Chapter 2 -- Kindergarten

Chapter 2 – Kindergarten

Last night I lay in bed with my 3-year-old daughter. It was our usual nighttime ritual. I tried to get her to open the secrets of what she thought and saw during the day. She almost never tells. Meanwhile, she prods me to recall my childhood.
This night she wanted to know about my entrance to kindergarten. Now that my son was about to enter kindergarten, Catie wanted to know more about it. Both she and her brother had been in what I considered one of the areas best pre-schools since they were infants.
When I told Catie that I hadn’t gone to pre-school, she was incredulous. My kindergarten teacher was my first teacher. At 3, Catie has already known the love, direction, and instruction of a half dozen caring teachers.
For me, my pre-school years were spent at home, mostly alone. Dad worked, mom was there. My brother was ten years older than I was.
We moved from Lynden when I was four, so I know that memories of Lynden are the early years. I don’t remember much.
One of the more pleasant memories I have of that time involves picking flowers for my mom. I guess it was May Day. Mom must have told me about it. I remember taking a wooden box with a handle out to the yard to pick flowers. At that age, I didn’t appreciate property lines and my mom reacted with a small degree of alarm when I returned with several flowers from the neighbor’s yard.
After we moved, I prepared for kindergarten. The first few weeks went well enough. However, my teacher, Miss Baker, told mom she didn’t like boys – they were harder to teach than girls. She also wasn’t happy with the school board’s ruling that teachers could no longer take pencils out of the hands of left handed kids and move then to the right hand – as had long been the practice. I remember during "scissors instruction" Miss Baker held up a pair of scissors and said, "Here is how you hold scissors safely, except for Greg – who holds them backwards." I knew I was different, but it seemed different in a bad way.
Miss Baker told us about Eskimos and their sled dogs. She told us that the smartest dog was the lead dog. It was a memorable story. Each week, one student would be selected to take the milk money collected from students up to the school office. This was my week. I was proud of the duty. I headed up to the second floor and only then realized – I hadn’t been to the office before. Plus, being five years old, I couldn’t read any of the signs. I was frozen with this dilemma. Little Greg holding on to the bag of milk money and not sure what to do. Then I saw Debbie Fisher. She went to my church. "Debbie, could you help me find the office." Debbie was happy to show me the way.
Upon returning to the kindergarten room, I was excited to tell Miss Baker that I faced a problem and solved it – using relationships. Miss Baker looked at me and said, "well it doesn’t sound like you would be a ver good lead sled dog." I felt bad. Like somehow I had done something wrong.