Mute

 

I’ve always been teased. 

My dad always had various names for people other than their given name. That wasn’t unusual. But when the Chatty Cathy doll came out and I asked for one, he said, “We already have one,” meaning me. Everyone else laughed. I was hurt. And I never got the doll.

I had lots of dolls I didn’t ask for. I combed their hair until they were nearly bald, but otherwise took care of them. Some were kind of ugly, as far as I was concerned, but they were what I had, so that’s what I played with.

Tiny Tears was probably my first name doll. I’m not sure whether or not I wanted her, but she was a baby doll, and that’s what my mother thought would be good for me.

My mother didn’t often let me feed my dolls water because they all wet themselves, and she didn't like wet doll clothes all over. The difference with Tiny Tears was that if you fed her water, she cried “real tears,” too.

Of course, water wasn’t the same as milk. Since real babies drank milk, I wanted something that looked like milk. In my quest for something resembling reality, I ground up chalk and mixed it with the water. This was fine for all of the dolls except Tiny Tears. I didn’t realize, as a small child, that the chalk would also go to her eyes. As a result, I had the only Tiny Tears with cataracts.

 

                                                               
Chatty Cathy was a different story. You didn’t feed her. She actually talked. She came with a choice of blonde or dark hair, rather than the dull orange most of my dolls had. This was a chance to actually have a doll with dark hair like me. But my dad said no because I was the Chatty Cathy of the house. And that hurt. (Chatty Cathy Christmas Ornament, pictured above)

My mother used to say I was quiet. Of course, as I got older, people would tell me I talked a lot. Too much. Do you ever shut up? I know often I would start to say something and someone usually interrupted me before I could finish a sentence, and no matter how many times I attempted to tell them what I was trying to say, I was always interrupted, and never got to finish. That’s probably why I prefer being by myself.

I didn’t have friends. Oh, yes, there was a girl everyone called my friend, who lived across the street. She was a year and a half younger, which when I was four, made her 2 ½. Not someone to socially interact with. I played alone most of the time, unless my brothers were available.

That’s the only reason I was interested in dolls. They were my friends. I could line them up on chairs and pretend they were the audience, and I’d be a rock star. Or they were the patients when I played hospital. Or I’d choose one or two to be my sidekick for some game I was playing. They were never my “children.”

I don’t think I chatted all that much. I wanted to participate in the family chatter at the dinner table, but I was usually told to be quiet because I didn’t know anything. My mother told me once that she used to come in to my play room or out in the back yard to check on me to make sure I wasn’t dead because I was so quiet in my play. I “talked” my dolls in my head because I thought only crazy people talked to dolls or talked out loud pretending to be the doll answering.

I think, looking back on it, that my dad was just teasing – they never got me that doll! – but I didn’t know that then. He hurt my feelings, and no one seemed to care. I don’t think my parents considered much that small children have feelings.

My brothers also called me names. I was “Hey Ugly,” or “Hey Stupid” for no better reason than I was the youngest and fair game. But that’s what brothers do, so I’m told.

I know I had lots of questions as a small child, but I didn’t ask them. If I asked my mother something, she’d reply with, “Because I’m your mother, and I said so.” My brother, Rob would say I didn’t know things because I was stupid. I knew I wouldn’t be enlightened by my mother, and I didn’t want my brother to think I was stupid. So I kept my questions to myself, and tried to figure out answers that made sense to me. They were wrong, and to an adult me, they were hilarious, but my answers weren’t really a help to child me.

My mother always thought I was being a smart-Alec when I would look at the sky and the ground before crossing the street, but I was looking up and down, just like she said.

Often, since I didn’t have friends, I created friends in my head. I would have a whole imaginary scenario set up, and often forgot that others didn’t know about it. I’d make a comment based on my imaginary play, and people – especially my peers once I went to school – looked at me oddly and moved away from me.

School was supposed to be an amazing wonderland where I would not only learn to read, but also have lots of friends. It didn’t go quite that way.

