It’s a memory. It’s a meme. It’s a memory. It’s a meme. It’s two blog entries in one!
First of all, don’t confuse this with the self-help/inspirational title of many years back, EVERYTHING I NEEDED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN. (An aside: Really? What about long division? What about tampons? What about putting on pantyhose? I’m sorry, but all kindergarten gave me was phonics, which has left me with the inability to use about 30 percent of my vocabulary in conversation.) No, these are the things I KNEW, the facts of life as I had divined them from parents, Tarzan movies and cartoons.
1) God had a dark crewcut, a blue robe and a big smile.
2) If someone almost drowned, you pressed on his or her chest, chanting “Out goes the bad air, in goes the good air” until a spume of water issued from his or her lips.
3) One hundred was the most of anything, you couldn’t have more than 100. A journey could not be more than 100 miles. A family could not have more than $100. After much thought, I decided my family had $36.
4) Red M&M’s were the best.
5) You couldn’t go more than a few yards in a jungle without hitting quicksand. Don’t struggle!
6) Only bad people got cavities. My sister had no cavities. I did. And just in case I still didn’t get the point that I was very bad, there were all those issues of Highlights handy, with Goofus and Gallant to drive the dichotomy home. I was so clearly Goofus.
7) “Jane” (not her real name) was weird. (Still feel bad about that arbitrary judgment. I remember gossiping with my best friend when report cards came out, remarking that “Jane” probably got all her checks in the “needs work” boxes. She’s wearing striped socks, a la the Wicked Witch of the East, in our class picture. What was her mother thinking?)
8) “Zip,” inspired by the terrier in the Weekly Reader, was the best puppet of all the puppets at Trinity Day Kindergarten.
9) The most formidable villain in all of Greek mythology was Daedalus. Hey, the cartoon said so! And don’t forget the song, in which Hercules was said to have “softness in his eyes/iron in his thighs.” It’s such a bummer when it goes the other way.
10) If you sucked your thumb, you would be buck-toothed and have to wear braces. I sucked my thumb. My sister didn’t. Guess who got braces, and who ended up with an utterly manageable overbite? Sometimes, Goofus wins!
What did you know, absolutely know, when you were five years old?
When I turned 5 I had a new baby sister (Diane) born just 4 weeks before my 5th birthday. Diane was the 9th of my parents’ kids. I had five older siblings and at lunch time one day, they tell me I looked around the table and said “How many kids do we have around here anyway?!” But I think I was actually 4 when I said that!
For my 5th birthday my grandma got me a miniature wooden bushel basket for my baby dolls. My brother Dave (age 13 at the time) saw it and said “Who gave you the sturdy basket?” And I replied “It is NOT dirty! Grandma just gave it to me!” I also fell asleep with all my clothes on the night of my 5th birthday, and I was allowed to stay that way until morning (sans shoes) since I’d had such a fun day.
I knew my dad was the strongest man in the world, and I loved to help him work in his workshop when he’d be doing carpenter work, his hobby. The smell of sawdust still makes me feel quite content. I also got to go with him to Zundell’s Photo Studio sometimes where he worked part time as a photographer. His regular job was as a mail sorter at the Post Office.
I knew my mom was the best mother in the world, and took good care of all nine Kirchner kids with love and efficiency. I lived next door to my Uncle Tim and Aunt Ruth, who had six kids, and we were like one giant family instead of two separate ones.
(The nine kids eventually became 10 kids when the last baby, Janet, was born on July 4th 1964!)
I knew (and actually told a little friend of mine), that if your parents yell at each other, they will definately get something called a divorce and then you only see your dad on weekends. (He must have been so stressed out after I told him that).
I knew that boys had something different in their pants and the girls in my kindergarden class spent some time trying to see as many of them as we could. I was “the doctor” of my neighborhood. The boys parents didn’t see it that way.
For some reason the girls played in the little kitchen and the boys rode on the little trucks.
I knew that the illustrations in books go a long way to tell a story and sometimes the story you imagined was better than what the words said when you finally learned to read them.
Flowers in people’s yard are not to be picked and given to your mother–she will yell at you. Also some leaves on trees can be eaten but the little white bulb at the bottom of that long grass will burn your mouth.
