WHEN I WAS IN PRESCHOOL, my teachers noticed that I was "different." If by "different" they meant that I sometimes preferred playing on my own as opposed to with friends, then they were right on the money.
I also made several great friends. One of them became a longtime family friend, and her sister babysat us later on. Unfortunately, I guess I wasn't hitting the exact social benchmarks that the charts said I should be, or had *quite* as many friends as the "experts" said I should. Or something like that. I wasn't paying attention back then.
But the thing was, back then, I just loved to create on my own sometimes. Nobody hated this more than teachers and parents. At that age, the slightest display of introversion was a major concern. It was a terrible affliction that led to the worst punishment a person could receive: never fitting in. Alone-ness was something to be remedied.
I created stories with the toy dogs and the animal Legos and even have the plastic letters talk with each other. Alone, of course. I had certain characters in mind when it came to the toy bins (like a certain white dog and a plastic letter P) who other kids just wouldn't know like I did. I mean, if Stacy tried to join in my game of letters, how would she know that the letter P was an obnoxious busybody who liked to interrupt everyone's fun when the other letters got together? She'd probably try to make P nice or something.
Little did I know that, while I played with the doll puppet whose hair looked like spaghetti, teachers were noticing. "It does look like spaghetti, doesn't it?" Ms. Aspen asked. I hated people commenting on my ridiculous-sounding thoughts and decided to be more private about them.
Upon graduation, I was presented with a diploma, but the thought that I wouldn't be there forever didn't cross my mind. I had all the time in the world, as far as I was concerned! Before life starts to speed by, it goes slow, starting at a snail's pace. I wasn't worried about ending preschool. That was years and years away, if we go by adult time-passing standards.
***
Come September, I ended up at a small K-8 school half an hour away from home. It wasn't an "elementary" school or a "primary" school. It was a "Friends school." What did that mean? Did it mean that everyone was encouraged to be friends? It was for kids in preschool through eighth grade, though I started in kindergarten.
My first day there was for orientation, in what was to be my kindergarten room. A taller African American boy went up to me near the snack table and said, "Hello." I promptly turned around, pretending I didn't hear them. I'm pretty sure my parents did that half-laugh thing that parents do when their kid does something awkward and then said that I should say hello back. I didn't listen. I don't think I ever saw the kid again---perhaps I ruined his experience!
I mostly remember the good times, but physical evidence exists for the bad---including walking into the classroom, which was just as scary as it was in preschool, where I often stood outside the classroom waiting for a teacher to notice me at the start of the day. At the time of this writing, I just discovered an old note I received from the head of the lower school back in May of 2000, congratulating me on being able to walk in the building all by myself at drop-off. You know, that super challenging task! For most of that year, the head of the upper school walked me to my classroom each morning. Or so I've been told. She would eventually become my math teacher and academic advisor in middle school.
However, it wasn't all scary. Here is how to survive in Quaker school, whether or not you're trying.
CONQUER CLASSROOMS
Kindergarten marked the start of what would become "real" school. Of course, the biggest part of this career would be going into the "grades," but kindergarten was an all-important first step.
I spent some mornings "getting ready" by doing Barbie workbooks at the kitchen table, with a bowl of cereal. If there was no time for that, I'd take three chocolates in the car with me, usually peanut butter cups, and eat those. However, I would have just brushed my teeth. My rule was to wait until we drove past a certain elementary school, then I'd get going on them.
The classroom was a unique space with four tables, a chalkboard with a row of paper clocks hanging above it detailing the day's events, a loft-like fort that was built into the wall that you could climb up to, a toy workbench in the corner, and a 70s-esque alphabet rug that we often sat around (I loved running my hands up and down it, creating a rough tingly sensation on my palms), and a rocking chair in the center of the room. We kept our stuff in cubbies by the back door leading to the playground. We even had our own little bathroom. I never used it. I avoided using the bathroom at school whenever possible.
