Summer Days

My grandson has finished his last week at the local Parks & Rec summer camp. It was an amazing time and he loved every minute. He's such a wonderful boy and deserved to have a great summer.

It brought back memories of my summer vacations. In those days most of us made our own fun. I knew of one or two kids who went away to camp but otherwise we all stayed in town. Most summers were spent with my family and I lost touch with my school friends. My sisters, younger brother and I played games, sometimes alone and sometimes with a few of the neighbor kids; roamed the neighborhood exploring; or traveled uptown to the library. The days seemed to stretch on forever but we were hardly ever bored and enjoyed our vacation immensely.

I don't remember much about what my older brother and sister were doing. My sister spent one or two summers working at the local sardine cannery and my brother was probably out with his friends. We never saw them much because when they were home, they were on the phone or watching TV. My sister was involved with the church even then and was probably making plans for her religious future. I really don't remenber much of what my brother did except for one time when he frightened us almost to death. We were walking uptown with him and he decided to show off by walking along on the top of the railing of the bridge that we used to cross the river. This river was shallow at that point and filled with big boulders. If he had fallen, he probably would have been killed.

I loved summer until the last few weeks when I would start missing school. Reading and playing with anyone who was available kept me entertained. Our games were simple. One game we played after a long day of running around was to sit on the edge of our front lawn and count the cars that went by. We lived on a State road but when I was young the cars were few. Once in awhile my older brother joined us and amazed me by being able to name the make and model of each car we saw. Another time we heard about a local farm that was hiring kids to pick vegetables, and my mother said we could go. I don't remember what we picked but I do remember that we were paid by the pound, and we were all proud of ourselves for earning some spending money.

My grandson has a much different life now but he enjoys summer in the same way. Days of nothing to do but have fun is the best memory he can have.

Cruel Fun

The town I grew up in was lily white. I never saw a person of another race until I was in college. The teachers in my schools, the people in my church, everyone was white,  and as far as I knew, all Christian. But when I was in fourth grade, one of my teachers was Jewish, I think.

I only knew about Jews from what I learned in Sunday school and of course, what I learned later in history lessons about WWII. Then my fourth grade teacher came along and made sure we learned something about the holocaust at a young age.

I don't remember much about my teacher. She was fairly young and dark-haired. I'm assuming she learned what she told us from her family or from people her family knew. Or she may have been given the information from someone she knew, or read about it somewhere, and had no personal connection to it. Whichever it was, she told her story very dramatically as if to make sure we never forgot, and I have never forgotten one especially graphic part of it.

I can still see her in my mind's eye, standing in front of the class, talking. She told us some scary things about what happened to the Jews  during the war. I imagine the parts I don't remember were the usual accounts brought back by news reporters and soldiers. These accounts were upsetting but were soon forgotten. However, the one story that I have never forgotten is the one about German soldiers killing Jewish babies. She described an especially heinous method that still makes me feel chilled. It involved soldiers, bayonets, Jewish mothers and their babies, and someone's idea of cruel fun.

I haven't thought about this teacher in years, but thinking back about my school years brought her to the forefront. I don't know why she thought she had to frighten 9 and 10 year old children with this graphically told story, but she must have thought she had a good reason. After that year she didn't return to teaching in my town. Maybe some of my classmates went home and repeated the story to their parents and those parents complained.

I just hope she didn't think of it as her own cruel joke.

Religious Freedom

When I was in third grade, my classroom was next to a class whose teacher was also the principal of the school. It was a small school but new and my class was there only temporarily. I never knew why except that it had something to do with our old school having some repairs done. I don't remember who my teacher was but I'll never forget the teacher next door.

Our principal was an older woman, or at least she seemed that way to me, and she was very strict and stern. We were all afraid of her. She would stand in the doorway of her classroom and watch everything that was going on. If she saw any of the students not acting appropriately, she would immediately call them to her. I never wanted to be noticed by her so I always behaved. I never actually saw her hollering at anyone but I just knew she could and would. Later that year we were moved to the other school and I assume she remained where she was.

My older brother went to school with one of her daughters and I remember my parents talking about the family once in awhile. Apparently they used to attend the church where my family went but left, supposedly because of the minister. I never knew what the problem between them and our minister was but I didn't really care because I liked him and his family. I was happy at our church. After my brother graduated from high school, he went to college and at some point started dating this teacher's daughter. They eventually got married and she and her mother came to be a part of our family, and I found that she was nothing like the teacher I thought I knew.

My brother and his wife never attended our church, or any other church. This made my mother unhappy but she never talked about it. After she died, my brother and sister-in-law started attending our old church which now had a new minister. They have become very active in the church and seem like different people. The new minister is very evangelical bordering on fanaticism and my brother seems to like this.

