Long story to a short line:
My Mom told the story that I wanted to go to school so bad that she found a kindergarten class at a public school a few blocks from our apartment in Hoboken. The Catholic School, Our Lady of Garce did not offer anything but grades 1-8. The kindergarten class was in Demarest School, which years later would host dances that required a “couple” to enter, but that’s another story. I have three distinct memories of that kindergarten class.
- There was a coveted “peg table” that was very popular. We lined up at the classroom door and when it opened everyone rushed to their favorite toy or thing. I ran for the peg table, you could sit down at it and (yes, you guessed it) put pegs in holes. Hey, its’s fucking kindergarten! Well, this one day I must have accidentally pushed a girl and it must have been winter and the steam radiators were at full heat, and she fell into one and burned her arm. The good news is it was Hoboken it was 1954 and there were no lawyers around. Her very angry father did show up at my apartment and yelled up the 22 stairs at my Mom pointing at the burn on his daughter’s arm. “See what your son did to my daughter?” My mother handled it well.
- There was a girl with red hair who always wore a yellow dress with those stupid black and white shoes. I loved her. I would try to sit next to her when we had sitting events. Once, during our milk break she got up to get her little container of Whole Milk first and I bent down and smelled the bench where her ass had just sat. It smelled like slightly wet wood.
- The last day of kindergarten we were given a folder of all our drawings and “stuff” to take home. On the way home, I remember running into some “big kids” and my folder got smaller and not so neat. I remember my Mom consoling me. It might be the beginning of “Zorro”. Timing is right – 1954.
First Grade and Mrs. Caldron and I’m finally in Our Lady of Grace being regularly beat up by Sisters of Charity. I am the boy who is assigned to deliver the little milk containers to each classroom. Why am I assigned to do this? Because it keeps me busy and otherwise out of the nuns’ non-existent hair. At the end of the day, I gather all the erasers and take them outside to shake the chalk out of them (this entails slapping them along the side of the school building). I didn’t know why I was given all these jobs until years later when I read about ADHD and realized if I was born 20 years later I’d have been lined up outside the nurses office to get my “calm him down” shot. I was so lucky.
Here’s the thing: all during my 8 years of OLG, just about EVERY report card had on the back a check in the “Unsatisfactory” or “Improvement Needed” boxes next to Emotional Stability. “What does emotional stability mean?” I’d ask my mom never missing the opportunity to ask a question. She didn’t know and so she’d say something like “you get angry sometimes”. I didn’t think I got angry EVER.
To bring this story to an end, the other day I was posed with the question:
In three words what you will have on your tombstone, and I proudly replied:
Remains Emotionally Unstable