Читать книгу Drowning Naked in Paradise & Other Essays - David Bakish - Страница 13

7

Amnesia through Age Five and Sitting Still

Strange for someone with an almost photographic memory for many people’s faces and events in a life that so far has carried me within striking distance of age eighty, octogenarian territory, but I have no memory at all of the first five years of my life. Oh sure, I was told about multiple events multiple times by my mother, and I looked at early photographs my father took before he stopped thinking I was cute and adorable, but the first thing I actually remember was the first day of kindergarten at the Ben Franklin Normal School far from our house. Betty Moser wet her pants and, in tears, was taken home by her mother. The rest of the year is a blank.

I do remember a few events of the first grade at the nearby Fifth Street Elementary School primarily because Miss Krauss, the only Jewish teacher, reported home to my mother that I had trouble sitting still. She had me sharpening large batches of pencils, and maybe this was the year when I was sent out to the very rudimentary, gravel-covered playground to pick up candy wrappers and other garbage, wielding a long stick with a nail on the end. I also remember being home in bed with the measles and Miss Krauss—her first name was Sarah—visiting me, maybe giving me a coloring book, but I’m not sure of that. Her visit struck me as an honor, my teacher coming to my house, the only time that ever happened, ever.

Second grade passed like a blur. I could recall only the teacher’s name, a Miss or Mrs. Gorey. I’m not even sure I got the name correct, and I don’t think I ever knew her first name. Most teachers did not give out their first names like that was some kind of dark secret, and her face is also a blur. I have no memory of any class projects, anything I learned or any discipline problems I might have created. Nothing.

My memory started to focus more clearly in the third grade. In the classroom of Mrs. Bundens—I later discovered her first name was Victoria—I remember being assigned a part in a play and missing one rehearsal because that school day, my father was driving my family back from New York City where we visited my mother’s two sisters, Clara and Martha. It was a boring and exhausting four-and-a-half-hour trip long before the interstate highway system had been built with Route 80 significantly shortening the travel time. Sitting on a steel railing at the edge of the school property, I stared into the distant window of my first-floor classroom. My watch told me the school day was almost ending. Eagle-eyed Mrs. Bundens saw me and, opening the window, called out, “David, come in, we’re rehearsing the play. We can use you.” I enjoyed being the focus of positive attention as an actor, much better than forced to sit still in my assigned seat. Most of all, however, I recall being kept after school another day for misbehaving. I stubbornly refused to apologize like the bullheaded Taurus that I was. I wore down the teacher until she let me go home without an apology. She whacked other boys on the butt for various misbehavior, but I was spared that indignity. I wondered how girls in the class could sit still and avoid punishment. Maybe girls were given less freedom to act out while, as the saying goes, “boys will be boys,” meaning rambunctious and hard to control.