Kara's Gone Up in a Spaceship

I dropped Kara off to Kindergarten this morning on her first full day. She wore a red, Polo shirt and khaki pants. Her backpack, a real prize that Lynn-nore discovered at a Hallmark store, was pink bubble gum and she was clutching a stringy-headed blond doll with puffy muffin feet. On the way, she was nervous. She asked me about my own first-day at Kindergarten.

My first day I was typically clueless as to what was happening. The stream-of-imaginative-consciousness that was my immersive world of play and song was being directed in a different, somewhat uncomfortable direction. No doubt my Mom tried to clearly explain what was happening several times – we visited the classroom a week before – but her words fell like golden leaves to the forest floor. The seasons were changing, but so brilliantly. Therefore, to be honest, the first day of Kindergarten was kind of a shock.

When Kara and I arrived at the school, I played like I didn’t know where her class was. “Now where do we go from here?” I said. Kara grasped an extended finger and hauled me inside and up a flight of narrow navy steps. A wide, olive pair of slacks disappeared at the top of a far-away staircase. Voices bubbling, pushing, stumbling. We turned the corner and found the hallway already adorned with hooks, against which backpacks and other paraphernalia were hurled like siege troops struggling to climb a muddy wall. Kara’s name stood proudly above her own hook, and we put her backpack on it. Someone in the room behind us chimed, “Kara’s here!” And her teacher said, “Good!”

Blocks, faux-brick, cardboard blocks, were my salvation those first, awkward 20 minutes of Kindergarten. The teacher, merely a faceless force-field of adult energy and will, shepherded me into the room like an alien abduction. My Mom was part of the plot, smiling guilty and waving. Adrenaline survival made her passing of no consequence; she could not (or would not) help me. Blocks stacked high, each one upon another. Blocks propping and pushing each other. I can build a wall. I can build a tower. I can build a city with many windows, and I do. Slowly, the blocks anchor me and open up to me the existence of other children like myself. There’s a girl playing with dress ups, a dark frilly dress with white, fur trim. There’s a short little boy just coming in the room with blond hair. There’s a mat on the floor that looks like a little village which has been flattened upon the brittle glass of a microscope slide. We are in the space saucer. It is taking off.

I took a photograph of Kara opening her backpack as it dangled on the hook. Her teacher, dark brown in a brown dress and brown hair, said, “Kara, get out your blue folder and your snack.” I started to open the backpack, but then stopped my fingers and let Kara do it, passing the baton of power over to this new authority in Kara’s life. A taller little girl with bright, blond hair curled cloud-like upon her head came out of the room like a soldier and ushered Kara inside. The door of the spaceship closed. The little blond girl was in charge. “Here, Kara,” she stated, “here is where you put your snack…” I turned, earthbound, and drove on to work.


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