Day 322 - Good Secrets/Bad Secrets

Sharon put down the book. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Laughter would be aimed at herself for being so naive. Crying would be for any of her classmates or other students who had gone through the same experiences as the author of the book she had just finished reading. But maybe he was the only one, she thought; although her real hope was that no child would ever have to experience predatory actions from adults, especially from a teacher.

The book was a novel, but the author indicated it was based on events from his childhood that he had kept secret from everyone. Sharon knew the teacher was Mr. Crawford, her fourth grade and favorite elementary school teacher.

Sharon had felt she was special to Mr. Crawford, but not in any shameful way. She thought he considered every student in his class special. She had considered him special, because he had taken the time to verify that Sharon's inconsistent grades were not the result of her not knowing the material. Sharon needed glasses.

When Mr. Crawford handed out problems to solve or tests on paper, Sharon got most of the answers right. He had consoled her when tears filled her eyes whenever her grades weren't what she expected. It had always been that way. Tears came all too easily for Sharon, the source for the nickname her classmates gave her: Cry Baby. Mr. Crawford told her that her ability to bring tears to her eyes so easily might be a talent she could develop later in life. She could be an actress. Actors need to be able to display emotions at any time. He was the first teacher to give her encouragement, to see her ability to bring up emotions easily as a positive thing and to encourage her to develop the ability to control her emotions for the right moment, instead of just telling her to stop it, to grow up and quit behaving like a baby.

One reason Sharon's grades disappointed her was that Sharon couldn't always see arithmetic problems on the blackboard clearly enough. If the problem involved words, she could figure out what she couldn't see by what she could see, but when the problems involved numbers, she couldn't always figure out what the shapes were. So she made mistakes, lots of mistakes. Fourth grade was when multiplication and division were introduced, so there were lots of number problems to solve.

One day as class was about to be dismissed, Mr. Crawford asked Sharon to stay. He told her to stand in the back of the room while he walked to the front and raised one of the maps that covered a section of the blackboard. On the board were several arithmetic problems. These were all completed, so it wasn't like a test. But the problems were a mixture of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

Multiplication and division had been difficult for Sharon and the plus sign for addition looked so much like the times and division signs from the back of the room. Mr. Crawford asked her to read the problems. She admitted she was guessing as she read. Sometimes, if she could see one of the top numbers and the bottom number, she could figure out the other number and whether the problem was addition or multiplication.

After Sharon completed reading the problems to Mr. Crawford, he gave her a note to take home to her parents. He told her he thought she needed glasses and suggested that her parents have her eyes tested.

Sharon's mother was surprised when she read the note because she knew the school administered eye tests each year and no one at the school had indicated Sharon's vision might need correcting. But no one had ever asked Sharon if she understood what the eye test was for. She knew it was a test, so it was just one more time when she wanted to get all the answers right. Sharon didn't remember if she did anything to make sure she answered correctly.

The eye chart in elementary school wasn't like the one in optometrists' offices. It only had the letter E on it. Sometimes the E was correct, sometimes it was backward, sometimes it was lying on its back, and sometimes it was standing on its three arms. Students were supposed to point in the direction the arms were pointing. It seemed like a game.

When Sharon had her eyes tested in a doctor's office, it was clear that she needed glasses. The day after her exam, she told Mr. Crawford she was getting glasses and asked him not to tell anyone in the class. She wanted him to keep her secret so it would be a surprise when she arrived in school the next week wearing glasses.

Now, five years after Mr. Crawford's death at 82 years old, she learned that at least one of Mr. Crawford's students saw a very different side of him. Even when Sharon's mother told her that Mr. Crawford had left the school district, moved out of town and there were rumors about the reason for his departure, Sharon hadn’t asked for details. If they had been important, she thought her mother would have told her. Sharon assumed the reason for his departure was that his marriage was troubled and any talk of divorce among the teaching staff at that time was scandalous. It was only now, after reading the work of fiction that developed characters along troubled paths as a result of a teacher’s inappropriate touching, that Sharon learned the real reason for Mr. Crawford’s departure. Instead of separation and divorce, Mr. Crawford remained married for the 44 years until his death.

Sharon couldn't stop remembering the good he did. She thought about all the crime shows on TV about child predators and the message in them, repeated again and again, that such people could never be cured. Once a predator, always a predator. Sharon wanted desperately to believe that was wrong, that at least one man who acted inappropriately with at least one 9-year-old child did find redemption though counseling and a 44-year-long marriage.

Sharon thought about her own grandchild, still several years away from going to school. She thought about how important it was for parents, for grandparents, for all adults who care about children to pay attention to unexplained changes in a child’s behavior and to talk with the child. In addition to reminders not to accept candy or rides from strangers, children need to know they should tell an adult they trust if ever an adult – not just a stranger, but any adult – does or says something that makes them feel bad or uncomfortable.

Maybe if the schools had done more to explain the difference between good touching and bad touching forty years ago, Mr. Crawford would have known his students wouldn’t keep quiet. Maybe then he would have restrained his urges and remained that special teacher for Sharon and his other students.

Maybe the author breaking his silence about the secret he kept for nearly fifty years will help other adults and children talk about good secrets and bad secrets, as well as what is good touching and bad touching.

No child should ever have to face the shame the author hid. Maybe that is the best outcome Sharon could hope for.

