Kindergarten

Moira, or more accurately her little girl Plum, has me thinking about my first day of school. My mother walked me. Not far, two longish blocks, amid a gush of children. One of those ancient grade school buildings, with squeaky brown floors and institutional green painted halls of great immensity. All painted grey, then. A long flight of grand steps just inside the front entrance, tiny back door to the playground of fenced gravel. My granny had attended it for a summer, when it was an open-air day-school when she had been my age, around 1895, before the present building.

In class, on wooden floors, with a circle painted on it for us to sit around, we were asked our names, one by one. I stood up and spelled mine out. It's a long, bastard-French last name, and I remember the look on the teacher's face - astonished, although I can't remember what her face looked like. I felt a mixture of pride, and shame at my quite unintentional showing off. Only today did I realize what I was doing, modeling my parents who when asked for their last name usually simply spelled it. I did what I thought was expected, with all my might. My parents told me to stand when I answered a question, and that I had to write the number 2 with a proper loop, spelling my last name just seemed to me to be part of what was required.

I knew I was prepared otherwise, because I could read my older brothers' first and second grade readers.

The smallest girl in class felt ill while we later sat in the circle, so I had her lay her head in my lap.

I walked by myself the second day, and from then on.


走开。 我每次将报告您。

Started in Catholic school in 3rd grade, due to my own parish church school's gradual closure, and attended another only when it closed completely.