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Topic: Elementary School (07/19/04)
TITLE: We Were So Small By Al Boyce 07/23/04 |
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I remember walking down the hallways lined with knee-high drinking fountains and thinking, "We were so small." Yet I never felt small sitting at the miniscule desks on the toy chairs.
I muse on and think the thoughts that occupied my younger self in those days in the '60s -- thoughts of 2-cent milk cartons, of kindergarten naps on dimestore throw rugs. Then a not-so-small thought of my first glimpse of poverty, of want, of "differentness."
Horace was the only black kid in our school. We didn't think of him as black, I'm sure, or even as "Negro" or "African-American." He was just different in ways that went beyond skin color.
I can remember Horace sleeping at his desk in 1st Grade on more than one occasion, with a thumb in his slightly opened mouth. I don't know why he was tired, or why the teacher let him sleep when I would surely have received a stern lecture for snoozing through math.
In those days in upstate New York there was no sense of a "race problem." But if we kids were any indication, there was a blindness to those who were "different." No one taunted Horace or teased him -- or spoke to him.
I remember the afternoon school bus ride that curled through various neighborhoods dropping off classmates. At one stop near the top of a long hill, we'd shout "Jimmy and Linda" as those two galloped off the bus and headed for their respective homes.
Then the bus would roll down that long hill, past the cemetery, past the steel mill and stop in front of a bricked row of what I now know as tenements. And Horace would leave a bus as silent as a tomb.
By the time the bus was halfway back up the hill, we'd be chatting, singing and spitballing again.
By 2nd or maybe 3rd grade, Horace stopped coming to school. Maybe he moved away.
But like the knee-high water fountains and the tiny desks, memories of our benign neglect of that boy remind me again of how small we once were. And still have room to grow.