Day 319 - G-Men

by  Joss U 

When I was a child, I wanted to be an FBI officer. There were lots of TV programs about the FBI, including The Untouchables in the early 60s and The F.B.I. with Ephram Zimbalist, Jr, in the later 60s.

They were G-Men, Government Men. I thought of them as the ultimate good guys. I couldn't imagine why anyone would try robbing a bank or kidnapping someone because the FBI always caught the bad guys. Always.

I read somewhere that J. Edgar Hoover was determined no women would ever be accepted into the FBI as agents, and I thought it was entirely unfair.  So my goal became to become the first female FBI agent. But at around the same time I also wanted to join the Army because TV commercials showed women wearing ball gowns in front of mirrors while the narrator promised new wardrobes with the career that offered an opportunity to see the world. I was too much influenced by marketing.

During college, I got a different impression of the FBI while I worked one summer for my church. One afternoon a man in a black suit, white shirt, and tie came into the church office and flipped open his wallet to show his badge. He was from the FBI and told me he was there to confirm the employment of one of the upper classmen of Concordia by the church as a camp counselor two summers earlier. Since I had been at camp that summer and I knew the upper classman, I told him I knew that he had been at the camp that summer, smiling because I was pleased I could help. Remember that at this point I had positive impressions of G-Men. But his response to my statement took me aback. Instead of a thank you or any other positive acknowledgement, he told me it didn't matter if I could confirm where he was for one week of the summer because he needed to know the exact dates he arrived and left. And if he had left the camp during that period of time, the FBI wanted to know.

Well, that was me told off. So I contacted one of the pastors for the G-Man to talk to.

The upper classman in question was one of the only African American students at Concordia. Later I learned he had applied for conscientious objector status so he wouldn't have to serve in the army as a soldier. I concluded that the FBI was looking for reasons to question his patriotism or find even more damaging information about him. Or maybe it was just because he was black.

My next encounter with someone from the FBI was in Berkeley where I once again worked for a church and a guy wearing a black suit, white shirt, and tie came in to ask where the guy who lived next door in the apartment above the garage, also an African American, was. I had met the guy next door but the church rented the apartment to a woman so I saw her at least once a month when she paid her rent, but not him. I could honestly tell the agent I had no idea where the guy was. He gave me his card and asked me to call him if I saw the man next door.

As soon as he left, the woman next door came in quite aggitated to ask me if an FBI agent had asked about her husband. I told her he had. She said the issue was nothing and she hoped that I would just ignore the agent's request. Again, since I rarely saw her husband, I had little reason to think I would face the dilemma of having to decide to make that call. And the shine had definitely gone off the FBI's star for me.

During my State Department career, I only had one assignment where the FBI had assigned a Legal Attache (or Legatt, the title members of the FBI were given overseas), in Barbados. And that was a positive experience overall. But I did learn about the interagency rivalry among law enforcement. The regional security officer was jealous and suspicious of everything the Legatt did. Of course since then I have become an NCIS addict so the competition among law enforcement agencies is no big secret to anyone these days.

by  IceNineJon 

But my thirteen months of service in Yemen was an intense experience with the FBI, almost none of it pleasant. 

More than 100 FBI agents arrived in Aden after the attack on the Cole. Most of them - or those who came in waves as their replacements - stayed in Aden. The numbers scaled back considerably, but there were as many to protect them as there were agents to investigate. One agent, Jennifer, was assigned on a temporary basis to Sanaa as a liaison between the Aden operation and the embassy. When it was clear that Jennifer had established a good working relationship with the ambassador and the rest of the staff in Sanaa, her colleagues in Aden seemed to think she had been co-opted by the embassy. What a can't-win situation she was put into.

There was pressure from the FBI at all times for the ambassador to press the Yemeni government for more cooperation. The ambassador believed the Yemeni government was already doing all it could. Seven months later, the FBI informed the ambassador that they had credible information that they were in danger in Aden so they planned to relocate to Sanaa. The whole operation in Aden was packed up, put into the embassy cars, trucks, and buses, and driven up the country through some very rugged terrain to Sanaa. The FBI team took residence in the Sheraton Hotel in Sanaa, taking up whole floors for their living and working spaces, setting up metal detectors at the entrance to the hotel for all hotel visitors to have to pass through, and armed guards at the entrance to the parking lot. When they traveled between the hotel and the embassy, they traveled all together in a bus with armed guards sitting on the roof. We referred to them as a pod. 

A few days later, the lead agent told the ambassador they had further intelligence that it was no longer safe for them to remain in Sanaa either. She gave the ambassador no details. She said only that they would be leaving. Nothing the ambassador said could convince them to stay.

And then they were gone. 

Day 192 - Being Four Years Old Again

Slightly older than 4-year-old neighbors from Dudrey Court

Many times in my life I have said that I thought four years old was the perfect age - or at least it was my perfect age. At four years old, I hadn't started school yet, so I didn't have any routine to my life besides wanting to get up earlier than my parents and not wanting to go to bed when they told me to. I didn't have any homework to do. I only had one sibling to have to share anything, including my parents' attention. And I found it very easy at that age to meet someone new and become best friends with him or her instantly.

I was four years old when Margaret Simonitsch's family moved back to the house across the street from ours. They had lived there before, but then I was too young to have any memories of them. I still remember clearly the image of seeing blonde Margaret on the driveway of the house across the street, looking towards our house. She wasn't the first person in the neighborhood about my age, but she was the closest one to our house. And I knew right away that she was going to be my friend.