My teacher wasn't very teacher-like at all. Mrs. O not only treated us as her students, but as her honorary grandchildren to a degree. She called us "Friends" rather than students, maybe because Quakers called each other Friends, or maybe because she liked us. She read from huge, colorful storybooks and the Magic Tree House series.
She also liked hugs from us, which we did as she sat in her rocking chair. We learned rhymes about Fuzzy Wuzzy the bear and social justice at an early age, particularly through songs about how if you gave a penny away, you ended up having more rather than less because of the gesture. We learned addition and subtraction and how to fill in a calendar. Once, I got carried away and filled in 35 days in September. I was ashamed. I thought I had found a math activity that had been easy.
We rest during the day by laying on plastic blue mats and listening to Enya. Sometimes we'd also read books at that time. My naptime ambition was always to read Flat Stanley. One problem: my classmate Jenna always got to it first. She'd always end up falling asleep with it, too---and she often woke up crying. Was the book that bad? I had to find it. When Jenna eventually moved to Connecticut, Flat Stanley was finally mine.
We got to cook on Fridays, making such delights as monkey bread. We had Centers, where parents would come in and help us reinforce concepts with crafts and games. During that time, Mrs. G helped us make our own journals by writing a sentence off a prompt and drawing it.
It was like preschool, but with more real, actual learning involved. I felt important!
We had other classes, too. We got to go to Library and Computer and Music and Art, while the science teacher came to our classroom. Big construction projects were underway, leaving the lower school without a science room. The temporary media centers were in what has since been the not-large-by-any-means music room (to this day I don't understand how they got a whole library in there, and that was with the computer lab as the other half of the room), and computer class was done in pairs.
Library was a different story. On the first day every year, we would decorate cardboard library cards. The first fifteen minutes were devoted to reading a story that usually bored me, although I liked the picture books in kindergarten. Oh, and we always had to sit boy-girl-boy-girl in a circle of chairs.
The last fifteen minutes were spent browsing books. I remember some kids in first grade checking out Harry Potter volumes, being told that they were big books and that parents would hopefully read it to them. "Wacky Wednesday" and "Guide to Owning a Poodle" were two of my favorite titles, but I checked out some American Girl books, too. I was excited to learn about the doll characters I didn't own, like Molly and Felicity.
And forget about running out the door at the end of the day! No, we would all line up properly, and the teacher would shake our hand as we went to our respective dismissal locations.
I had a super time learning. And not only that, but the school actually bothered teaching us social change during my nine years there, so we not only got to learn about the world, but be productive.
LEARNING TO LISTEN IN ASSEMBLY (OR NOT)
Monday and Thursday assemblies offered a chance for the whole school to get together and learn important news, like the latest score of a soccer game, how many minutes Mrs. Bourns' first-grade class read for that week, or who knows what else. We'd sit on the waxed pine floors of the windowless auditorium with our class and watch as teachers and students walked to the mic one by one for announcements.
On Mondays we'd start by singing a song---either a hymn or some other tune like Simple Gifts, Morning Has Broken, or something kitschy like that. A popular favorite was Rise and Shine, where each grade got their own verse to sing before the whole room went back to the chorus.
But the real deal happened on Thursdays, when everyone who had a birthday that week was invited to stand up with the principal as the room sang "Happy Birthday" to them.
Okay. Picture you, at the dinner table, with your family singing Happy Birthday to you. Awkward enough, right? Now imagine staring out at the entire school, just standing there, watching everyone --teachers, administrators, students, everyone---sing at you. That was probably why I never went up there. I was also saved by a couple of snow days.
I would sometimes act out these assemblies at home, writing my own "announcements" in my Elmo notebook and performing them to myself in the hallway.
MAKE A FRIEND OR TWO OR THREE
I wasn't outgoing in kindergarten, as you might have gathered.
A bit of irony, though: most of my recesses were spent on the jungle gym, pretending I was on some show where I entertained viewers by singing. Funny how I was uncomfortable talking to some people, but totally fine singing ridiculous made-up songs in front of everyone. I don't remember what any of these songs were about.