I progressed through school with an attention deficit and mild dyslexia. They didn’t diagnose things like that when I was in school – especially not in parochial school – much less do anything about it. And I was considered fairly smart, so every problem was blamed on my being left-handed. My mother, working with me on reading, got me through learning to read.  Since the letters in the words were so large and the words were widely spaced, it wasn’t that difficult, once I got the hang of reading frontwards.

Problems didn’t show up until third or fourth grade when letters were smaller and more closely spaced. But by then I had figured out compensations that allowed me to cover. Still, I’ve always read slower than my peers because I have difficulty going from one line to the next, and sometimes the words move around.

Because we never printed, but used cursive handwriting, I was never found out because letter reversals weren’t a possibility. If they’d looked at my printing, they would have seen several reversals. But since we didn’t use printing in school, it didn’t matter.

By about 6^th or 7^th grade, I only had two reversals left, z and Q. I figured out a way to test the direction of z. Write Zorro, with the orro on the bottom line of the z. If the z came first, it was done correctly, and I could erase the other letters. If the o came first, I needed to erase everything and make the z the other way. Q, I never found a way to fix. Unless I had a Q to look at, it was a guess, and still is. I would stress over where the bottom line went. Finally, I’d just put it anywhere. Once done, it was always wrong.

I’ve now adopted that as my unique Q, and I don’t care. I’ve also been told my check marks are backwards. Until I was in college, I didn’t know there was a backwards or forwards for a check mark. I don’t care enough about them to fix them. It’s another signature thing I do.

My mother always complained about my handwriting. So did my teachers. I was doing the best I could, but, like art, it didn’t come easily to me, like math or English. I still get mixed reviews. My husband thinks my handwriting is pretty but illegible. Other people seem to be able to read it just fine. Of course, there are fewer and fewer people who can read cursive, so I suppose it’s better that most written things I have to give people are typed.

I was considered fairly intelligent at school, but I had no social skills. The first day, I was put in line with a sea of children, most of whom were crying. I didn’t know whether or not I was supposed to cry, since I didn’t know why they were crying. I knew from my mother that you weren’t allowed to cry without a reason. One of her favorite sayings was, “If you don’t stop that crying, I’ll give you something to cry about.” So I stood there, mute, wondering if I would get into trouble for not crying. I was relieved, once we entered the building, that the others had stopped crying by then, and I didn’t get into trouble.

Our first recess was a revelation to me. We had to line up with partners. There were two girls in my class that I knew. One, who lived in my neighborhood, and apparently liked first grade so much she was doing it for a second time, didn’t like me. Her dislike – and the way she plagued me the entire year – was because of something that happened a few years earlier at home, where she was forbidden by my mother to come anywhere near me.  As a result, she did her best to get me into trouble whenever she could.

The other girl I knew from church. But she was on the other side of the room, since her last name was near the beginning of the alphabet. So, I had to pick someone near me in order to have a partner before everyone was taken.

The girl in front of me at our desks was cute and littler than me, and she had a name I loved (Debbie). Those were reasons enough to ask her to be my partner. She accepted, and I thought that made her my friend. To my mind, we would play together once we were outside, and be partners in line forever. That’s not what happened.

Once we were outside, Debbie disappeared – apparently, she actually had friends. I wandered around, trying to figure out how to play the various games the other girls were playing – girls and boys were not allowed to play together at my school. I went from group to group asking if I could play until I found a group that didn’t say no. That is how recess worked for me for most of first grade.

I didn’t know why I was rejected, and never did figure that out. Maybe they thought I was ugly, like my brother said. At six, I was very aware of things and people either being pretty or ugly, and I was never told I was pretty, ever. I knew what pretty looked like. I had a cousin with blonde hair and blue eyes, and everyone said she was pretty.

I never went near groups of pretty girls. I knew they wouldn’t play with me.