We often took drives on Sunday afternoons when Dad wasn't working a shift that had him at the Power Plant all day. And when we took those drives, I don't think even Mom knew where we were going to end up. Sometimes it would be at one of Mom's or Dad's sibling's homes on the farm. But sometimes we would drive somewhere else, like to Detroit Lakes, where high school friends of Mom or Dad lived. I recently learned that Dad's sister Myrt and her family lived in Detroit Lakes for a year or so. Perhaps that was the reason Dad drove that far from town just to visit. And I remember meeting another four-year-old girl in the neighborhood on one of those trips. I don't remember her name. I don't remember if she was a relative or the daughter of a friend. Perhaps she was just the child of a neighbor. But I remember being very comfortable playing all afternoon with her. Or maybe it was just an hour. An hour today seems so much shorter than an hour seemed at four.

Maybe it is because I have such good feelings about being four years old that I was so comfortable being around four-year-olds in Germany. Or maybe it is that I am an introvert who is more comfortable talking with just one person at a time and four-year-olds are a good audience for conversation in a foreign language. I had three experiences in three different cities with four-year-olds. And each brought back the feeling of being four myself.

The first was when my colleague Judith and I went to Berlin on a Thanksgiving weekend tour organized by the Armed Forces Morale and Welfare organization at Patch Barracks. In addition to all the site-seeing that was built into the trip, I took the opportunity to visit a couple I knew there whom I had met at a South St. Paul Romanian restaurant several years before. Martin* had been a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota that semester and his girlfriend, Marina*, was from Romania. They met in Berlin when Marina and her ex-husband arrived there after having driven across the border into Hungary and then Austria and finally into Germany. Marina and her husband saw that they had the opportunity to get out of Romania and while they knew they no longer had the basis for a relationship, they decided to make this last trip out of Romania together, after which they split up and never saw one another again.

Martin had heard about the Romanian restaurant in South St. Paul so when Marina joined him in Minnesota for his last few weeks, he took her there. It turned out to be an evening when the Romanian dance ensemble I was part of performed at the restaurant. After we concluded our performance, we always grabbed a few patrons at the restaurant to get them dancing with us. Marina and Martin joined us gladly, and that was the beginning of our acquaintanceship.

A few days after we met them at the restaurant, they called my ex-husband and me to ask if we would join them for dinner. They had a purpose for the invitation. They were hoping we could help Marina find a place where she could get a quick divorce. The German government wouldn't allow them to marry until she could produce a divorce decree. And she couldn't get divorced in Germany without her husband's involvement in the process, but she had no idea where he was. She knew that if she could get a divorce somewhere in the world, and then she and Martin could marry there, the German government would acknowledge their marriage.

Zephyrius and Amalyswintha

We weren't able to help them with that problem, but I stayed in touch with them, exchanging Christmas cards each year, even after John and I had gone through our own divorce. By the time I was assigned to Germany, I knew they had traveled to Denmark where Marina got her divorce and they were able to marry. They now had two children whose names I will never forget: Zephyrius and Amalyswintha. When I learned I was going to Germany, I got in touch with them and Judith and I made our way to see them during our Thanksgiving holiday.

Amalyswintha was still an infant, but Zephyrius was about four. While both Martin and Marina spoke very good English, Zephyrius only spoke German. Since my German was not much better than a fourth graders', I was able to converse quite well with Zephyrius. I was very interested to see how much his language skills had developed, so I asked him a lot of the W-questions - who, what, when, where, and why. I knew that children develop the concepts of who and what before they learn when and where and that why is a more complex concept. During our conversation, I observed that Zephyrius had wer (who), was (what), wenn (when) and wo (where) down pat. But when I asked him questions that began with warum, the German equivalent of why, he usually just repeated what he had last told me.

When Marina told Zephyrius it was time for him to go to bed, he looked up with a sad look on his face and said, "Aber wir spielen" (but, we are playing). I was reminded of my four-year-old self in that moment.

The next four-year-old was the son of a couple Judith knew who lived in Wiesbaden. John* was American and his wife Ulrike* was German. They were following all the advice at the time about one parent speaking consistently in one language and the other consistently in the other language in order to help their son, Jacob*, master both languages. So John spoke with Jacob in English and Ulrike spoke with him in German. In this case, I started asking Jacob the same set of questions I had asked Zephyrius, but in English. And I noticed the same thing. Jacob could answer the who, what, when, and where questions, but why questions stumped him. I decided both Zephyrius and Jacob must have barely turned four because between 3 and 5 years old is when most children begin to ask their parents all those why questions, so famously followed up with yet another why? Or maybe it is that they learn how to ask the question without necessarily having mastered the concept so they ask again, trying to figure it out. After all, once the first why question has been answered, the answer to the next one usually changes. How easy is that for a child to understand?

After we had a meal, the five of us - John, Ulrike, Judith, Jacob, and I - were standing in the kitchen talking and Jacob was trying to get his parents' attention when Ulrike suggested to him in German that he should go and play. He responded "OK," with a smile and then came to me and took my hand to bring me with him to play. That just about melted my heart.

My final four-year-old experience was when Pradeep and Parvani invited me to join them and several of their German friends at a celebration of the Indian holiday of Diwali, the festival of lights. In India, Diwali is a family holiday, but Pradeep and Parvani not only were far from their families, their families were still not happy with their marriage, so it is likely they would not have been welcome in the home of either of their parents anyway. So they invited all the people who had become important to them, and their children, to celebrate Diwali with them.

