As part of my efforts to be viewed as a non-shitty parent, I walk with Owen to his jiu jitsu class on Monday evenings. It’s only three blocks from the Zimmerman Compound and, when he first enrolled, he walked there himself. But that was September, and our slice of the planet hadn’t turned away from the sun by 6:00PM. But in January, it’s already dark. It’s dark all the time. January is the worst month.
In the brief time it took us to cover the distance, Owen said, “Know a funny thing? I can remember the first day of fourth grade, but not fifth grade or sixth grade! Isn’t that weird?”
Hm. I considered this for a moment. It was indeed weird. Owen’s fourth grade was neither the first nor the last year at his school. It wasn’t his first woman teacher (it was his fifth one in a row), nor was it his most recent school year.
“Really?” I said, incredulous. “You sure you don’t remember the first day of sixth grade? That was just a few months ago.”
“I can’t think of it,” he said, noticing that the memory was somewhere in his brain, like a lost book shoved behind other books on a shelf, but that he simply couldn’t access it.
“What was so special about fourth grade? What happened on that first day?”
“You know. The teacher just said hi and talked and stuff.”
“Yeah…”
“And then she had us all sit in a circle on the floor,” he explained, and then noted that this was the teacher’s method of introducing everyone to everyone else.
Of course, Owen had sat in a circle lots of times before, most notably in preschool and kindergarten. But by fourth grade, such circular kumbaya-ing seemed to juvenile for Owen and the other nine-year-olds, so the action of doing something unexpected created a solid pattern in Owen’s neurons that he can still easily recall over two years later.
He asked if I could recall any first days of school. My mind scrambled to recall which school I attended for which grade. I quickly thought about seventh, my first year of junior high, and twelfth, the most recent year of public school I had in my mind. where did those memories go? Why couldn’t I access them? What happened in the interim that caused thirteen first days to merge with the hundred other regular school days from each year. Yes, I could picture my science teacher from seventh grade, who gave me a pencil sharpener I still had mounted on my wall, I could remember that paunchy, bearded biologist from eleventh grade that uncomfortably asserted evolution was true, and I could recall the beautiful student teacher from second grade, who smelled of flowers ( a pleasant juxtaposition from the rest of the staff, who incessantly reeked of coffee), always wore cowgirl boots, had flowing blonde hair, and no thumbs. But considering kindergarten through twelfth grade for a moment, I could really only remember one: tenth grade.
“Really? Tenth? Why?”
I explained that that was my first day in a new school district. It was also my first day of high school. I didn’t know anyone. What’s more, the bus dropped me off at the doors a full half hour prior to the first bell. While other students convivially hobnobbed, or smoked in the parking lot, or slept on the floor in the library, I merely stopped at my locker, dropped off what I didn’t need right away, then walked to my first class. I turned on the lights, sat at a desk in the back row, and stared off at the bland room for ten minutes, until another student arrived. She didn’t even nod in my direction. Just sat in a seat a decent distance from me, opened a compact, checked her hair, and flipped through a notebook.
“Why were you so early?” Owen wanted to know.
“I don’t know. The bus came early all through tenth and eleventh grade. After a while, I learned to go hang out in the library and I scrambled to finish my homework or I just looked at the books, and there was this other guy I would sit and talk to for a while.”
“Do you remember any other years?”
“Well, I remember the first day of college, but that was a lot more recent. That was in 2000.”
“What!” he blurted. “You’ve been going to college since 2000?”
“Well, no. Remember, first I went to Century College. I went there from 2000 to 2002, then after I got my degree I didn’t go to college again until 2009. So that whole time we lived in Big Lake – back when you were born, I didn’t go. Even once we moved to St. Paul, it was still over a year before I started at Hamline.”
“Still, that’s a long time.”
“I know. But I’m taking it slow.”
Then Owen ran off into the rec center to attend jiu jitsu, and I was left trying to recall my first day of kindergarten. I can remember certain images, certain features, and vague recollection of a class discussion on December ninth of my kindergarten year. I know my teacher’s name and, if you dropped me in the foyer of my elementary school, I could walk assuredly to my former classroom. After all, I was at that school for five years, seeing my kindergarten teacher in the hall and passing by her room long after I’d moved on to higher grades, all the way up to fourth grade.
And then it hit me, I remember my first day of fourth grade, too.