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How lucky we were to have libraries in each school, and librarians to work them. I learned to use the card catalogs and the Dewey Decimal System to look up ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus), river otter (Lontras canadensis) and beaver (Castor canadensis). ‘Castor’ refers to the expensive beaver castor glands, and ‘canadensis’ means ‘Canadian’ or ‘North American.’
We learned how the Indians used fish as a fertilizer, and learned the words Chippewa and Ojibwe from Miss Kalland, who was part Chippewa. We learned about boat people (Khmer and Hmong and Vietnamese) and Henry Hudson “discovering” his river in New York and his bay in Canada.
In phy ed we learned kickball and T-ball and soccer, then cross country skiing and curling and squash.
But our favorite thing we learned in gym was Boomerang Pinball, which is a combination of dodgeball with bowling pins back on the baseline to be guarded. It was a chaotic game with a dozen or more red rubber balls flying around and the two or four or five or six bowling pins on the baseline flying around when they were hit – I can’t remember if they were plastic or wooden bowling pins. That game they outlawed over the years as the athletic boys – there was always about five or six athletic boys in a class of 26 or so – and the tomboy – named Aimee and who herself was more athletic than the athletic boys – separated themselves from the timid and mousy girls and the rest of us. And as the unathletic religious boys with glasses who were given the single task of guarding one pin each would fail, and with the weight of failure break their glasses against the blackboard back in class or hide their heads on their desks afterwards and cry. It was a very serious game for many of us. The emotions – the joy and pain, the excitement and drama – would not be recaptured for many of us until years later when we discovered puberty and romance, liquor and weed, or Metallica and Nirvana.
In school with my peers, I learned both that crying makes you feel better but also not to cry at all, and sometimes if you cry you will regret it the rest of your life. I know this because there are four boys who cried in school with me that I could name to this day. Jeff and Lynn and John and Lance. But they have flown far away and will never see their names in my print.
There were so many things I thought I couldn’t do, and then I did them, and I thought better of myself because I could do them. That’s how you gain self-worth and self-esteem. But for some of us that was a well that was constantly draining so you always had to do more and keep proving to yourself.
In second grade I could make a presentation for the class about saving energy with solar panels and by living underground.
In eighth grade a presentation to all the parents about my trap line: my muskrat and mink and fox and coon line.
When I was 15, I almost couldn’t give my speeches in Speech class because I was so intimidated by the senior jocks in the class and because of the way they made fun of my quarterbacking skills.
But at 18 I didn’t think twice about giving a commencement speech in front of 5000 people.
I hope that as you travel outside these United States, travel around the world, people are curious about America and that they ask you.
As an English teacher abroad, I could tell my students that anyone with an education can become the President of the United States. And amongst my very closest foreign friends I could reveal that even I, me myself, like any of us, my peers and classmates, Aimee or Jeff or John or Lance or Lynn or the athletic boys or the timid, mousy girls, or the jocks, and the religious boys, and the ones with glasses, and all the rest of us – we all could’ve been President at some point in our childhood.
That possibility ended about sixth grade or so for me. I do not fault my class, or teachers, or school, or school district, or school board, or the anonymous middle-class or nice Minnesota, for losing the opportunity, the chance, to be President of the United States. I fault only myself, me, myself, my negative attributes. I take the fault for not continuing my opportunity to have a shot at being the President of the United States. I took on the responsibility for being a sensitive trapper, an educated duckhunter, a snobbish artist, a learned writer, a public-school reader.
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