There were lots of children. I had spent several evenings with Pradeep and Parvani, but never with so many other adults. I think that is why I gravitated toward the children. In this event, there wasn't just a single four-year-old child for me to talk with; there were many children of a variety of ages. So I sat down on the floor with them and asked them questions - not the series of W-questions this time, but questions to get them talking about what was important to them. Some of them seemed bored to be at this event they didn't understand. I think some of the older children thought they might shock me with their answers - I'm certain some of their parents might have been shocked, if the children were honest enough to tell their parents the same thing. But I slipped right into being my 4-year-old or 8-year-old or 12-year-old self, albeit a much more confident version of those younger inner children, and kept the conversation going throughout the evening. If they mentioned something I didn't know anything about, I asked them to tell me more. If they mentioned something I knew something about, I told them what I thought, careful never to mix in any judgment in either my words or my intonation.

I don't want to be four years old again, or even 44 years old. But I hope I'll never stop being able to remember what it was like to be four.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 180 - A Secret in the Heartland

Sharon put down the book, recognizing that emotions were choking her up. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Laughter would be aimed at herself for being so naive. Crying would be for any of her classmates or students of other classes who had gone through the same experiences as the author of the book she had just finished reading. But maybe he was the only one, she thought, almost hopefully, even though her real hope was that no child would ever have to experience predatory actions from adults, especially from a teacher.

The book was a novel, but the author indicated it was based on events from his childhood. In the epilogue, he spelled out what happened, without naming real people, of course. But Sharon knew the teacher was Mr. C, her favorite elementary school teacher.

Sharon had felt she was special to Mr. C, but not in any shameful way. She thought Mr. C considered every student in his class special. She knew that she had considered Mr. C special, because he had taken the time to verify that Sharon's inconsistent grades were not the result of not knowing the material. It was because Sharon needed glasses. Whenever Mr C handed out problems to solve or tests on paper, Sharon got most of the answers right. She tried so hard to make no mistakes and Mr C had already tried to console her when tears filled her eyes whenever her grades weren't what she expected. It had always been that way. Tears came all too easily for Sharon, the source for the nickname she had had throughout elementary school and that followed her, behind her back, of course, into junior high school: Cry Baby. Mr C told her that her ability to bring tears to her eyes so easily might be a talent she could develop later in life if she decided to try acting. Actors need to be able to display all emotions at any time. Mr. C was the first teacher to give her encouragement, not to cry, but to see her ability to bring up emotions so easily, or more precisely her need to develop the ability to control her emotions for the right moment, instead of just telling her to stop it, to grow up and quit behaving like a baby. It was no wonder her classmates picked out the nickname Cry Baby for her. Most of her teachers thought she was acting like a baby, too.

One reason Sharon's grades disappointed her was that when Mr. C wrote the problems or questions on the board, Sharon couldn't always see them clearly enough. If the problem involved words, she could figure out what she couldn't see by what she could see, but when the problems involved numbers, she couldn't always figure out what the shapes were by what was around them. So she made mistakes, lots of mistakes. Fourth grade was when multiplication and division were introduced, so there were lots of number problems to solve.

One day as class was about to be dismissed, Mr. C asked Sharon to stay after class. Once the rest of the students had left, Mr. C told Sharon to stay in the back of the room while he walked to the front and raised one of the maps that covered a section of the blackboard. On the board were several arithmetic problems. These were all completed, so it wasn't like a test. But the problems were a mixture of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Multiplication and division had been difficult for Sharon and the plus sign for addition looked so much like the times and division signs to her from the back of the room. Mr. C asked her to read the problems. She had to guess a lot and she admitted that as she read, telling Mr. C that because she could see one of the top numbers and the bottom number, she could figure out the other number and whether the problem was addition or multiplication because she could figure it out by either subtracting or dividing.

After Sharon completed reading the problems to Mr. C, he gave her a note to take home to her parents. He told her the note said he thought she needed glasses and suggested that her parents have her eyes tested.

Sharon's mother was surprised when she read the note because she knew the school gave eye tests each year and none of those who tested children's eyes had indicated Sharon's vision needed correcting. But no one had ever asked Sharon if she understood what the eye test was for. She knew it was a test, so it was just one more time when she wanted to give all the right answers. Sharon didn't remember if she did anything to make sure she answered correctly, but as an adult, she believes she just might have done so. The eye chart in elementary school wasn't like the one in optometrists' offices. The eye chart in the school only had the letter E on it. Sometimes the E was correct, sometimes it was backward, sometimes it was lying on it's back, and sometimes it was standing on its three arms. Students were supposed to point in the direction the arms were pointing.

When Sharon had her eyes tested in a doctor's office, it was clear that she needed glasses. The day after her exam, she told Mr. C that she was getting glasses and asked him not to tell anyone in the class. She wanted it to be a surprise when she arrived in school the next week wearing her glasses.

In addition to being able to see everything written on the board with her glasses, Sharon noticed that people's faces no longer looked fuzzy. She realized that for at least the past year she had been seeing everyone with two noses until they were close enough for her to recognize. This inability to recognize faces at a distance may have contributed to her feeling that people were ignoring her. Her classmates probably had thought she was ignoring them since she didn't say "Hi" to anyone unless they were right next to her.