Sure, I got to know some other kids. I once played with a first grader named Laura, where we looked for pinecones under the trees. I vaguely remember a teacher yelling at us to go back to our own classes, and that was the end of that. Maybe I misunderstood her, but that's what I thought she said at the time.
Another encounter happened when I was walking on the playground and a tall, African-American girl who smelled like stale sunscreen ran up to me and asked, "Do you like Britney Spears?" Only she yelled it more than saying it. Caught off guard, I had no idea what to do. Who was Britney Spears? A first-grader? I dumbly nodded yes, and she ran off again.
Turns out, her name was Brittany too, and she was a first grader. She would muster a few attempts at picking on me when we got to middle school, but they didn't turn into anything.
I did have these two friends, Holly and Emma. A lot of our time was spent in this little fort situated in the corner of the room. You would climb up a ladder attached to a fort overlooking the classroom and just hang up there, looking down on all the kids below. We would play "Hot Potato" with a globe beanbag pillow there.â¯Below the fort was a little nook with dress-up clothes that I loved, but I was always confused as to why the inner wall was painted to look like a Greek house exterior but had a window looking outside. While construction projects were going on, there was also once a mock protest to "Save Our Trees" happening at recess, which the three of us participated in. Other times, we joined our friend Nicky to chop up leaves with rocks at a picnic table. (We thought we knew what we were doing.)
Sometimes during indoor recesses, Emma would want to leave "our" fort and go play with a large umbrella that she made out of K-nex. Holly would join her, and some others joined in as well.
Holly and especially Emma probably don't remember me, as is true with most kindergarten friendsâusually temporary and there for convenience. Holly got a new group of friends the following year and Emma changed schools. Still, I met many wonderful people, eventually including a longtime best friend who liked writing as much as I did.
KNOW WHAT QUAKERISM IS
The school was a Quaker school and it taught students as such. (This was where the Friends in "Friends school" came from; it was often how they referred to each other.) The few things I learned about Quakerism are as follows:
-Quakers are supposedly non-violent and promote peace.
-Quakers don't vote. At least not the super orthodox ones. This I learned in gym class when we were trying to decide on a game to play by raising hands, and someone pointed out that Quakers don't vote. If you're looking for a scapegoat for the election of 2016, you know where to send your hate mail.
-Quakers took a "moment of silence" before every mealtime---at least in school. Me being the good kid I was, I took it literally that we could not eat until the sacred moment of silence took place. So if, when we were in second grade and old enough to eat in the auditorium, the recess duty teacher was late to come inside, I'd sit in front of my chicken nuggets, anxiously watching the clock as the minutes ticked by, one minute closer to the end of lunch and me not being able to eat. The seconds would tick by and my stress would grow until the teacher came back. This would occur while most other people were probably happily eating.
-Quakers went to Meeting for Worship. One day in kindergarten, we all gathered in the other kindergarten room and the teacher read a book called "Michael (or insert correct boy's name here) Goes to Meeting."* It was about some Quaker kid who went to "meeting for worship" one day and learned what it all meant...being a community, sitting in silence and reflection, and getting in touch with God through an "Inner Light." As students, we were expected to do the same thing every Wednesday starting in the first grade.
The meetinghouse, located at the Quaker high school next door, was a simple brick building with waxed hardwood floors, wooden beams on the ceiling, and wooden, cushioned benches. We could sit anywhere we'd like, and we'd do just that for twenty minutes. If you felt moved to say something, you could stand and say it. It was a long wait for a little kid, and I didn't like it.
Turns out that sitting in silence once a week for nine years opened itself up to entertainment possibilities. One day a bird flew in because someone left the doors open. It flew around the rafters flapping and chirping as everyone's heads followed it the entire time. And then there was the day where two little boys got up and switched places mid-meeting, clearly a clever prank plotted previously.
I also can't forget about the year where we met before Thanksgiving break and a whopping 33 kids stood up to talk about what they were thankful for. (Usually, no more than 2 or 3 people spoke each week. Often, nobody did.) At least half of them said, with the exact wording, "I am thankful for my family."
