Memory trumps the present

Previous experience dictates the government of children. That's largely what complicates the issue of Kara's future. It isn't that the prognosis was difficult of itself: Your bright child has impulse control problems, otherwise known as ADD. Some medicine will help her cope, and give her control. And, oh, she should matriculate into first grade this year. First grade! We had spent the summer convincing ourselves that a do-over for Kindergarten was better. We talked to other parents and to Kara's kindergarten teachers. We observed her in different settings. And all of it had led to--I'm sorry, did you say first grade? Yes. But what if she doesn't make friends? What if she excludes herself, the way she's done before? What if she gets too shy again? What if the teacher doesn't care for her? And here we are, in the thick of previous experience.

My elementary school was horrible. I'm not sure why, except that I picked my nose, wriggled in my seat, and daydreamed so extensively that those moments where you realize the teacher has been calling your name over and over for awhile-yeah, those happened a lot. There was a window in my classroom in third grade through which I could see the forest. Its limbs and branches, its green leaves and the green hillsides and blue mountains beyond it suggested horizons achingly more interesting than anything happening in my neck of the woods. I looked at it a great deal. It made me feel clean and alive. I watched squirrels racing around in its limbs. I watched the fall colors spread over its surface until the trees made a carpet for winter. I watched that gorgeously yellow-green spring slip up and out of its cold bark, and how the birds came back and settled in its branches. So much life and meaning was going on out there, it made everything in here as dry as a solid sheet of double digit arithmetic.

I genuinely tried to pay attention. All would be going well until my teacher, usually a sincere and simple woman who liked children (of a sort) and taught to the book, would say something like, "put on your thinking caps" and I'd spend a half-hour's reverie working out the design of a thinking cap. The problem with the thinking cap was weight, as best I could tell. Headphones, remember, were gigantic mushrooms in 1977, and when you added the necessary material required to detect, categorize, and stimulate the proper bits required for thinking, the whole contraption could weigh upwards of thirty pounds! How would we carry such burdens, being only seven or eight years of age? And would the teacher or other students have access to our thoughts? What if you wandered a little? What if people found out you had a crush on that girl over there? What about the game of galactic war you and a friend were conducting on smuggled bits of notebook paper discretely torn? Indeed, this business about a thinking cap was nothing but an Orwellian plot to achieve 1984! Forget all about it, then, in case you genuinely solve the engineering difficulties and actually think one up.

Other favorite problems: How to save up enough money to purchase toys? We had a large hill behind my house, and I was fascinated with the mental construction of a wooden corridor full of jumps and hoops for coin racing. (A coin, by the way, has the best chance of rolling and being directed in its roll by first being allowed to go the length of an extended finger pointed at the desired direction. I worked this out during elementary school.) I and friends puzzled over how toy companies were going to manufacture a proper Death Star, and suggested solutions to each other. I was convinced that magnetism would make an excellent levitation system for space toys, but couldn’t solve the problem of balance. A big enough magnet could push a round Death Star into the air, but then the minute you put your Episode IV Luke Skywalker action figure on it, the whole thing would shift out of the magnetic field and crash onto the floor. Another long-time engineering project was a clubhouse. None of the trees in my neighborhood were large enough to hold a proper clubhouse. My own backyard was flat and dusty. This was a problem. The solution was a free standing, two-storey wooden construction with an interior staircase. Balls, bikes, gloves and other yard-paraphernalia would be stored downstairs and toys upstairs. A padlock would keep neighborhood bullies (like one MC) out. (Believe it or not, I actually saw my design in the flesh over at a neighbor kids house, and another one in Massachusetts behind a house in Hamilton.)