Years later, when Sharon was in high school, Mr. C had been her Sunday School teacher. Some of the shine of her admiration of him was tarnished that year as she discovered Mr. C opposed the integration of schools all at once. He proposed that the schools should be integrated one grade at a time, beginning with first grade and then adding a grade each year, giving everyone time to adjust gradually. The need for integration and bussing children across town was not an issue in Sharon's home town so there didn't appear to be any immediate impact of the desegregation of schools and no children in her town were going to have to be bussed to a school any further from their homes than was necessary already. But Sharon and her classmates all felt that it was important for all children to get a good education and if that meant children needed to ride a bus to school so that all the schools would provide equal education to all children, they agreed it was the right thing to do. But Mr. C objected.

Sharon began at that point to see Mr. C as more like all other adults than as the special teacher he had been to her in the fourth grade. But he remained one of her favorite teachers because of what he had done for her so many years before.

But now, five years after Mr. C's death at 82 years old, she learned that at least one of Mr. C's students saw a side of Mr. C that Sharon couldn't have imagined all those years ago, even when Sharon's mother told her after Mr. C had left the school district and moved out of town with his new wife that there were some ugly rumors about the reason for his departure. In fact, Sharon thought the reason for his departure was that the marriage was troubled and any talk of divorce among the teaching staff at that time was scandalous. It was only now, after reading the work of fiction that developed characters along paths that the author might have taken himself as a result of Mr. C's inappropriate attention, that Sharon learned the real reason for his departure from her home town. Mr. C remained married for the 44 years until his death.

Sharon knew that her friends and family considered her to be a bleeding heart liberal - too ready to give someone the benefit of the doubt. Those whose political alignment differed significantly from hers saw the world in more sharply delineated black and white tones. Sharon saw shades of gray. But she couldn't stop remembering the good he did just because he also stepped astray. She thought about all the crime shows on TV about child predators and recalled the message of them that was repeated again and again that such people could never be cured. Once a predator, always a predator. Sharon wanted desperately to believe that was wrong, that at least one man who acted inappropriately with at least one 9-year-old child did find redemption though counseling and a 44-year-long marriage.

Sharon worried about what Mr. C's widow would feel when someone told her about the novel. Someone would eventually mention it to her. She must also be in her 80's by now. What would it feel like to have to confront an event from nearly half a decade ago at such an age?

Yet the author had lived the consequences of keeping a horrible secret for that same length of time. Would it have been better had he written the novel six years earlier, while Mr. C was still alive to respond? Or would that have just raised dust unnecessarily in a new town?

Did Sharon's mother act correctly in telling Sharon that her beloved teacher had left town under a cloud without telling her the details? Was it kinder to Sharon, to Mr. C, to Mr. C's wife, to leave the details out? Surely it seemed so at the time, but perhaps an open airing of the details would have encouraged the author and possibly other children who experienced the same inappropriate attention to confront the facts instead of surpressing them and turning them into ghosts to haunt them in the future.

What do you think?

Day 126 - Innocence of Childhood

image by peter pearson, via Flickr

Mom and Dad didn't buy a lake home like so many others, but they did make sure we spent a week each summer at a lake. We spent several summers at the same resort where there was an island in the middle of the lake. One summer, my brother Wayne and I decided we would row out to the island. We didn't make it, not because we couldn't -- we were convinced we could -- but because the adults back on shore assumed we were in trouble because we were so far away from shore. I was so disappointed when Dad showed up with another boat and motor in order to tow us back to shore.

My 11-year-old niece's favorite TV programs include Law and Order Special Victims Unit and Criminal Minds.  And that made me recall my first encounter with such concepts, the book To Kill a Mockingbird.  When we were at Cotton Lake for our annual week of vacation, Mom read the book and decided it was a good one for me to read, I guess because the story was told from the young tomboy Scout's point of view.  When I got to the point where Tom Robinson was accused of rape, I asked Mom what the word rape meant. She told me to look it up in the dictionary. Our dictionary defined rape as forcible carnal knowledge. That didn't help much so I looked up carnal and read that it was of the flesh. The dictionary was no help at all. I realized only that rape was something bad, but that was enough for me to get the message of the story.

Dad felt strongly about not going to the drive-in theaters to watch movies. When a dusk-to-dawn showing of kids movies was announced, Dad took us kids. The next day I recall him telling Mom that he was never going to take us again because of what went on in the cars around us. I never saw anything going on around us. I watched the movies.

For years I didn't understand why Mom told people when she was buying something as a present. I had heard a clerk in Melberg's Book Store tell her that you always pay more for a present. So if she just didn't tell the clerk it was a present, the price should be less, right?

Day 66 - Dropping Out of Kindergarten

Kindergarten graduation image by SFA Union City via Flickr

 I was a kindergarten drop-out. I didn't know it at the time. It wasn't my choice. No one asked me if I wanted to stop going to kindergarten. It just happened. But I didn't notice at the time.
When I did learn that I only attended kindergarten for the first half of the year, I thought the reason was that Mom needed me at home to wash the kitchen floor. I have memories of being on my hands and knees with a sponge washing the floor from water in a pail. Mom was pregnant and couldn't get down to wash the floor that way any longer. I don't know why there wasn't a mop on a stick in the picture. I don't think I'm so old that they hadn't been invented yet. And I don't know why I thought attending kindergarten Mondays through Fridays was incompatible with making sure the kitchen floors were washed.