Mostly, though, nothing happened. Sometimes someone would get up and speak if they had a revelation about the meaning of life or something else important. When the principal shook the hand of the people next to him and everyone else did the same, I was ready for it to be over. I often worried some days, when I was younger, that it would never be over; there would be no handshake and we'd just sit there for all time; missing lunch and our buses and dinner with our families.
Once a month, we also had Buddy Meetings. We would pair up with a class who was either younger or older than we were to do an activity, ranging from playing Bunco to nature walks to making cards to learning about Quakerism. We would form some great bonds with these buddies of ours, especially the older ones. My friend Haley and I especially loved hanging with our eighth-grade buddies as second graders. Marie and Danielle for life!!
CONQUER BUS RIDES
I rode the bus for the first time in kindergarten. Bus number 30. Dad drove me to school each morning, me with my standard breakfast of peanut butter crackers or sometimes even three mini peanut butter cups. On the afternoon, I was on my own.
I was nervous about doing this too, so my parents and I played pretend games where we'd get on the bus (or use a Little People bus) and go through the whole process.
When school started, Emma walked me to my "busroom" at dismissal, an assigned classroom where kids on each bus would meet, and drop me off there. The middle school Spanish teacher was in charge of that busroom, but I'd often walk out with Kate or Mattie, two of the eighth-grade girls. (Question: why couldn't I walk ANYWHERE alone at this age?) Then the ride would begin soon after.
It was disappointing for several reasons. First of all, most school buses were long. They had emergency exits at the top that looked like little white squares and had brown seats. (At least, this was my ideal version of a bus. My next-door neighbor, Katie, was a Big First Grader and that was the bus she took.) My bus was short, had no white squares on top, and was green on the inside. And it had a lame number: 30. Katie's bus was #84. Please don't ask me why 84 is cooler than 30. I was a little kid. I don't know.
Amanda, my kindergarten bus driver, was wonderful though. She spent some time playing the alphabet game with a kid in my class and got me a balloon for my birthday. One time when we noticed that my mom wasn't home yet, even after my longer-than-average ride, she was cool about it, saying that we could "go on an adventure" by dropping off the last kid first. Even my anxious kindergarten self was disappointed to see that my mom had been turning into the neighborhood before we could get anywhere exciting.
I also lived a little farther away from many students at the school. Being a private school, we were comprised of several school districts. So not only did I live farther away, but we had to drop off a bunch of other kids first, usually making me the last stop. Basically, it took a while to get home.
Fridays were the worst, though. We dismissed early on Fridays; 2:10 instead of 3:10. Before doing anything else, we would have to stop at a Hebrew school and pick up another kid. Again, we'd have to wait forever until the kids came out, or so it seemed. My young self worried. What if, one, day, they never came out and we were stuck waiting for eternity?
Still, it was a unique experience. We were scattered around without wearing seat belts, sometimes sitting in funky positions...and that was okay! It also had its share of smells: exhaust and vinyl seats and one time, even what smelled like a dead skunk that burned all of our nostrils in turn as we entered the bus one day. Sometimes if I leaned my head on the window, I could see the bus's shadow on the ground, slicing through grass and mailboxes and sidewalks. Sometimes I imagined a little guy trying to outrun it.
Sometimes you'd see things outside, too, like a row of chickens crossing the road. "Aww, they're so cute!" gushed Mattie.
And we always had to stop and open the doors at railroad crossings. "Why do we always let someone off at the train tracks?" a sixth-grader named Alex asked.
You'd also get to see where your classmates lived and maybe some things about them. One kid, whose parents were famous chefs and who got off at a long driveway with a cow mailbox which he always checked before starting the walk down, used to have a brother get off with him, who disappeared at some point. I always wondered what happened, but looking through a page in my kindergarten yearbook, there is a hint that it was drugs) Another family got off in a neighborhood made of houses I thought looked lovely, and I vowed to buy a house built by the David Cutler Group when I got older.