When recess ended, I again stood next to Debbie, as I did every time we lined up for the next few days. Then my world crashed. One morning as I lined up with Debbie, another girl I didn’t know dashed up and said Debbie wasn’t my partner, she was hers. And she stole Debbie. I had been betrayed, and stood in line without a partner, crushed.

Sister wanted all of us to be partnered. I told her I didn’t have one. She made me go to the back of the line. Apparently, being a failure who didn’t have a partner was the most horrible thing a child could do. Once at the back of the line, she grabbed another girl without a partner, and pulled her next to me. After that, I would just wait until everyone else was lined up, and go to the end of the line, hoping someone would be my partner.

Recess was an odd world. There were all of these children who knew each other. I lived in a neighborhood where most of the girls were older than I was, except for the girl across the street. Just before I started school, another girl, Helen, appeared. She was also a year younger, and lived down the street. She was one of those children my mother called a street urchin because she was allowed to wander anywhere she pleased in the neighborhood, instead of having to stay in her own back yard, like I did. So, when I went to school, Helen essentially stole my only friend in the neighborhood because I wasn’t there. And when I got home, she often didn't play with me because she already had Helen.

The large globs of children tended to play together, and to protect themselves from outsiders, they would cross their game. Then if someone like me showed up, asking to join, they would say the game was crossed, so they couldn’t let me play. No one ever came up to me and asked me to play with them. (Crossing the game wasn’t the religious expression it seemed. “Cross, cross, double cross, nobody else can play but us. If they do, I’ll take my shoe and beat them till they’re black and blue. Cross!” Such a Christian sentiment for little girls in a Catholic school.)

The girl who had repeated first grade often walked up to me in the recess yard and told me I thought I was a big shot. I didn’t. How could you be a big shot if you didn’t have friends? She said that because I usually knew the answers when called on in class, and she didn’t. 

But it didn’t matter. Sister used to put all of the girls who were repeating the grade – I discovered there were several of them –  in charge when she left the room. My nemesis would invariably make me stand in the back of the room, and tell Sister I was talking. Usually,  Sister's habit hadn’t completely left the room  before my nemesis told me to go stand in the back of the room.

When she returned to class, Sister would ask why I was in the back of the room (I was never alone. There were usually several.) I would tell her I didn’t know. My nemesis would say I was talking. I would say I hadn’t been talking, and Sister would tell me to sit down. If I had been lying, there were plenty of people who would have said so.

Our first grade Sister apparently didn’t like boys, so she was severe with them at a time when corporal punishment was the norm in Catholic school.

When I was growing up, there were two churches that I knew of in the area: the Catholic church that I attended, and the Methodist church. The children who attended the Methodist church went to public school, so those of us in Catholic school referred to them as “the Publics.” And there were some Catholics who attended the public school, so they were also Publics. Being referred to as a Catholic or a Public was just a way of acknowledging which school someone attended, and there was no stigma attached. Many of the children in my neighborhood were Publics, so I never got to know them at school. But they were mainly older than I was.

By the end of first grade I somehow managed to have some friends, but I never knew from day to day whether or not they liked me. Sometimes they would let me play with them; sometimes not. The girl who had stolen Debbie from me ended up as one of my friends for a few years, but Debbie was more of an acquaintance for some reason.

I went through elementary school drifting socially from one group to another. The summer of 1964 I had a group of three friends who lived three or four blocks away. Two were in my grade at school. The other was a Public. We played together most of the summer, and often went swimming at one girl’s house. Her older sister - a teenager - belonged to the Beatles fan club, so she got the Christmas recordings the Beatles made each year, and had all sorts of Beatles memorabilia that third graders could only dream about.

We had a game that summer called Beatle wives. We each picked a Beatle. I had George, since Paul was already taken. They would pretend to be married to their chosen Beatle. I didn’t want to be married to anyone, so I pretended to be George. Because we’d listened to the girl’s sister’s Beatles Christmas recordings, where they actually talked, I learned how to do a Liverpool accent. Not bad for a 9-year-old. They were impressed that I could talk like the Beatles. (Only years later did I learn about inflection, British vocabulary and idiomatic phrases.) To anyone from Britain, my Liverpool accent was probably on par with Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney, but my friends and I thought it was good.