Recently, after watching our daughter-in-law go through her pregnancy, it struck me that my washing the kitchen floor was not all a consideration in my early departure from kindergarten. There were three other more significant considerations, and one right behind those three.

The first of those three is that the location of my kindergarten was across "the highway." I was four when I started kindergarten and I was not allowed to cross the highway, 4th Avenue South, by myself. The highway was the street that divided two-block long Dudrey Court so that those of us who lived on the north end didn't get to play the kids on the south end until the highway was rerouted several years later. Going to kindergarten therefore meant Mom had to walk with me until I had crossed 4th Avenue on the way to kindergarten, and then I had to wait for her to meet me at noon when I came home.

The second consideration is that winter requires a different style of dressing for that walk. The extra clothes and boots required added several minutes to getting ready for that walk.

The third consideration was I also had a younger brother who couldn't be left home alone. While I don't recall details of those walks, both Mom and Wayne must have walked me across 4th Avenue. And that meant winter required Mom to dress two of us plus herself for that walk in the morning and then once more with one child for the walk back at noon.

And the consideration that followed was the birth of my sister. The first three considerations alone probably would have ended my kindergarten career on their own, but the addition of the baby was the icing on the drop-out cake. Mornings were now the time for bathing the baby, feeding the baby, changing the baby's diapers, dressing the baby, and just spending time with the baby. Kindergarten was a poor second in the competition with the baby, even for me, even if I had known there was a choice.

Kindergarten was optional in those days, so attending only half a year of kindergarten was more than most children got. In addition, I had the oldest-child advantage:  I had more parent time before the age of 5 than any of my siblings. Mom had time to help me write letters to my cousin Lois. I told Mom what I wanted to say, she wrote it down for me, and then I copied what she wrote so that I could say that I wrote the letter even before I had learned to read. I didn't need to be able to read because Mom read stories to me and Dad told me stories, stories I thought he had read somewhere but later learned he just made up.

I didn't need to attend kindergarten for a full school year. I had Mom and Dad or five years before first grade started. I had Wayne to learn important socialization skills through playing together indoors. And I had all the rest of the kids on the north end of Dudrey Court to join me for "recess" aka playing outdoors.

Day 2 - Allison Wyatt, 6, Student

       Allison was shy. At six years old, that was the only word she knew to describe how she felt when strangers looked at her, especially if they tried to get her attention. A big smile from a stranger just made her look away and down, hoping her long blonde hair would cover her blushing cheeks, as though not being able to see the stranger would somehow make her invisible.

       All her effort went into being a good girl, one who attracted only positive attention from her parents. Misbehaving brought the type of attention she hated, with one parent pointing out to the other what she had done wrong or failed to do at all. Just the mention of her failings was enough to make her want to cry or hide or both.

       Allison hated it when adults laughed at something she said. She would never forget how she felt when her mother laughed when she explained to the milkman that they needed more milk because they "had an ulcer in the family." She didn’t think there was anything funny about that. When the milkman joined her mother and laughed, she couldn’t get away from them and into her bedroom to hide fast enough.

       Her shyness made it all the less understandable that she chose one day not only to tell a lie, but also to get up in front of her entire class during show-and-tell to do so. Something brought her to the point of overcoming her shyness to raise her hand in order to be called on to share her news with her first grade classmates. She eagerly walked to the front of the room and faced her classmates, pointed to her socks and told them they were new. But they weren’t. She had already shared the news of her new socks at show-and-tell before. She couldn’t remember if it was last week, last month, or even longer ago. She just remembered that she had already stood in front of the class for show-and-tell before. And she remembered that she liked the attention. Or was it that she was jealous of the others who had shared that they had new shoes, new dresses, new skirts, or whatever?

       As soon as she had told her news – her lie – it was just a little one, she thought, and no one would actually remember that the socks she pointed to that day were the same as before – she realized what she had done, lowered her eyes and head and made her return trip to the desk more quickly.

       And then she started to think.  She knew telling lies was wrong. Should she tell her mom what she did?  Did she have to tell her mom? Would the teacher figure out she lied? Would her teacher tell her mom?

       What should she do?

Warming Up - Exercise 6

To Visit Japan, A Childhood Dream

One of my earliest childhood memories is of a wooden trunk in the basement that contained my parents' mementos.  The trunk was off limits to us kids, although occasionally Mom or Dad would open it while we were in the basement and would show us some of the things in it.

My special memories of the contents of that trunk were all connected to items my father brought back from ports he visited during his days in the Merchant Marines during and in the year after World War II.  And the most important of those for me were a  kimono and fan from Japan.  I had never seen such a colorful, decorative, or soft piece of clothing as that kimono.  And it opened up a door in my curiosity that demanded I learn as much as possible about Japan and the people who lived there.

When I started school, I discovered there were a few books in the school library about Japan.  I read them all, starting with the shelves that were identified as appropriate for first graders and then continuing up the graded shelves.  By the third grade, I had finished all the available books, all the way up through those on the sixth grade shelf.