My dad also shared a secret: if you sat near the back of the bus, where the wheel was, you might bounce up and down. I tried that in kindergarten. It was fun! I didn't do it too much more in my bus career after that, though many years later on a camp field trip, I remembered how entertaining it could be.
Meanwhile, I started establishing time-killers, where I got to express my creativity. I had to, because bus rides were even longer than meeting for worship! I would go straight to the front seat on the left and sit there the whole time. Not talking to anyone, because... shyness, I guess. Once I left muddy footprints on the front of the seat just in front of me when I was putting my feet up. Those footprints stayed there the rest of the year and dubbed that spot "mine."
I would imagine stories to pass the time and made up my own games. One day, the bus edged a little too close to a stop sign and scraped the edge. So every time we passed that sign, I would play "Don't Scrape the Stop Sign," where I'd simply see if we brushed up against it or not. I think we only did it once more after that.
Bus rides ranged from 40 minutes (a record!) to an hour and a half over the course of nine years. It wasn't all bad as time went on. Sometimes I did homework or listened to Hilary Duff on my CD player.
And like in meetings for worship, bus rides had opportunities for humorous moments. My sixth grade driver let us decorate the windows with washable markers and bought those funny sunglasses with wild eyes in the frames. But by far one of the best bus memories I have is from middle school, of all the boys starting a chorus of "100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall," and they'dâ¯sing faster as they got closer to their neighborhood. Led by two cousins who were in my grade and notorious for being goofballs, everyone sang as loud as they could, and much, much faster as they got closer and closer to home. The bus driver even slowed down for them once we got to their neighborhood so they could finish.
There was another game, too. The Snap Clap game was enjoyed by those same boys and their friends. Everyone would be assigned a number and start the rhyme. One would say, "One, two." Then everyone would snap, clap. Two would be next, because their number was called previously. "Two, four." Snap, clap. "Four, one." Snap, clap.
I never got the point of this game, but they did come up with another that was amusing. As we were about to hit a certain bridge, the boys would start a countdown starting at about five seconds. The goal was to try to hit the bridge right on "one." You know when you'd hit the bridge, because you'd feel the jostling.
I even made friends with a kindergarten girl on the bus when I was a second-grader. We played with Leigh's makeup kits and talked about our classes and friends--she was in Mrs. O's class that year, bringing back fond memories for me. And in sixth grade, I rode with a little Chinese boy who was obsessed with old ladies. He was a hoot and a half, and we loved him. Sadly for us on the bus, Harrison moved back to China that summer and we never heard from him again.
But one of the most memorable people on my bus rides had to be Greg, a classmate of mine. We rode together through second grade. Greg hated all things sitting still, or all things schoolwork. He too had a reputation for being a goofball. When it was his turn to start and end the moment of silence at lunch, he would skip past the silence part, as I predicted he'd do. And he always preferred bouncing around to sitting.
He'd do it on the bus as well. He never paid attention to where we were on the ride, so the bus driver, Ashley, and I would remind him to get his things together as we pulled into his neighborhood. One day, he decided to eat a couple of snacks, including a bottle of liquid pink yogurt that spilled all over his Harry Potter lunchbox, all over the floor, and all over himself.⯠This image of pink liquid yogurt burned in my brain where it still lives today. I'm glad it did, for it was representative of a typical bus ride with Greg.
So were bus rides all a bad thing? Not necessarily. I complained, but I hardly minded them, In fact, they were often the source of funny and memorable stories between me and a new friend later on. I mean, look at how much you just read about riding the school bus.
ON OLD PEOPLE
On Halloween in kindergarten, I was super excited to put on my Cinderella costume and put it on display for the entire school. I also had no idea that the place where the day's events would take place would eventually lead me to a new career path.
But the parade didn't end in the gym. Instead, the faculty led us down a pathway outside. A Halloween nature walk? This was new.
Soon we were shepherded into a room in an all-new building. We entered a circular room with dusty, floral, pink seats in various alcoves and a large front desk. The vague smell of skunks lingered from the outside and an older woman was there to greet the teachers.
