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In early grade school there were always the pictures of old men: paintings of the founding fathers, or black and white photos of our principal or the superintendent of our school district, maybe a famous Minnesotan.
For George Washington, it was the painting of him at the bow of the wooden skiff while crossing the frozen Delaware river in the sleet, for his surprise attack on the British garrison at Trenton, New Jersey. I thought about that years later when I was still in public school but when I was a deer hunter with the old men down on the frozen Mississippi river bottoms in a 14-foot aluminum boat with my grandfather, who was an old man, at the outboard and me and Ralph (an even older man) on the middle bench and my own old man in the bow pounding, pounding to break the ice in the dark. A gray and black and white morning with us in dirty orange, not the technical blaze orange of nowadays. That was during the mini-ice age of the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s another story altogether.
For Lincoln it wasn’t old Abe himself but just a painting of a log cabin in the Illinois or Kentucky woods. Washington and Lincoln were our King Arthur or Joan of Arc or Prometheus.
The very first thing we learned at that school on the very first day of kindergarten (which is a very German-sounding word) was “The Pledge of Allegiance,” and standing up, facing our flag, with our right hands over our hearts, we repeated it every morning first thing, and before Halloween we had it memorized, and then came Thanksgiving and the Holidays and then Presidents’ Day, and we continued to say The Pledge for a couple years subsequently. I had a very cloudy relationship to The Pledge because from where I came from it always meant soldiering.
Soon I learned to print the letters of the alphabet. I was very average at that and felt disappointed in myself. I was better at copying the portraits of dogs from the illustrated book of dog breeds.
The next year I learned to write in cursive. A couple years later I stopped writing in cursive.
I wrote and illustrated a children’s book in the sixth grade, a laminated book stapled together, drawn in marker, about the adventures of an anthropomorphic – as we do – time-traveling white ermine weasel (Mustela erminea). His participation in the Revolutionary and the Civil wars. His life as a mountain man trapping beaver in the Rocky frontier.
In the seventh grade we had a class called Reading, which I thought was silly and remedial. I had been a reader for several years and was above being a seventh grader taking Reading class. I felt arrogant about that. I was a reading snob very young. I was a music snob, too, because I listened to The Beatles when my classmates listened to Michael Jackson and Prince or KISS and Van Halen. The arrogance and snobbishness I have not unlearned.
The irony is that I was doing poorly in the Reading class. I often did poorly in Reading because I resented being assigned books that didn’t interest me like Poe and Harper Lee, and I wasn’t sophisticated enough to appreciate Dickens or Shakespeare. I wasn’t the great reader I thought I was.
But I was lucky to be allowed to do extra credit for the Reading class. And for my extra credit I chose to write. I wrote a sketch. My sketch I wrote in the second person singular, about a bull rider climbing into the bull’s pen, astride the bull, and the gate opening, and the bull being released, and the world opens before you and you ride the bull for about three seconds. And that was the end of the sketch.
I handed it to Mr. Smith at his desk, my sketch on yellow legal-sized paper. I sat down at my table and Mr. Smith, who was balding but had a beard and a lisp, read it. Then he called my name and I stood up and he had the yellow sketch in his hand, and he asked me, Did you write this? and I replied, Yes. And he said, Are you sure you wrote this? and I said, Yes, I did. So that sketch for extra credit helped me a lot in that grade.
I wrote a couple of other sketches around that time and in that same manner. Imaginative or from firsthand experience. One was about sitting in a duck blind and the ducks coming in to the decoys.
In Social Studies in ninth grade, I wrote an essay titled “Sur l’Utopie et des Utopies.” I was precocious and pretentious, and I have not unlearned those either. I was learning just enough French to attach a French title to an essay.
In French class I memorized the first two lines of the song “Sur la Pont d’Avignon,” which I remember to this day. About, I imagined, a beautiful stone bridge in the French countryside over a brook. I learned to imagine life in peace.
I found out about studying abroad from a bearded, cigarette smoking, 17-year-old French foreign exchange student named François.
I learned a kernel of Greek. From “Oedipus Rex” I learned that ‘rex’ meant ‘king,’ and over the years I learned the mathematical symbols delta, theta, psi, sigma, phi, and omega. And I learned a kernel of Latin from “O! Magnum Mysterium” (‘Oh, Great Conundrum’) and other choir songs. A kernel, as gardeners know, is a necessary – but not sufficient – requirement.
We were taught not to smoke by a very old gentleman who came to our class when we were eight years old, and who had his throat cut out at the clavicle and who breathed and ate through the hole and who covered the hole with his hand when he needed to speak. That scared the bejeezus out of me for a long while. But some lessons you never learn. And some lessons you just don’t follow.
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