Picture Day

I was only four years old when I began attending kindergarten at Blair School in the late 1960s. I don't know if it went against some policy of the St. Louis School District to allow someone so young to attend school, but it could be that some kindly registrar took pity on my poor mother, who was already quite burdened with four children and would be birthing two more by month's end. 

I walked to school by myself each day. It was just a short trip straight across the park from our two-family flat. I'm told that on the first day of school, we were allowed outside to play at recess, and I interpreted this as a sign of dismissal, and so I went home. (I don't remember this at all, and truthfully, I think my parents may be fibbing about it.)

Memory has a funny, selective quality about it, especially when it comes to memories of childhood. I don't remember a single thing about kindergarten. Nothing. Not my classroom, not my classmates, not my teacher. No memories of me painstakingly gripping a fat pencil and writing my name, nor learning the rudimentary skills of reading or arithmetic. No memories of show and tell or coloring pictures or milk and cookies or anything else one might normally associate with those very first days of school during that period of time. Just...nothing.

But I do remember very clearly one fall morning, as breakfast dishes sat on the kitchen table waiting to be cleared, and two noisy infants fussed in their crib nearby, past due for diaper changes, a harried young mother took a moment to neatly tie a yellow ribbon in her little girl's hair so that she would look extra pretty for picture day at school. That little girl never did let her mom know how much she appreciated that.

But I like to think it showed in her smile.