I learned that it is not nice to tell a kid that he’s fat, or call an African American man Mr. Ni**er or the race, “chocolate people”. I’m cringing as I admit this. Good lesson.
And if you skate on thin ice it might and probably will break. Luckily it was shallow water.
That the answers were printed at the bottom upside down. (I knew how to read in kindergarten and finished the game on page 4 of My Weekly Reader before the teacher had finished reading the instructions.) (My mother claims that I read to the class and it was the first time that Mrs. Dettenborn had ever had a break in all her years as a kindergarten teacher.)
I’m SO GLAD no one thought phonics the way to go when I was a little kid. The Republican Party actually tried to require the teaching of phonics – actually DID make it – a plank in the party platform not too long ago in my state (where the RP took such a slew to the extreme right that no one has seen them for years).
I have absolutely no memory of kindergarten. I wonder what happened that I completely blocked that year? But I do remember first grade and that my teacher Mrs. Dolan had a beehive hairdo and I wanted one when I grew up.
Weekly Reader is alive and well in schools today, Mary. I had a job interview with them about 15 years ago. I had to create an entire issue. Took me two weeks. And I didn’t get the job.
Laura -your recall is amazing! Kindergarten? Hell, I can’t even remember what happened last week. Oh, wait-I do remember something – we had to hide under our desks everytime we heard a plane overhead. Guess that pretty well dates me, huh?
1. I knew for a fact that Timmy liked me better than his old girlfriend Jessica; he told me so under the monkey bars
2. My mother told me I did the best impersonations of Mae West and Jimmy Carter that she ever heard. Go figure!
3. I knew what I was getting for my birhtday – a baby brother or sister. I was quite upset when he arrived three days late!
4. I knew I would one day be a Dallas Cowboys’ cheerleader.
5. I knew it was my destiny to marry either John Travolta, Shawn Cassidy or Han Solo.
6. I knew that if my father tried to make me eat peas again, I throw them up the next time too
7. High’s was the greatest convenience store on earth. At the time I had no idea what a “convenience” store was, but I did know that it sold Yoo-hoos and Tutti Fruiti ice cream and because it was at the corner of our street and my dad could carry me on his shoulders there and back.
8. Red Rose iced tea was the nectar of the gods, right behind Yoo-hoo
1. If you go over the edge of the hill in the back yard, you’ll fall in the swamp (we moved at the end of that year so I have no idea how big the hill was, or how wide the swamp, but I suspect it was a creek)
2. That if you’re young you have to pay to go to school. I did have to take a monthly tuition check to the office even though it was public school, but I’m now suspecting that I was actually paying to go out of district because the local district didn’t have public kindergarten, or maybe it was the age after all. The city we moved to didn’t have public kindergarten either, so my younger siblings went to kindergarten at the Baptist Church, even though we’re Jewish.
3. That if you drag someone by the ankles, something bad will happen. Towards the end of the year a boy dragged a girl around at recess, and she never came back to school.
Can’t remember much else, although our clssroom had a house big enough for kid-size furniture constructed out of blocks right in the room. No idea what kept it from falling down on us.
Wow, the Weekly Reader. What a blast from the past.
It scares me ,all of things that I CAN’T remember from then ( you are amazing with the names!), but there are a couple things that come back loud and clear. Number One : Boys were going to be a BIG part of my life! Number Two: I was going to marry my Dad when I grew up. Number Three: I was scared to death of getting Mrs Francis for my first grade teacher (self fulfilling prophecy).
I absolutely knew that I would have Mrs. Gray because everyone had Mrs. Gray for kindergarten. My mom put me on the bus and when I got to school and went into the building I found out that I wasn’t in Mrs. Gray’s class at all. There were too many kids and they had hired a new teacher at the last minute. Even Mom didn’t know that I was going to be in Miss Boner’s (I’m not kidding about the name) class.
Did anyone else learn phonics from Soundy the Elf who lived under a magic toadstool?
