Days gone by

Mrs. Jackson's kindergarten class had one entire wall of nothing but closets. In the far corner was the coat closet. The teacher would pick some suck-up to be the person to stand on a chair and put the coats on the rack. I don't remember ever having the honor of coat hanging person. In today's world of ORM and ergonomics I am sure they have replaced the pig-tailed class tattle tale on a metal folding chair with some age appropriate coat hanging solution.

I mention this because I was a spacey kid. As the third of four kids at home, I was content to sit undisturbed for hours. I would day dream about dashing into the coat closet to find the hidden door that led to a room with a vent that led straight out the top of the building. The process involved putting on some sort of suit with a cape and flying out of the closet and around the play ground. I kid you not. This is real and vivid still in my memory.

In the first grade we had a substitute teacher for most of the year. A temper filled red headed woman that happened to go to my church. I had a Kool-Aid backpack with a Velcro flap that would never stay closed. I thought that if I jumped on it that it would eventually close tight enough so as not to spill out. Mrs. Jones thought I was insane for jumping on my backpack and suggested to my parents that I needed some help.

In the third grade my teacher believed I was retarded from the start. Why else would a kid wear camo t-shirts and have an official G.I. Joe fan club belt buckle. She tried to have me put in "special classes" so as not to deal with me. My parents would have nothing of this.

The freak, I mean teacher, decided to take matters into her own hands. She brought a refrigerator box from home and cut out the back and top. She put my desk in the box and there I stayed next to the actually retarded kid in the washing machine box in the back of the class. I pretended the box was the inside of a tank and accomplished even less work than ever.

The third grade had an economy of sorts. You could earn stickers and display them on a plastic box. I had one sticker for every 15 that my peers had on their boxes. When I would earn one it would not be a "scratch and sniff" one because those were for the good kids. I don't think I learned anything that whole year and my cursive handwriting and multiplication skills prove it.

In sixth grade I named my backpack Mr Picasso and made him talk to the other kids. I even had a voice for it and everything. I tape-recorded T.V. shows on cassette for later consumption since we were not rich enough to have a VCR. I never learned the board-foot formula and clearly failed 7th and 8th grade English and Math while still advancing to high school without a single repeat.

All of these stupid memories were brought to mind while I went through a box of school records my mother had kept. This all makes me realize that I don't have to worry about my son. He is goofy and a day dreamer. He has funny voices and silly dances. He likes Lego and stuffed monkeys.

I don't have to sweat his phonics or attention span too much. If I can make it through 12 years of bottom of the barrel teachers, never doing homework, and day dreaming the day away then my much smarter son will do just fine.