The nice thing was, they didn’t mind me being George and not being a girl. Whenever I played with Helen and the girl across the street from me , they would get mad at me for being a boy. They’d try to tell me I had to be a girl, and I didn’t want to be. And I always played the youngest, usually a boy named Michael.

After that summer, those friends drifted away. The girl with the pool was in the other 4^th grade, so she hung around with a new set of friends, and I really never saw the Public girl. The third girl (another Debbie) moved away.

My nemesis from first grade was still sometimes my nemesis, and sometimes – like when she needed help with homework – pretended to be a friend. I didn’t particularly like her, so if I were playing in my yard and she came over, I frequently hid until she went away. Often I was in the tree fort, and she couldn’t see me from the ground. My mother, fortunately, never gave me away. She assumed if I wanted to play with the girl, I would’ve made myself known.

It never bothered my mother that the other girls would sometimes decide to fight with me. They’d insist I couldn’t be whatever character I was pretending to be that day, or they’d make me pick whatever game we were going to play and then refuse to play that game, saying I always picked that one. It didn’t matter if I told them I didn’t care what we played. They were intent on having an argument. So I’d go home.

My mother often told me I didn’t need them, they were stuck-up. And eventually, I didn’t. I had enough pretend friends to have all sorts of adventures by myself. I’d ride my bike, pretending it was a motorcycle (balloons or baseball cards clipped near the wheels to make the engine noise), or go into the woods to pick blackberries, or play in the tree fort, pretending it was a space ship or an apartment or whatever I was thinking of that day.

I never quite figured out girls, although I could do the girl act pretty well by the time I got to high school. At least there no one ever said I thought I was a big shot.

Into the Future

Some of us remember a time, perhaps in the 1960s when the 21^st century was looked upon as the ultimate utopia.

We were told we would have refrigerators with computers in the door where we could check off grocery items as they ran out (rather than having to do something as old-fashioned as write a list!), and when we had enough items on the list, send it to the local grocery and our groceries would be delivered to our doors.

We were assured we would have robot maids, like Rosie from The Jetsons.

We would have flying cars.

We would have wrist watches that would allow us to make phone calls, as Dick Tracy could do.

Doctors would wave salt shaker-looking gadgets over us to get a comprehensive diagnosis of our well-being, just like Bones did on Star Trek.

And perhaps we would be able to beam from place to place from a transporter room rather than using planes.

We would have the option of living on Mars or a space station, and perhaps vacation on the moon.

There would be so much gadgetry to make our lives easier, it was almost inconceivable.     

Ah yes. The future.

In reality, there were computers – PCs and laptops, something they never predicted – and cell phones.

Yes, the fridge did catch up to the computer age. There are apps on our cell phones that allow us to order our groceries – and even our fast food – and have them delivered. We can even order almost anything from Amazon and have it delivered within a day.

Thankfully – especially living in New Jersey, where the driving is horrible and turn signals are optional – there are no flying cars. Indeed, people’s drones are bad enough.

We do have wrist watch phones, but they still need to be synced with cell phones.

Medicine hasn’t quite caught up with Star Trek – nor has travel – but there are big machines to do those diagnostics, and I’m sure one day they’ll be the size of salt shakers.

We also haven’t got our robot maids, for which I’m dreadfully disappointed. The closest we’ve come is the Rumba.

Vacations are still earth-bound.

But our advances haven’t been without drawbacks.

Remember Y2K?

And while nearly everyone has a laptop or tablet, and every child seems to have a phone, they haven’t made life easier, and they certainly haven’t made us a more civilized society.

It hasn’t made us freer. People are enslaved by their phones. They can’t tear their eyes from them. Walk down any street, and you’ll find pedestrians with eyes glued to the screen.

