Elementary

I suppose everyone is waiting with baited breath to learn more about my early years.  Please refer to previous blog for definitions of sophomania, egomania and typomania;  you can search for examples of all those things in what I am about to write if the subject matter gets tedious.  Although I can’t imagine that happening.  Well, on second thought, yes I can.  So I’ll try to be brief and hit the highlights only.I attended a one room school house from grade one to grade eight.  No, I’m not ninety…we lived on a farm in southwestern Ontario – there were little towns all around us in every direction, but I was off to high school before someone got the bright notion to build bigger central schools and bus country kids to them.  I don’t remember there ever being any more than 30 kids total attending that school, and the most kids ever in my grade at any given time was four.  Mostly it was just me and my best friend going from grade to grade – and moving in a westerly direction on the seating plan until we finally ended up in the big desks.  There are some good things to be said about one room schools.  You were able to listen in on every lesson for every level – but you also learned great powers of concentration to tune that out and focus on your own work. You got to read a lot.   You learned to amuse yourself when your work was finished, because you never seemed to be the teacher’s top priority more than once or twice a day. You got to read some more,  and make valiant attempts to find the right answers on your own.  You were able to help the little kids, and you had to create recess games that included a wide age group.  And did I mention you got to read A LOT?  We had a travelling library, which wasn’t called a book-mobile then, but same thing – and I read every single book in the rotation I think.  And some twice if they showed up at our school again. 

There are also bad things to be said about a one room school.  You interacted with the same small group of people every day.  It was a finite little world.  There were no extracuricular activities to speak of, because there just weren’t enough people to make them feasible.  You had to help haul wood from the woodshed and keep the wood stove fired up in the winter.  We had a caretaker who would come by and get the fire going in the morning, but it was up to us to keep it going.  Sometimes it was smokey and often it was freezing cold depending on the direction of the wind. Most of us walked to school, and mitts and hats and boots and outer pants had to be hung close to the stove so they’d dry out before you had to walk home.  If you have never smelled kids snow suits drying by a fire,  count yourself lucky.  Oh, and for all you spoiled little bus riders out there, it was a two mile walk, uphill both ways.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  Okay, I admit we rode bikes most of the time.   We had ‘hot lunches’ during the winter, which consisted of the teacher heating up soup or canned peas or creamed corn on a hot plate and serving it to us in cups.  (To supplement the lunches we brought with us, of course.) Scorched creamed corn always reminds me of my childhood.   We never once had a teacher that stayed longer than one school year – there was always somebody different every fall.  I’ve often wondered how they ever found people to take the job, even on the short term. 

I thought the Dick and Jane type books were incredibly stupid.  I wanted to read comic books.  Lessons that said things like ‘colour the apple red’  or ‘draw six circles’ made me positively itch to grab that purple crayon, or make the circles into smiling faces with ears and teeth and other interesting details.  I had to learn to make perfectly shaped letters and numbers and stay on the lines – all tedious.  To this day I don’t take directions very well.  And singing songs where you couldn’t make up your own words?   - my creativity was stifled at every turn.  And that was just grade one.  I learned, like every child eventually does, to conform and behave and fit in.  Not that I didn’t disagree with a lot of things – like religious instruction which taught us absolutely nothing about any religion other than protestant.  And having to make the thank-you speach to another small school who invited our school to play baseball against them.  Really, I wasn’t thankful for it.  They beat the pants off us, and after that humiliation I had to stand up in front of them and lie about having had a wonderful time.  Interesting that the teacher chose such a seasoned tale-teller for the task.

Except for odd vivid memories of one sort or another those times are now pretty much a blur.  I managed to survive those eight years without any irreparable damage that I’m aware of.  So much for being brief about it.  But there IS one more story of some interest.  Out of the blue one day in grade four or five I decided it was high time I had a boyfriend.  I remember looking around and mentally assessing every elligible male.  Too old, too ugly, too stupid, too mean, my brother,  too young……and then there was Harvey.  Stupid name, but he was kinda cute.  Next grade to me, blonde curly hair, had never hit me that I could recall…..what the hell, he’d do.  Seriously, there was not a whole lot of choices, and I made up my mind about him about that fast.  And promptly wrote him a love letter.  Our relationship did not get off to a good start, because Harvey was mortified.  I had no idea someone could blush right up into the roots of his hair.  But I was nothing if not persistent, and eventually he started writing cryptic notes back.  All the while we were passing notes in class, we studiously ignored eachother on the playground.   I played goal for the boys in shinny hockey and froze my feet just to be near him.  We held mittened hands and skated together at all the skating parties.   I went to his hockey games.  (They happened to be my brother’s too.) It made my day for him to turn around in the player’s box and search me out in the crowd  (I use the term loosely – is 20 people a crowd?) so we could gaze longingly into eachother’s eyes.   I guess he finally tired of the inuendo, or maybe he just developed writer’s cramp after all those notes;  at any rate, he  made his big move and suggested that we get it all out into the open and proclaim our love for eachother to the world.  Well of course I had to dump him.  I have to admit,  I loved the secrecy more than I loved Harvey.  That, and the fact that my mother found some of his more romantic scribblings and was going to go and talk to his mother about it,  before I was forced to admit that I had started the whole thing. Somehow that fact didn’t surprise her.  Shortly after our break up, Harvey moved away with a broken heart.  The broken heart is pure conjecture on my part.  Every time I see a Harvey’s franchise to this day I think about him.  Not that he has anything to do with them that I’m aware of.  I think he might be one of those guys who writes jokes about women and the strange things they do that you can never figure out.  Its just a feeling I have.