2024-06-23 Journal Entry

Created: June 23, 2024 10:49 PM Tags: Daily

Much of my past is remembered not in the form of memory but rather through words. I remember the stories I’m told about myself, about the mishaps and quotes and things that my parents say I did. Some of my earliest memories are somehow different than my parents’ memory of me — each of us comes forward with our own set of preconceptions, and the past is irrevocably stamped by those lines. They will always be there, like the grain of a cut of wood.

The earliest thing I can remember clearly was my day alone in kindergarten. Mrs. O’Connor was my teacher, a woman so old even then that I’d be concerned about putting my child in her class. My parents wanted me to be taught by Mrs. Wadd, a member of my church and a nearby neighbor.

The flu was running through our class, and probably half of the students didn’t even show up that day. Our classroom was wide — at least in my memory — and sectioned off into little areas for toys and reading and art. The room was sparse even at the beginning of the day, our numbers thinned to a mixture of immunologically resilient and those whose parents were perhaps unaware. The latter camp thinned out quickly as parents learned of the situation, calling in regularly to take their child out of class.

Back then we had those old, off-gray office phones with intentionally jarring ringtones, and on days like today the phones were ringing nonstop to notify teachers of their child’s dismissal. Kids would pack up their still-to-large backpacks, the straps unable to prevent the pack from knocking at the backs of their knees, and jog down to the reception desk where their mothers waited, happy to be anywhere elsewhere, anywhere not penetrated by those horrible fluorescent lights or the constant scent of janitorial cleaning supplies, ammonia, or Mrs. O’Connor’s distinct old-person smell.

The rest of us stayed either because parents couldn’t pick us up or simply weren’t aware. Our numbers had dwindled from a class of twenty-something students down to the last handful of us. Any semblance of a lesson plan was firmly out the window and out on the front lawn by this point, and we were mostly given free reign to entertain ourselves however we liked. This was in the early 2000s where we would’ve just had access to really simple computer games, and I remember spending a fair amount of time doing what I remember as an automated paint-by-numbers, an MS-paint-bucket-tool with pre-drawn lines, which was probably cutting edge back then.

Finally, in our kindergarten Lord of the Flies, our numbers had dwindled to, well, me. It was myself and Mrs. O’Connor and our teaching assistant, and I think by now the teachers were ready to call it quits. They called Mom just to make sure she was aware that I was the only one remaining — apparently the neighborhood grape-vine-messages hadn’t quite reached her yet — and so she swooped by and took me home. As the last one standing, however, it was nearly 1pm and the school day was practically over, so my memory of that day is largely that I got to have the lego station all to myself and could build a really tall tower, and then I went home essentially at the same time as usual.