Try having a conversation with someone who is physically standing next to you. Even loved ones usually lose in competition with an incoming text.

And while some talk, most don’t want to talk to others. They prefer texting.

People call one another hoping no one will answer. Leave a message at the tone. Better yet, text.

Children don’t go outside to play. Good heavens, it might be too hot or too cold. Heat index and wind chill determine whether or not there is outdoor recess in schools. And the poor dears might not have hats and gloves. When I was in school, it was considered the parent’s responsibility to make sure a child had those things, and the child’s responsibility to wear them.

Besides, children would rather stay inside and “play” on their computers or phones, where their playmates are in cyberspace, not in the same room.

Adults “friend” people online, while actual friendships often languish in preference to the electronic.

And the negative result of all of these “futuristic” advances is that we have lost contact with being human – or at least being civilized.

You can be anyone online. No one need know your true identity. While many people are the same online as off, the anonymity of the internet has given people license to be horrific excuses for human beings.

If someone disagrees with your opinion online, rather than having a conversation to further understanding, or at least explain why you feel as you do, there is more likely to be an attack of insults. Snowflake seems to be the insult of choice. If you’re conservative, the worst you can say of someone is that they’re a liberal snowflake.

It doesn’t matter whether the person is a liberal, conservative, moderate or being from mars. If they disagree with the other person’s opinion, they are the enemy.

We have become such a rude, bullying society since the advent of the internet that tolerance has gone out the window. This bullying rudeness has, with the blessing of a variety of politicians, bled over into actual interactions in the real world.

Yes, this is a sweeping generalization not true of everyone in the world. There are decent, civilized people in the world. But they’re being drowned out by those who are incapable of admitting – or even realizing – there are valid opinions on the other side.

There is a feeling of anger and rudeness about the world that I don’t remember growing up. We had fears of an enemy, but it wasn’t your next door neighbor. It was the leaders of another country: The Nazis, the Communists.

We didn’t walk around with a chip on our shoulders, waiting for the person standing next to us to say the wrong thing so we could start an argument.

And we certainly didn’t live in fear of going places because we might not come home alive.

Don’t believe me?

When was the last time you thought better of beeping your horn at someone who sat at a green light because they might turn around and shoot you?

When was the last time you decided to order online rather than going to the mall because of a recent spate of shootings at malls?

Have you stopped attending religious services because of shootings in churches, synagogues and mosques?

Perhaps that hasn’t come home to roost where you are. Or perhaps you’re one of the ones who concealed carries “just to be safe.”

I have more than once swerved on a highway rather than beeping at someone who’s crossed the dotted lines because I didn’t know if they might be an angry person with a gun.

Maybe my reactions have more to do with the fact that I work in schools.

One day there was a threat by a student in one of those schools. He planned to shoot up people in the school. While they assured us he wasn’t in school that day, and there was significant police presence in the school, I had my car keys with me at all times, and knew the closest door to the outside everywhere I went. If there was a lockdown and the opportunity presented itself, I was going to run, not cower in a fetal position in the back of a classroom.

Maybe it’s the little things like that that keep me angry just below the surface.

I’m impatient with other drivers because I’m trying to get home, get to my safe place, before anyone can hurt me.

It’s a hell of a way to live.

Maybe that’s why I’m so anxious to retire. Maybe that’s why I’d prefer to live in another country – one without guns.

Of Holy Communion, Confession and Second Grade

Children dream big. It is only later that reality crushes those dreams out of existence.

When I was very small I knew what I wanted to be: I wanted to grow up to be Ricky Nelson. So what if I was a girl? Did it matter that I was denied the basic training for music, dance and acting as a child? You can, I was told, grow up to be anything you want to be.

           

Stages never scared me. How wonderful it is to stand on a stage and perform. It wasn’t frightening, like walking up to a child you didn’t know and asking if you could be friends, knowing rejection was the most likely outcome.

When you performed on a stage, people came to see you and paid money for the privilege. They weren’t waiting to boo you or walk away. Instead, they would applaud and smile and ask for your autograph.