The dream of someone else also contributed to my dream.  Miss Ingram, the music teacher in our elementary school, was dedicated to igniting interest in music among her students.  Each year she organized two musical productions, operettas, in which we students starred, one for the third and fourth graders and one for the fifth and sixth graders.  The sixth grade production when I reached that age had Around the World in 60 Minutes as its theme. One piece included was the Gilbert and Sullivan tune "Three Little Girls From School Are We."  I will never forget wearing the purple silk kimono from the basement trunk in that production.  And my curiosity about Japan got a little more of a boost when Miss Ingram taught the three of us who sang the song how to open our fans one-handed with the flick of the wrist.  Until then, I had had to use both hands to pull the two wooden ends apart carefully to expose the painted scene of Japan on the delicately folded paper between the wooden handles.  By then, my dream had grown from learning as much as possible about Japan to visiting Japan.

In the following ten years, my Japan dream took a back seat to the shorter-term goals of finding and keeping best friends, passing tests, getting good grades, growing up, getting boys to notice me, getting my parents to stop noticing everything I did, and getting away from their limits and the small town I had felt I was stuck in.  Eventually I did made it away from the midwest, all the way to San Francisco where I ended up in a Masters Degree program in Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL).  My acceptance into that program was the switch that turned my dream of visiting Japan back on.

There weren't many jobs in Japan when I completed my training, so I chose Iran as my first overseas experience.  While there, I continued to dream of visiting Japan.  At the end of that two-and-a-half year-experience, I finally made it to Japan, my final stop in a two-week, multi-country trip home.  Four days in India, then four in Thailand, four in Indonesia, a day back in Thailand, and finally, four days in Tokyo.  Four days when my jaw ached the whole time because of the ear-to-ear grin that I couldn't stop.  I was in Japan!  And I loved everything I saw.

By accomplishing my dream, I learned that having a dream, and working steadily to accomplish it, made problems and disappointments, both small and large, almost disappear.

The Big Lesson

The most important lesson of this experience wasn't obvious to me until years later when my parents, my husband, and I were crossing the mall in Washington, DC.  A middle-aged Japanese man approached my father to ask for directions.  After pointing out the way, my father joined us and commented that fifty years earlier, while he was in the Pacific in the Merchant Marines, he would never have imagined that he would one day be speaking to someone from Japan in the capital of our country.

Hearing that comment made me realize how much it meant that my parents never discouraged me from my dream of going to Japan, a dream that began so shortly after the end of World War II.  It would have been easy to understand had either of my parents tried to dissuade me from my interest in our former enemy.  Instead, they encouraged the spark of interest with the hope that it would lead to other interests and a love for learning. They were right.

Warming Up - Exercise 5

THE PHYSICS OF TOOTHPASTE TUBES AND SOAP BARS

My parents didn't disagree about how to squeeze the toothpaste tube.  They agreed that the only reasonable place to squeeze it was at the bottom, not at the top, and not in the middle.  And they spent a lot of time trying to get that message through to us kids.  These were the days before toothpaste pumps and plastic tubes.  These were the days when toothpaste tubes were made from tin and came with painted labels that flaked off as we rolled the tubes up.

There was one brand that would
have solved the problem very well:  Vademacum, a pink, powdery, not quite minty toothpaste made in Sweden that came with its own roll-up key that fit on the bottom of the tube.  But our family was Norwegian, not Swedish.  And while nearly everyone in Minnesota in those days came from Scandinavian stock, there were differences, such as the difference between being Norwegian and being Swedish.  I never knew if the fact that Vademacum came from Sweden was the reason we didn't use it, or if it was more expensive the other brands, or if Mom and Dad just didn't like the taste.  Whatever the reason, instead of picking a technical solution, Mom and Dad kept trying a pedagogical approach:  whenever they found evidence that small fingers had made an impact in the wrong place, they reminded us of the importance of squeezing from the bottom.

At about the same time, I was going through a particularly intense curiosity phase.  I had at least two siblings by then, maybe even three.  No matter the number, what was important was that the youngest one was an infant.  And I was old enough to "get" to help Mom with the daily bathing ritual.  Sometimes I even got to help change the diapers.  In those days, changing diapers meant forcing thick diaper pins with pastel-colored plastic heads through multiple layers of thick cotton, without poking the baby in the process, right after having removed the pins from multiple layers of soggy thick cotton.  The points of those pins were sharp enough to cause the baby to scream, but not sharp enough to get through the layers of cotton without some force, or some help.

The help came in the form of something that these days might be found in "Hints from Heloise."  I watched Mom push the diaper pins into a bar of soap that served as a diaper pin cushion.  The soap added just enough slick to the metal so the pins just slid through the diapers.  Using the bar of soap probably aided in the disinfecting of the pins once removed from the soggy diapers, too.

But what was more amazing to me was that just by washing my hands with the bar of soap, the tiny holes in the soap bars disappeared.

And that  observation made me wonder if I could work the same trick with other materials.  I was somewhere between 5 and 7 so I hadn't been exposed to science classes that might have provided me with an understanding of the principles that explain the differences between the properties of solids, liquids, and gases.  And I probably wouldn't have understood just which of those categories bar soap falls into anyway.

Since the soap pin cushion usually sat in the bathroom, on the edge of the tub, right next to the diaper pail, my eyes fell on items close to it for my experiments.  And the first thing I put my hands on was the toothpaste tube.  I pushed a pin into it in a couple of places and held the tube under running water and swished my hands around it a few times.  Then I looked to see if the holes disappeared.  I don't remember if I could see the holes or not because when I brushed my teeth, any observations I had earlier were replaced by the vision of tiny streams of toothpaste coming out of the holes I had created.

