Kindergarten

It seems strange to me, but I remember more events from my kindergarten class when I was barely 5 years old than nearly any other year in my history of schooling.  Perhaps this is because it was setting what was to be the measure by which I regarded every other school event.  Perhaps it was just because my kindergarten year was wild with activity and nuance never again to be repeated in a school setting.  I will let you be the judge of this.

My first memory began before the kindergarten class actually met for the first time.  This was a get together that included our parents and siblings.  I think they wanted to throw us all together and see where the problems were going to be.  What I remember about this pre-class event was that they had us play musical chairs.  Now that may not seem like such a difficult thing to do, but nobody explained the rules to me.  Or perhaps they did explain the rules and I was too busy sticking my tongue into the side of my cheek.  This took up a lot of my time and unfortunately resulted in me looking as if I had some sort of cheek growth.  My mother was probably mortified but considering I coupled this tongue thing with an almost completely glazed expression of apathetic attention, she probably thought it was better they just believed I was retarded.  Best to set their expectations low and let them be pleasantly surprised.

The musical chairs began okay enough because at first there were the same number of chairs as us kids milling about.  Then they began removing chairs and it became a mad scramble.  The parents and siblings were egging us all on and I just did not see the point of it, so I went over to my mom and put my head in her lap.  Competition was not my thing.

Then a few days later the actual class began and I remember this because we were all paired up alphabetically.   I was paired up with a boy who I will remember forever because he took the event of meeting me for the first time to show me the snot he had just blown into his handkerchief.  Thankfully the teacher observed this interaction an decided I would do better sitting with another girl.  Snot boy ended up by himself.

We did many things each day, especially learning to write the alphabet and about half way through our day we were required to take a nap.  We had each brought with us a towel that our parents had embroidered with our names in the corner.  In order to encourage us to actually rest the teacher told us the most quiet child would become the wake-up fairy.  This job entailed taking a yard stick (the wand) and touching each child in the order they were the quietest.  I wanted this job more than anything else in the universe but unfortunately I was typically the last child touched by the yard stick because there was just no way I could remember to lie still for long enough.

One day however, I must have been coming down with something because I fell asleep during nap time.  The teacher woke me up and handed me the coveted wand.  At last I had my chance but the problem was that I was so muzzy with sleep I could not really appreciate the honor and just randomly touched my classmates to wake them.  What a cruel twist of fate.

One day, I guess in order for us to get a grip on the extraordinary world of cooking, the teacher said we would be making butter.  She showed us this glass jar with a lid in which she had placed cream.  She said if we shook the jar the cream would turn into butter.  We passed the jar around and each of us shook it as hard as we could.  The cream turned frothy, but it did not thicken.  This puzzled our teacher and she sent the jar around again.  I shook that jar as hard as I could and so did my classmates, but still nothing was happening.  The teacher took the jar and said she would let it settle for a little bit.  The next day she came in with this perfectly rectangular block of butter and told us that the cook had taken our jar and scooped out the butter we had made to make this butter block.  The rest of the class seemed to buy it, but I was suspicious and kept asking questions.  "How did the cook shape the butter?  Why was it yellow when yesterday the cream was white?  How did it get thicker when it stayed so liquid all the while we were shaking it?"  This line of questioning got me dirty looks from the teacher and she told me I would have to take it up with the cook.

The cook was someone I did not want to meet.  My kindergarten class was the 'early' one which meant we met from 8am to noon.  There was a second class that met from noon to 4pm and they got lunch in the cafeteria.  For some reason I was terrified of the cafeteria and this whole second kindergarten class.  It did not make sense to me and I wanted no part of it.

One day though my mother was not able to pick me up at noon.  The teacher just directed me into the cafeteria and I had to sit with all the scary children.  They were going to have lunch and this sent me into a panic.  Where was my mother?  Didn't they know I never ate lunch at the cafeteria?  Didn't they know the only food I would eat for lunch was a peanut butter sandwich?  Apparently someone failed to tell them this because I was handed a washcloth and told to wipe my hands before we got our lunch of chicken and dumplings.

I remember feeling as if my world had fallen apart.  As I wiped my hands with the washcloth I began to cry and could not stop.  I tried to wipe my eyes with the cloth but the tears kept coming.  A girl sitting across from me notified the teacher of my situation.  Apparently, it was deemed that I was a hazard because my crying might incite others to the same.  The teacher quickly led me back to where the lunch cooks were sitting.  This was a group of black ladies in uniforms who were cooking in the kitchen and cleaning pots and pans.  They were very kind to me but all I could do was cry.  Apparently crying was not taboo to them because once they figured out there was nothing I would eat and nothing that would comfort me they just sat me in a chair and went on about their business.  This was probably the best thing for me because now that nobody was paying attention to me I was able to calm down.  I sat in my chair and watched them cooking and cleaning and let their their soft voices soothe me.  I probably sat with them for over an hour and it was quite lovely.

 Eventually my mother arrived and was directed back to the kitchen to retrieve me.  She got miffed with me when she found out I had not eaten and had been crying.  The lunch ladies told her I had been no trouble at all, but I could tell she was irritated about my failure to cope.  Here she was having to negotiate some unexpected problem but safe in the knowledge that her daughter was being fed and cared for at a competent and trusted facility yet here I was falling apart because of some slight change in the plans.

What could I say - kindergarten might have prepared me for snotty nosed kids, writing the alphabet, taking a pretend nap and supposedly making butter out of cream but no where in its lesson plan was there any practice for me to learn to live without peanut butter sandwiches and adapt to a change in my schedule.

I did however learn to appreciate the lunch ladies.