           

I lived a good bit of my childhood in my head, turning the names of my brothers’ friends into characters I could become as I played alone in the back yard or swam in the pool.

The pretend world I created was so vivid to me that I usually forgot that any other children were not privy to it, and when I said something related to it, they didn’t know what I was talking about. Instead of asking, they’d look at me oddly and tell me I was weird.

           

I was used to that. My brothers called me worse things than weird, and even my own mother told me I was strange. Repeatedly.

If I didn’t know something, my brother would say I was stupid. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t learned it yet because he was four years older. The fact that I didn’t know everything he did meant I was stupid.

           

School was a different matter entirely. It wasn’t everything I was promised. We learned something new and then spent the next two weeks having it repeated eternally, so, I assumed, even the most brick-headed student would know it.

This of course caused me to miss the fact for years that I can’t memorize things by reading them; I memorize by hearing things. While I think I have somewhat of a photographic memory, often the photos don’t turn out.

Because of the slow and repetitious nature of the classroom, added to the fact that my bad handwriting caused me to have to write my homework over several times before my mother was satisfied with it, my hand spent more time in the air than folded in obedient stasis on my desk. 

When called on in class, I could give the answer. It wasn’t a matter of pride to me; hearing the same thing droned into your ears day after day, how could you not give the answer?

Yet for all of my shrugging off answering in class, I was hounded and what would now be called bullied for doing well in school.

           

“You think you’re a big shot,” was hurled in my direction more often than, “Hi, how are you?”

           

Why would I think I was a big shot? Because I could spell? Because I got 100 on a math test? Because I could tell which verb part to use in a sentence? Because I was almost never called on to read, since the teacher knew I could? Because I was sent to the back of the room for talking? 

My art projects were always failures, and I could never manage to write on the lines. Those were the important things to me, and in those matters I was a failure.

Big shot? School felt to me like hanging from a window sill, afraid that someone would slam the window down on my fingers.

I tripped up the stairs. I couldn’t cut on or color inside the lines. I didn’t know how to jump rope. I was a slow runner, and therefore, always “it” in a game of tag.

I essentially had no friends. Yes, I was allowed to hang around with someone for a week or two, but that was it. That wasn’t being a big shot to me; that was total failure.

At home, there were no girls in my neighborhood who were my age, and I was forbidden to play with boys. Most of the girls on my block and the next were a year or two older than I was. Until the teen years, that’s massive.

The rest were a year or two younger. That’s also massive, but younger was easier to get along with – until they decide they don’t want to play with you. Then you’re a big shot.

Then there was my big, empty yard to play in, with swings, a sliding board, a tree fort and a sand box. How could I possibly need other children?

           

When I was seven, there was a five-year-old girl who liked me. She was allowed to cross the street to come to my house to ask if I could play (when I was five, I wasn’t allowed to cross the street alone). 

My mother discouraged me from playing with her because she was so much younger than I was, but if she came to my door and I was home, it meant I had no one else to play with, so my mother didn’t want to be so cruel as to forbid me from going to her house. Her name was Sheila.

           

Sheila would play with me for about ten minutes, and then lose interest and go off somewhere else.

That didn’t bother me. She had a seven-year-old brother who was in my class at school. He and I got along very well, and he was always interested in playing some game or other with me when I came over – in fact, I think that’s why Sheila went off somewhere else.

The other children in school would tease that Michael was my boyfriend. He wasn’t. We were just pals. We played cowboys or soldiers or tree climbing or whatever other things I wasn’t allowed to play at home.

He never kissed me or tried to. In fact, that kind of thought never crossed either of our minds. He was the one person who didn’t mind that I could answer questions at school, who never, ever called me a big shot.

           

My parents were surprised when I was invited to Michael’s eighth birthday party. I was surprised that they let me go, since I wasn’t allowed to play with boys. And it still rates as one of the best birthday parties I ever attended.