I’ve been looking for a reference to this online for years now. Checking and rechecking periodically… I went to school in New Orleans in kindergarden, and we had Soundy The Elf, too! I don’t remember if he lived under a toad stool, but I do remember the phonics lessons pretty well. I think they were transparencies on an overhead projector. Interesting. Can’t seem to find any proof of any published character by that name used as a teaching tool for children, aside from your personal memory reference. I was beginning to think that my teacher, Mrs. Atkinson, invented him!
Oooh, fun….
1. There were only three adult ages: 25, 50, 75. My parents were 50. Untrue, of course, but that’s how I saw it – I was big on symmetry.
2. There really was a house at Pooh Corner, if I could just figure out how to get there…
3. Santa Claus absolutely existed, and lived at the North Pole. I was pretty clear, however, that there wasn’t an Easter Bunny or a Tooth Fairy. Their existence didn’t make sense to me, as opposed to the complete logic of Santa Claus
These really date me, but here are some of the great truths I had discovered by age 5.
1. That the REAL Santa Claus was at L.H. Field’s Department store in Jackson (MI).
2. That the wilderness began at the Jackson city limits.
3. That all evil resided in Germany and Japan.
4. That my mom and dad were 32 and 35.
5. That nickels were the nicest coins—even if dimes were worth more.
6. That Trumbull School was the best place in town, and that Mrs.Humphries (my kdg. teacher) was beautiful.
7. That nothing beats a short nap on my blue chenille rug at school.
8. That the “A” sticker on the windshield allowed my dad to buy gas.
9. That $20 was the maximum amount of money.
10. That Superman, Terry and the Pirates, Little Orphan Annie, Captain Midnight, the Hermit, and lots of other radio characters lived somewhere in my neighborhood, but I couldn’t figure out where.
My biggest disappointment: I couldn’t start school on my fifth birthday (May 17).
My biggest failure in kindergarten: I never quite got the hang of tying my shoes so they’d stay tied. (Still a problem for me.)
There was no kindergarten at our neighborhood Catholic grammer school, so I have to start with my earliest memories beginning right before my sixth birthday when I started first grade and knew..
1) That we were the only family in our neighborhood that had four dogs! Brownie, Bingo her pup, and two black strays, whose names I’ve forgotten. The cats I remember better: Biscuit, Rusty and a few tiny kittens. My kitten I named Muffin. She was gray and had very soft, long fur.
2) That it was very scary sitting on the floor in the hall outside our classroom for air raid drills. The alarm hurt our ears and the wooden floor was hard. My friend Irene always sat next to me. Her big brother Tom told us you should never look up when the bombs come because we’d be blinded for life from the flash of the light, brighter than the sun. Sometimes, we’d just sit under our desks, put our heads down, and wrap our arms tightly around our heads for protection. The Reds in Russia wanted to kill everyone in America. Even me and Irene. And Muffin.
3) That the best route home was to walk down Honore to 73rd. Mr Bistricky, a friend of my Papa’s since high school, had the store with the biggest and best candy counter. All the candy was in a big glass case next to the front door, and Mr B always gave us a free piece of bubble gun, Bazooka with the comic inside the wrapper, if we bought something. And sometimes, even if we didn’t. I bought Mary-Janes or licorice whips mostly, sometimes Malteasers. Or if I had two pennies, a long strip of white paper with tiny disc-shaped candies in pastel colors stuck to it in rows. Real candy bars were a nickel.
4) That Murray Park Playground was the best place to go next after the candy stop. You play on the swings and teeter-totters, then drink ice cold water from the drinking fountain. It was a real fountain… always on, spouting away, no hands required. My best friend was four months older than me, but I was taller and could run faster. But Irene could swing higher and was better at jump rope. We both excelled at hopscotch. Our street was next to the railroad yard and we were given thick sticks of chalk by the trainmen, They used it to write on the boxcars. We used it for drawing hopscotch boxes on the sidewalk.
5) That if a kid in our classroom got sick and threw up, the janitor would come and sprinkle ‘compound’ all over IT and sweep that up. Ick. But our room still smelled awful, we were getting queasier by the minute, so our teacher would fling open all the windows as best she could. (I learned years later that the ‘compound’ used was sawdust and Lysol… the old fashioned red-colored kind. I’ve always been repelled the smell of Lysol. Ugh.)
