racist ones about red little Indian boys? “ And “What’s wrong with making kids fill in mimeographed family trees that don’t allow for divorces?”

 

Mrs. Conwell called in Dean Mommy for a variety of offenses…including the time I scored 3% on a standard math test due to not reading the directions (Mrs. Conwell was probably ready to put me in special classes away from her ) and my questionable color combinations when making crafts (for real!)

 

Kate backed me up on Facebook, also remembering Mrs Conwell as a royal witch.  She also pictures the Wicked Witch of the West when she remembers her (as do I, which may have been from her black-dyed one-color hair…or her WICKEDNESS) Her memories of 1^st grade involve Mrs. Conwell yelling at her, my leg cast, and the 1 & a 1/2 arms issue.

 

Mrs. Conwell, I suspect, was not comfortable around the products of divorce. I wonder if she was comfortable around physical disabilities. In retrospect I think she probably tried to be the progressive teacher she must have felt some Madison pressure to be, but that it didn’t sit well with her.

 

Mrs. Conwell had a very special talk with our class about how a boy who would be joining our class only had 1 and a  1/2 arms and that we’d have to be nice about it. I vaguely remember this boy. I can’t remember his name or his face, as he was only around for a year or so, but I really remember being fascinated by the tiny fingers on the end of his half arm, they were so smooth to the touch. Kate wasn’t really in need of such sensitivity lectures, she piped in that her mom also had 1 and a 1/2 arms! Which was and is 100% true.

 

Mrs Conwell didn’t believe her. Kate had to have a meeting with Conwell, and Morgenson, about if Kate was lying or not…and what to do about it…either way.

 

And, little by little, the past returns to us.