           

I never told my parents that I spent my time playing with Michael and not Sheila. They wouldn’t have let me go to his house if I did.

I didn’t think of that as lying. I could never understand how not volunteering information was lying when you didn’t actually say anything. It might be a sin, but it wasn’t lying.

           

Sin was a big deal in second grade, although now I’m not sure whether or not a seven-year-old is capable of actual sin. I was far more afraid of my parents than God, if he existed – although I believed he did, just in case, since I’d never actually met him – and at the time I was a bit skeptical of whether or not people in history, like Caesar and George Washington were real.  I thought maybe they were like fairy-tales, and teachers made them up so they’d have something to teach.

I had already learned that a little lie that didn’t hurt anyone but kept you from being punished was preferable to having a grownup make a big deal out of something that wasn’t important, and hounding you about it for a year.

Like the time I went to a report card conference with my mother when – other than art, handwriting and orderliness – history and geography were my only two bad grades. I was in fifth grade by then.

The teacher asked me if I liked history and geography. That particular year, I did not. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by expressing hatred for something she taught, and I didn’t want to have to hear about it every time I answered incorrectly, so I said, “I guess.”

           

Now, I knew lying was wrong, but I figured I could make up for something that small long before I had to apply for my ticket to heaven. God wasn’t going to give me extra homework or yell at me as my parents or teacher would, so I decided to tell the lie and do the Hail Mary to make up for it instead.

But back to second grade, I tried to be an accurate student.

           

I found my First Communion prayer book not too long ago, with its pre-Vatican II Latin responses and pictures of a much different-looking Mass than what people see today. I also found, tucked in the pages, a paper with a list written in my second-grade handwriting.

It was a list of sins I’d committed since the previous visit to Confession. I wanted to be accurate so I wouldn’t commit an additional sin of lying to the priest in Confession by giving an incorrect account of my failings.

I’m not sure whether or not I brought the list with me to Confession, but it’s  documentation of what I thought I was doing wrong at the time.

           

Children’s understanding of wrongdoing is amusing. I wonder if other children thought to impress the priest by confessing to a murder or theft they hadn’t committed (I never did).

But so many of the commandments, at least the way they used to be worded, were difficult to understand. I knew lying was wrong, but I could never find a commandment saying that. There was one about bears, which made no sense to me.

And my classmates didn’t understand the word “covet”. They usually mispronounced it as “cover”. What would be wrong with covering your neighbor’s things? What if it was raining? Should you just leave them out there to get wet?

           

God had some strange rules. His were even odder than the ones my parents had, like looking up and down before you crossed the street. Shouldn’t you look for cars? But then, God could turn into a wafer, so I wasn’t too surprised.

           

By second grade, I was pretty good at riding my bike. The training wheels were gone and I had even learned to ride around corners.

I still had minor accidents, like the time I decided I was going to let go of the handlebars because I wanted to learn to ride without holding on, as I had seen some of the older kids do. I wasn’t sure how that was accomplished, so I decided to let go and count. As soon as the bike got a bit wobbly, I’d grab the handlebars again. Once the bike was steady, I’d try again.

           

I could ride for a fast count of ten. My goal one day was to wait until I reached twenty. So, as I started down my street, I let go. I reached ten.

On the next try I was almost able to reach fifteen.  Almost was close. I let go again, determined to reach twenty. The road slanted down slightly as I counted. I could feel the wobblies return, but determination won out, and I didn’t grab the bars.

As the bike started to fall over, I was only to eighteen, but I grabbed the handlebars once again, just as Jimmy, a seventh-grade boy who lived across the street was walking past. I was too late, and the bike went completely over, with me on the street below it. I couldn’t seem to get myself up, and Jimmy didn’t give me a second glance.

Finally, I called out to him, and he grudgingly, picked up my bicycle so I could stand up. As soon as I was off the road and able to take the bike, he let it go, leaving me to my cuts and scrapes, and went on his way.

           

School might be easy, but being a second grader was definitely difficult.