School Daze

Ahh, school. I spent a loooooong time in school - more of my life in than out, although eventually that balance will tip. The schedule of school no longer binds me, but still, September rolls around, the sun grows more golden, sets a little earlier, the wind gets a special tangy snap, and I find myself longing for a new notebook, a bright crop of coloured pens, natty school shoes, and, as Nora Ephron put it, a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils. I was very excited for my first day of school. My mother walked me to the front door of the dull red-brick building. My bangs had been fastidiously brushed, and my long hair braided and tied with two puffy, bulbous scrunchies, one at each end of my plait. September breathed its chilly air down the neck of my jacket, but there were leaves on the ground for stomping and swishing, so I didn't mind. Mrs. Albers-Jones, my first-grade teacher, was a kind and soothing sort of person, with a soft, low voice and long printed cotton skirts that swirled around her legs and brushed the tops of her sandals. The classroom was bright and busy: the cloakroom and the tickle-trunk were jammed together in one corner; our little Formica desks stood stolidly in the middle of the room; a flattened, defeated carpet of indeterminate colour was offered to us for sitting on while Mrs. Albers-Jones spoke to us. One little girl near me was weeping noisily, drawing constricted breaths between sobs. I was confused at her tears, but no one else seemed to be taking much notice of her, so I turned my attention back to Mrs. Albers-Jones.

I remember pieces of that morning in fuzzy flashes. We got our own file folders with our names on them, where we were to put our homework and assignments. We tacked up our names over the hooks in the cloakroom so we knew where our jackets and boots would go when winter came. Mrs. Albers-Jones read to us from a book, but it was too long to finish. She walked us around the classroom, showing us where our math booklets were, and where we could sharpen our enormous red pencils that had no erasers, and where the eraser tin was if we needed to erase anything, which of course, we often did.

The morning seemed to pass in a blur, and suddenly shrill bells were screaming out the call to  recess. I had been to a sort of school before, having gone to daycare, and knew about name-tags and packed lunches, desiccated glue sticks and sharing, dog-eared books and cubby-holes. Recess, however, was new to me. I filed out in frightened obedience with my classmates, and was suddenly faced with a never-ending playground, swirling with other children who seemed to know exactly what recess was for, thank you very much. To my left, there was a creaking wooden play-structure, crawling with screaming creatures. Two hills, one big and one small, swelled out of the ground before me: I could not determine their purpose. To my right was a field, or as I was to later learn, three fields, where painted steel goal posts stood sentinel over soccer games. Around the corner from the little stone steps upon which I was still hesitantly perched was a black-top, painted with yellow lines to mark out the four-square court, the hopscotch, and the tether-ball circle. I ventured first to the black-top in search of a friend who was in an upper grade, but she was busy with her own friends of her own age, and I was left standing alone, watching a game of four-square which I had not yet learned to play. I wandered back to the big hill, which was closest to the door from which I'd come. I didn't know how long recess was meant to be, so I thought it would be best not to wander too far. I sat and played with the grass, building a little house for some pioneer ants who were without shelter, like my then-heroine Laura Ingalls, and went on to build a little fire pit with some sticks and a swimming pool from a dead leaf, which was empty at the time, but, I reasoned,  could be filled with rain water. I was sitting next to a rut in the big hill, a kind of impromptu path which had been worn down from so many children walking up it, and just as I was putting the finishing touches on my splendid ant villa, a boy with lights in his runners that flashed each time he took a step went pelting past, bellowing ferociously, and trod on my wonderful architecture.

I looked up at his retreating back, my mouth hanging open and my brows meeting beneath my fringe, but before I could utter a sound at this monstrous brute, an ear-splitting ringing sounded from the school bell. I dusted the dead grass from my pants, and scurried down the hill. Another shriek, this time the voice of a child, joined the bell's horrible noise. I wondered who was screaming. Surely it did very little good to scream at the end of recess? It wouldn't make it go on longer, and the bell was already making enough racket on its own, without needing the help of some unfortunate creature on the playground. I glanced around to see who was shouting.

It was me.

Jennifer