6) That Willie is crazy! “Cubs won! Cubs won! he’d yell at anyone and no one. He lived above the tavern on Damen, and Mama said he’d been in the war and had a medal. Willie had a weird sing-song voice, walked with an odd hop-step rhythm, and wore winter coats in summer and a dirty baseball cap all the time. Grandma and Mama said stay away from him, but don’t make fun or be cruel, and always cross the street if you see him coming…
7) That I was the only one in my class that year who had two Christmas trees! Exciting, but I still missed Papa who was somewhere in the Aleutian Islands and it was very cold there. He wrote letters to Mama and Grandma, one a day always, sometimes even more. Mama’d read them to my brother Mikey and me. It made me sadder.
8) That the most beautiful dolls come from a faraway place called Japan. Mine had an embroidered silk kimono, beautiful black hair that looked and felt real. She’d tiny little sticks that held her fancy hairstyle in place and tiny white silk slippers on her little feet. Did the people in Japan still hate us? Were we supposed to hate them back? Mama said that was the war, and that it was over now. I still loved my doll.
9) That ‘How Much is that Doggie in the Window” is the best song ever!
10) That the best place in the world to be on a hot summer day is lying on a grassy hill, looking up at the clouds with your best friend, and trying to guess what animal looks most like each cloud.
(Sorry for the lengthy ramblings.. It truly amazes me to be able to remember all this.. Oh, and Irene and I still are close friends. We’ve a standing lunch date once a month.
)
Linda, how right you are, and I think I knew that as a child – being an adult is much better.
At Kindergarten (where my mother was the teacher, which made me feel like the deputy!) I knew a few things.
I knew that adults tricked you and couldn’t be trusted. They’d tell you this needle wouldn’t hurt, that they wouldn’t let go of you in the water, that it was ketchup and not blood on your knee. Seriously, I felt constantly betrayed!
Thanks to The Clangers, a wonderfully English series, I knew the universe was a wonderful and mysterious place. My brother had also told me it was infinite but that thinking about infinity sent you mad – I thought about it anyway.
I knew I’d lived in Malaya (I hadn’t, except in the womb).
I knew we had an Empire (our atlases still had the Empire shaded pink). I was nine when I realized we’d “lost” India. I said to my brother, “But Canada’s still ours, isn’t it?” Out of kindness, or in ignorance, he told me it was.
I knew that I was different – but hey, I’m a writer, so that should have been obvious.
1. If you didn’t stand up for yourself someone would beat you up for sport. Upon my father’s advice, I punched Marva Mack in the stomach the next time she bothered me and she started to cry. Wow, fighting back worked. My mother didn’t believe in fighting back because nice girls didn’t do that.
2. If you misbehaved the kindergarten teacher would smack your bottom with her hair brush and you would be so embarrassed.
3. There was no world outside of my family.
4. Joyce Bell was my best friend and would always be (we parted ways in 6th grade).
5. I could spell really well at 4 years old.
6. The best cartoon ever made was Mighty Mouse (Here I come to save the dayyyyyy, that means that Mighty Mouse is on the wayyyyyyy).
7. Superman didn’t really love Lois Lane; he was only pretending.
Although I have really good memories of kindergarten (thanks to the lovely French teacher who made us Happy face dolls — I still have mine, the purple-legged Happy Man) they’re mostly hazy and not really telling. But the next year (homework? What’s that??) in class we had this work assignment to write about friends and stuff. I wrote something like this:
“Today I am in Grade One. Grade One is Fun. Next year I’ll be in grade two. Then I’ll be in grade 3,4,5,6,7,8, then high school and college.”
If that’s not an insight into my personality, I don’t know what is…
1) That if you make a bad face and an angel is flying over your head at that moment, you’ll be frozen like that forever.
2) That ‘The Answer,’ which was ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ had reached my Uncle Pete’s house (some 30 miles away, the far reaches of the galaxy to my 5-year-old mind).
I knew that if your mom didn’t drive, you didn’t get to go to kindergarten- the school bus only took you to school starting in first grade. So I stayed home another year and played with the Catholic kids who were all going to Catholic school in 1st grade(the diocese schools did not have kindergarten like the public schools).
