“Are you excited or nervous?” I asked my daughter.
Of course it was a dumb question. Dads are legendary for dumb questions. Obvious ones. And no matter how many blank stares we get. No matter how many burning laser beams we get, we keep asking them.
It was the first day of school. Second grade. The BIG time! On a whole new hall. In a big kid classroom. The seats are taller. When I sit in them, my back doesn’t creak and my knee caps don’t burst out of my legs.
We were walking up the sidewalk to school. Parents all around smiled and said, “Welcome back! Just in time, huh? One more day of summer and I was selling little Johnnie to the gypsies!” You know, good stuff like that.
“Are you excited or nervous?” I asked my daughter.
The dumb question. I got the blank stare with laser beam eyes. But an answer, too!
“Both,” she said.
“Ah, yes,” I replied. “I always felt that way, too.”
Nostalgia had prompted me to ask. I had been trying to remember what it was like as a kid to experience that first day. That cocktail of emotions when summer broke, and fall whooshed in like a wave, dragging me back to school in a tumbling froth.
What was that day like?
Hot, of course. It was Tampa. In August, kids arrived at my private Catholic school drenched in sweat. They passed out from heat exhaustion just opening the car door.
But this was a different hot. The heat of fear. Dread. Trepidation. I felt it in my head and in my feet. It tingled, and the world moved by in a blur.
What would I find? What would my class look like? Would my uniform pants still fit? Would I stutter when I said my name? Would I forget my name? If I forgot my name, would I say something utterly stupid instead? “Good morning Miss Rose. My name is … uh … TEDDY ROOSEVELT!”
Would I be the first to class? The last to class? Would all of my friends be there? There was always the chance none of them would be. It was a long summer. It was Catholic school. They were a rag-tag lot. Most were probably in prison for stealing candy bars or setting off firecrackers under police cars. What if I don’t have any friends? What if the new kids look funny? What if they SMELL funny? Remember the kid who still had accidents in his pants? What if I had to sit next to him? I can NOT sit next to him!
And this was all racing through my mind. In a single second. Thirty-thousand fear-induced questions. Like a super computer processing an endless stream of queries. None of them answerable until I took … that … first … exciting … terrible … excruciating … step … into … the … classroom.
Whoosh!
Or teachers. Remember the horror stories? I would hear them on the playground the year before. Big kids older than me told them. Terrorizing with lies because it was hot and their underwear was riding up on them. (Florida heat did strange things to children!)
“You’re going to have Miss Schwartz next year,” they would say. “She’ll remove your toenails when you get in trouble. I only have two left!”
Whoosh!
I would squeeze my toes a little tighter as I walked into class.
So many memories. New boxes of Crayons. Star Wars lunchboxes. Freshly sharpened pencils. I went to school with about 60 of them. Remember the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil? Graphite and wood shavings? Like a gerbil cage. It left a mountain of debris by the sharpener. I swept them off the back of the desk at home. My poor mother would have been crushed by an avalanche of pencil shavings if she ever pulled the desk out.
She drove a 1978 Ford Thunderbird. It was as long as a parade float. It had so much polished chrome, it blinded spy satellites when they flew over. I remember I could barely see above the door. I desperately wanted to see everything, but the big, stupid car door was like the Berlin Wall! I couldn’t see anything.
Which added to the excitement and the tension as we arrived in the frothy whoosh, and I desperately tried not to introduce myself as Teddy Roosevelt.