And while neither Mom nor Dad had ever told me I shouldn't push pins into toothpaste tubes, I knew I couldn't admit to them or anyone else that I had done that.

Later that day, Mom and Dad came to my younger brother and me and showed us what happened when they squeezed the toothpaste tube.  I am quite certain the lack of surprise on my face gave away my role in this event, but my parents didn't accuse either of us or express anger or disappointment or any of the other negative responses I had expected.  Instead, they pointed out that the phenomenon they were demonstrating was probably the result of us kids squeezing the tube from the top instead of from the bottom.

The result:  I have never since squeezed a toothpaste tube anywhere but from the bottom. 

The Lesson

Wise parents don't take every opportunity to point out how much smarter they are than their children.

Sometimes cutting a child some slack gets better resuts than catching the child doing something against "the rules" and passing out punishment.

How I Have Used This Lesson In Life

Just as it was more effective for my parents to use the experience to make a point they had not succeeded in making by other means, sometimes it is more effective for a supervisor to praise an employee, or a teacher to praise a student, for doing something right, even if it isn't clear the employee or student was involved in the accomplishment.  The result may be a turnaround in the employee's or student's motivation.

Warming Up - Exercise 3

To Sandy, From Henry

About his paintings, Norman Rockwell said, "The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be." 

I selected this quotation because I grew up in Norman Rockwell’s small town America, where celebrating Christmas was never sordid or ugly. This is a Christmas story, but its lessons could come from any holiday in any place or time.  To begin, here’s an outline of a typical Christmas from my childhood:

By Christmas Eve, the pile of presents under the tree had grown beyond the tree’s circumference.  In the late afternoon, we would have a light meal, to tide us over until later.  After that meal, we six kids were allowed to pick out one present each to open. With that done, we would pack ourselves into the car for the drive to Grandma and Grandpa’s house where all the aunts, uncles, and cousins would meet up.  Grandpa and Grandma had 36 grandchildren so the house was well filled by the time we all arrived.

Once there, we’d eat the real evening meal.  

In no time, the suspense had grown nearly as high as the pile of presents under Grandpa and Grandma’s tree. But we had to wait until Santa arrived to hand out the presents.  Santa was usually Uncle Marvin, dressed in a remarkably awful Santa suit that didn’t fool any of us.  We made a game of seeing who would first notice that Marvin was no longer in the room.  His absence meant Santa would arrive soon.  Once Santa arrived, there was great jostling to see whose present would be passed out first. 

Once the presents were opened, we spent an appropriate amount of time playing with the toys before we all headed home late in the evening.

At home, my brothers, sister and I got to open the rest of the presents under the tree.  In the morning, there would be more presents, this time from Santa.  That was our ritual, our celebration of Christmas as a nuclear – and extended – family. 

But when I turned 12, the routine changed slightly.  Grandpa and Grandma started spending the winters in Arizona.  With Grandpa and Grandma no longer in town for Christmas, Mom and her siblings rotated hosting the family on Christmas Eve.  That’s how we ended up one year for my special Christmas at Uncle Marvin’s house.

Uncle Marvin lived on the farm that had been home for Mom and her siblings while they grew up.  That house had more memories for their generation than the house in town that we cousins thought of as Grandma’s.  So it was appropriate that a special gift was waiting there that year.

When my family arrived at Uncle Marvin’s house, nearly all the cousins who were old enough to walk and talk ran out to the car with one question – “Who is Henry?”  And they were all asking me that question.  But I had no idea what they were talking about.

They nearly dragged me into the house and up to the tree to point to the envelope laying on one of the boughs.  “To Sandy, from Henry” was written on the envelope. I had NO IDEA who Henry was.

For the first time ever, there wasn’t any competition about which present should be handed out first.  Everyone wanted to know what was in the envelope from Henry.  When Santa handed me the envelope, every eye followed his hand.  I opened the envelope; I pulled out a locket on a chain.  And nothing else.  I still didn’t know who Henry was. 

Then I heard my mother laugh.  She turned and pointed at her baby sister, LaVerne, and explained to those few who didn’t already know that Henry had been her boyfriend before she met my father.  Henry had given her the locket for Christmas.  When Mom met Dad, she gave the locket to LaVerne.  LaVerne kept it until Mom’s oldest daughter – that’s me – turned 13.  And LaVerne decided it was time for the locket to be passed on - from Henry, to Sandy.

When I got married, I gave the locket to my sister, Joan.  And I never gave it another thought, until Joan and I found it in my mother’s jewelry box after she died.  As Joan and I stared at it in the box, we realized immediately that we needed to pass it on - again.

You see, even though Mom married Dad and not Henry, Henry had become part of our family.  Henry’s daughter, Kathy, married Mom’s nephew, David, making Henry my cousin’s father-in-law.  And Dad’s best friend, Norman, had a sister who was Henry’s wife, making Norman Kathy’s uncle.  A few weeks later, when Kathy and David invited Dad and Norman for dinner, the two of them delivered the locket to Kathy, to return it to the family.

LaVerne, Mom, and Henry died within four months of one another.  But every Christmas, they are with me in the story of the envelope labeled, “To Sandy, from Henry.”

Since I opened with a quotation, let me also close with one, from Clara Ortega, that sums up my special family Christmas.

“To the outside world we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were. We know each other's hearts. We share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live outside the touch of time.”

May all your holidays be blessed with rich family traditions at all holidays.