We walked around this building for a while. Old people sitting in the halls wished us a Happy Halloween and admired our costumes.
Where the heck were we, anyway? It certainly wasn't school.
The complex was called The Woods. It consisted of apartments and a nursing facility for older people. As I'd learn later, The Woods was also Quaker, just like us, and one of the many unique aspects of this new school I attended was that we'd do many activities together, especially during our sixth-grade community service block.
Some classes had "Penn Pals," residents who would come to one class occasionally over the course of the year and do activities with us. Cornelia visited our second-grade class and taught us about her travels to Europe and taught me how to spell February, my birth month. Gina visited our fourth-grade class and told us about her experiences with polio many years ago. She even invited us to her apartment once, where we all played tag on the lawn and where they served terrible bread. I didn't get to know the place well for a year or two yet, but through fifth grade, we always took our Halloween parades there.
GRADUATE
Kindergarten? Not so bad.
Then first grade started, which was a transition. While Holly and Emma were nice playmates, I would make my first close friend in this particular grade.
Entering the classroom for the first time was scary. I was officially in The Grades now. No more Friday Cooking time, or lunch in the classroom, or naps. There were real actual desks, as opposed to tables, and we shared the hallways with bigger kids, which actually had lockers instead of cubbies. We would also now be going to meeting for worship every single week.
But I shouldn't have been so anxious, because the teachers were nice. I developed a special bond with the assistant teacher, Mrs. Campbell. Mrs. Campbell liked me for some reason, and sometimes left me little goodies. I was the only one allowed to call her Grace, which was not only her middle name but the middle name of my baby sister-to-be as well.
The best part, though, was a new girl named Christine. She was sitting at my cluster of desks, and soon we became friends. We especially bonded over our first school trauma.
We had just finished an assignment where we had to do a reading about nature and answer questions typed in Ms. Stevens' signature Comic Sans. We were putting our stuff away, about to go to morning recess, when she told us, "Morgan and Christine, we need to have a talk."
My blood froze. Did we do something?
We sat down on the rug as everyone else left the classroom.
"I don't think you were doing your best work," she said. She went on to tell us that we could have put in more effort. This also meant Getting a Stick on the behavior chart. Instead of going to recess, we'd have to stand against the brick wall in the hall.
Christine was full-on crying. I wasn't, but on the inside, I was FREAKING OUT. I was the good girl. I wasn't supposed to get punished in class. Getting scolded was foreign to me.
I tried to console her anyway. "Just imagine we're out on the swings!" I said. I imagined I was pumping my legs back and forth. "What a nice day, out on the swings!" I said. I don't think it worked.
Mrs. Campbell saw me on her way back inside and asked me if I got a stick. She seemed concerned. Maybe she'd stick up for me. So I nodded yes. Fortunately, we had only gotten green sticks. We wouldn't get a phone call home to our parents or anything. We could put this away.
When I got home, though, Mom asked me about the stick I got in class that day. That was it. I tried unsuccessfully to hide my tears on the sofa, but I was angry. Calls home were for people who got red sticks, not green. I didn't even know what I did in the first place.
I actually still have the assignment---my mom tended to save our old school stuff over the elementary years. I still can't tell you what was wrong with my apparent lack of work. I perhaps could have been a bit more detailed, but otherwise I still had no clue. But at least I got to suffer with my best friend.
So Christine and I, undeterred by what I guess was our teacher's bad day, continued with our little traditions. We played at recess together---that is, when Jake wasn't inviting me to shoot hoops---often swinging on the High Swings, a set of two swings that were raised higher than the others. At Library, we'd go find some books we liked about cool math tricks and take turns reading a trick aloud. That was how we learned that numbers could spell words on the calculator when you turned it upside down.
By now I had great teachers, some traditions, and even had a handle on the long parts of my day, like meeting for worship and bus rides. As the Pull-Ups commercials say, I was a big kid now. And so off I went into the world to learn the fine art of storytelling.