Gee, a nice blank page on a brand new blog. My very first blog. I am very excited. Expectant even. Enough to start with fragmented sentences …I remember this same exact feeling early on in the second grade … a fresh new day, a bright yellow #2 pencil, and a brand new twenty-five page double ruled notebook. One without all of the stupid extra lines in the first grade notebook! All of the fresh white pages were perfectly smooth on my cheek, with the smell of fresh blue ink pressed on the pages in perfect lines. Well, almost perfect lines. Some of them bulged up and down a little, which suddenly drove me bonkers! How can you write on lines that bulged in such a non-symmetrical fashion? Just random blotches of blue ink - up, down, up, down ...that meant failure to “stay in the lines,” failure to “write like a big boy”, failure to get a big gold star on the "GOOD BOY POSTER", which meant no flaming extra recess time and no cupcake and milk! I would STARVE! I mean, for gosh sakes, my teacher Sister Mary Bootcamp, who had a thin erie little mustache like Uncle Wilson's, is saying that neatness counts at least half of of the grade. MADRE DIOS! I am going the fail the second grade. I will never be a Doctor, a Lawyer, or even a good Republican … all because some rummy at a third rate printing company cannot keep the flaming blue lines straight! How unfair is this? I just got rid of that firkin four inches round pencil they forced in my hand in the first grade. It was like doing needlepoint with a telephone pole! Wake up educators, the #2 pencil rocks! (Can anyone else hear you scream in your brain when you are six years old?) Suddenly the room got hotter, the floor swam, and I smelled death on the wing. I leaned over the side of my desk, the one with the cavernous area under the top that rose like a slab of granite and creaked like the hood of a rusty ’53 Dodge truck, and I puked all over Vicky Blanton. She sat next to me for all twelve years of the public humiliation we call schools. She still hates me... I am positive of it. The lift top desk… oh, what a fond memory. Sometimes it would try to kill me by falling and pinning my neck to the sharp desk edges, while I twisted and squirmed to breathe … and the whole time Sister Mary Bootcamp would yell at the top of her considerable lungs, “Mien Gott in Himmel! Close der desk while I’m speakink!” in that solid, “down home in Stuttgart” German accent. She acted like I was deaf and could not read her lips if I was out of the line of sight. I miss her still.
That day I got to go to the sick room – I did not have to write in my journal. I got a pass, a “no grade”, a “do it later”, sympathy, and Pepto-Bismol. Life was good. Thank you, Mommy. For making me tuna fish, onion, and banana samiches, in a brown paper bag on a hot September day. Therefore - I guess I will head to the kitchen to see if we have Chicken of the Sea and bananas. But first I'll go ahead and post this. Someone may be able to relate … but I am going to name this Blog Tuna and Banana Samiches. :-)
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