When I was five, I knew that if I crossed my eyes for too long, they would stay that way.
I knew that toys moved around and talked to each other when I left the room.
I knew that books without pictures were much more interesting than books with pictures.
I knew that not everybody spoke the same language as I did, but that it was rude to ask about it too loudly in public.
I suspected that garbagemen would take little kids away, if they happened to be outside when the garbage truck came.
I knew that God saw us all the time, even in the bathroom. (That freaked me out a little.)
And I knew — I remember the exact moment I realized this, at church one Sunday — that there had been a time when I hadn’t even existed, and that freaked me out more than anything.
Sounds like you all had nice childhoods.
I knew at five that it was better to be a boy than a girl; that brothers hated their sisters; that dads worked all the time and mothers didn’t; that people would disappoint but animals wouldn’t; that I was an oddball who didn’t fit anywhere; school was to be endured; music was to dance to; I should never sing out loud; hide when you cry; love makes you hurt.
Later, I learned that reading is the great escape.
Being an adult is much better than being a child. That one, I know is true.
Ooh, Yeah! Mighty Mouse. He was great! And I can’t forget Woody Woodpecker. I think they used to show them together, or one after the other maybe?
Kindergarten………..
I learned how to sing and did every chance I could get. Sang my first solo at kindergarten graduation. Something about a rooster on the barnyard gate.
My best friend was Dorothy who lived across the street. We would yell out our bedroom windows and meet behind her house to play. There was a BIG DARK forest (about 50 yards deep) behind her house. Now we could hear fine across a road but if you went past the third tree you could never hear your mother’s call. But until we were 6 and big kids it was kind of scary in that gigantic woods so we never went too far. When we were 6 it was okay.
We both “loved” Kevin in kindergarten and made a pact to kiss him before school ended. Of course we did–at the same time! And of course he cried!
Kindergarten also meant learning how to read and my first trip to the library. I clearly remember that first time. And the first book I was allowed to take out on my Aunt’s library card–C.W. Anderson’s The Crooked Little Colt.
Worse thing about kindergarten was that I HAD to wear dresses. I hated dresses. ‘Cause that also meant I couldn’t climb trees. (Which i did anyway.) Needless to say my dresses never got passed on to my sisters.
Wow. Kindergarten, huh? Let’s see, I moved three times in kindergarten, so I don’t have specific memories of teachers or classmates. That’s all a blur.
What I do remember is tap-dancing. I thought I was a tap-dancing fool.
Jackie, thanks for reminding me of Mighty Mouse….I adored that rodent, and thought Mickey Mouse was an inferior imitation.
Also loved Rocky and Bullwinkle (completely subversive, although at 5, that part went over my head, I just thought it was funny) and Huckleberry Hound…
1. The King James Bible was the only real Bible.
2. Women could have mustaches too.
3. Belts were absolutely nessecary.
4. Dockers were the best pants EVER.
i knew, I just KNEW, that my older half brother lived in Georgia – which was down the street from our house in Illinois, and over the hill (which was the dump). Somehow my 5-year-old mind remembered him leaving to go home, and driving over that hill – which is pretty much impossible – and that’s where I thought he lived. I guess I never cared enough to really go check it out, though…
1. I knew that my father lived next door to Elvis Presley when they were kids, and they were best friends
2.The first thing my mother ever said to my father was Hey Joe, whatcha know? You got gum?” (to this day if I say this to my mother she FREAKS out because she thinks it makes her sound like a German prostitute.)
3 That the song Hark The Herald Angel sings was about my Grandpa Harold. ( when I asked him, he even said Yes.)
4. Dogs were way better then cats
5. Some boys like my grandpa are “double jointed” in their jaws and could take their teeth out.
6. I was going to marry Scott my next door neighbor, he was older and very handsome, and always nice to me
7. That my cousin Freddie was the coolest girl in the world.
The Gopher Indians were so much smarter then those dumb coyote calvary guys …
The biggest mystery in my life at that point was why the hell all the people on Sesame Street live in the same house – because they weren’t related. It wouldn’t be till YEARS later that I would know anything about apartments.
For the record my Dad is a LIAR, as was my Grampa Harold.