Primary Education

It was the first hour of the first day in the first grade, the day I had been waiting for with all my impatient little heart. At last I was entering the world where you were expected to learn things every day, the sophisticated world of my big brother, a seasoned 4^th-grader. This wasn’t merely kindergarten (which I’d heard about but never been to), this was truly being in school.

Everything was new and vivid, the room was filled with promise and excitement. I sat motionless as though invisible at ‘my’ desk, my first ever, happy to be a part of the regimentation, to be just a stranger in a row of bolted-down desks...a strict regimentation because school was that important, it seemed to me. There was something extravagant about all this, the way everything was devoted to the purpose of learning about something. Within minutes I wanted to know what we were going to learn about first, thinking that it would have to do with letters or numbers or something like that.

Then the ranks broke and little Billy C., the only kid in the room I knew even vaguely, the only other little Jewish kid, began crying at his desk, bawling actually. The next thing I remember, as though remembering a dream, little Billy C. is standing at the front of the room, hopelessly whimpering, the lady teacher is bending down to comfort him. Billy C. had peed in his pants with much abandon. Now he stood sobbing with the backs of his hands held to his eyes in a way I had never seen before, the front of his pants a sizable flower of wet. Then there appeared a small group of mothers hovering and consoling him, mothers who had been allowed in the room for this first hour of the first day and had waited unobtrusively in the back of the room. Billy C.’s mother was not among them. One of the ladies, her face filled with concern even as she smiled, took one of Billy’s hands away from his eyes and led him outside, probably to take him home.

I could afford to be brave, as well as inspired. We lived directly across the street from the school, so there was a sense of familiarity at the edges of all this newness for me: no peeing in my pants. My father would meet me after school (this was during the Depression, there was no work to be had). We would walk a half a block to a little store that had a huge glass case filled with shelves of penny candy, and every day I would choose one piece of candy and my father would put a penny on the counter. Then he would take my hand and we’d cross the street and in a couple of minutes we’d be home.

It was a long time before they tried to teach us anything about letters or numbers. I’m not sure why this memory has stayed with me, but I know that little Billy C. and his awful first day had a lot to do with it. On the other hand, and aside from that, this day was certainly a First, that from which all the rest would spring. Like kissing a girl for the first time, or one’s first experience with death, which for me was Popeye, our black and white bird-dog. When Popeye was killed by a car about a year before that first day of school, I saw that it was strictly out of love that my brother was crying, something I’d never seen before, and I realized probably it was a first, something new for him too.