I often wonder if my brother feels guilty about my mother's unhappiness at his refusal to attend church and is trying to make it up to her. More importantly, he is making sure he will spend eternity with her. I feel sad about this. Not that he has a religion that gives him peace but that he feels he needs to go to extremes in his beliefs, which include judging other people and believing that everyone who doesn't believe as he does will go to hell. He's reached the same place that my older sister is in and I don't feel comfortable around either of them. Their religious beliefs have put barriers between us.

The Public System

In a way, education and religion are very similar. Teachers, as opposed to religious leaders, are the gods of education whereas in religion the god is out "there" somewhere. This difference is basically the only one.

Teachers have the true way of knowledge and only their way is right. Students must follow and obey without question. Any attempt at independent thinking is immediately eradicated. Most students find that learning what they're told to learn by their Teacher is easier and safer. After all, Teachers have the power to allow them to succeed or fail. It all comes down to self-preservation.

I was like all the others. I believed what my teachers told me and learned what was in my textbooks. My parents believed we were getting a good education. Although, according to some of the stories my parents told us of their school days, they may not have believed completely in the education system, but that was all there was. Thankfully my parents had a thirst for knowledge and read whenever they had a chance. This example is what saved all of us.

I know good teachers exist. I've met a few. Most of my teachers, however, were either worn out from the conflicts and politics they faced every day or just plain ended up in the wrong profession. Whatever the reason, the results are the same. Students don't learn much while they are in school. The lucky ones find ways to continue to learn after school. The not so lucky ones have no interest in continuing with anything even slightly resembling education. These are the future leaders of our country.

Family Dinners

Dinner with the family, supposedly one of the mainstays of American life, didn't happen very often in my house when I was little. My father worked nights, ate his main meal at noon and took his lunch to work. When we were in school, we usually ate school lunch and that was considered our main meal. In the evening, we ate a simple meal that my mother always called supper. Dinner was the noon meal. Since my older brother and sister were quite often late getting home, they ate whenever they got there.

On Sunday however, we all ate dinner together. It was usually a special meal for us and we looked forward to it, especially since it followed a long morning at church. We were always served meat along with potatoes and vegetables. The meat was usually beef prepared in different ways to stretch it among eight people. Vegetables were usually cheap so we were given plenty of those, and of course, there was always bread.

Our kitchen was small and even though we had a separate dining room, we always ate our family meals in the kitchen. My father removed the table-and-chairs set-up because we couldn't fit that many chairs in the space alloted. He built an L-shaped bench in the corner and placed the table next to it. I think we had room for three chairs at the table. The kids sat on the bench, my father sat at the head, and my mother sat next to him on the side next to the stove. The youngest sat next to my mother. It was crowded but I remember it with pleasure. The food was always good, the conversation was lively (we were all talkers), and my father often entertained us with stories of his life as a child.

We never had much money but my father had a good union job and he kept us supplied with the basics. I remember growing up knowing that we didn't have money for "extras" but I never felt deprived. It wasn't until I went out on my own that I realized my family was part of the working poor, and my mother had to scrape together enough money each week to pay the bills. There was never anything left over. Yet they encouraged all of us to continue our education after high school and managed to contribute something to what we earned on our own. I think my sense of security and well-being began at those family dinners and gave me the confidence to continue on to my future.

Presents for the Teacher

When I was in elementary school, everyone gave the teacher a present at the end of the year, I guess to thank her for all her hard work. Nothing was ever said about this but all the parents seemed to know. My mother had six kids and finding gifts for the teacher for each of her kids must have been worrisome. Luckily, the practice didn't continue after the fifth grade, and luckily, my mother had a good imagination and the assurance to act on what she felt was acceptable.

Our yard was crowded with flowering shrubs in the spring. It was a beautiful time of year and I loved to watch the blossoming of one shrub after another. If I had been gifted with a talent for painting, I would have painted these flowers. However, even though I enjoyed their color and fragrance, I wasn't prepared to see them as appropriate gifts for the teacher. My mother disagreed. Every year on the last day of school my mother sent me outside to cut a large bouquet of lilacs to bring to school. Now, I loved lilacs, still do, but I was embarrassed to bring this bouquet to school as my gift for my teacher. None of the other kids brought flowers. They all brought gifts that their mothers had bought at the local store. Little trinkets that seemed so much more appropriate for the teacher than what I had brought lined her desk for all to see. I never noticed that my gift always held center stage in a vase placed front and center on her desk.

Doctors and Sickness

When my siblings and I were sick with various childhood diseases, it was usually at the same time. I'm sure my older brother and sister brought the diseases home from school where they spread through the entire family, even infecting my mother and father at times.

We suffered through measles, chicken pox, scarletina, mumps, pneumonia and meningitis before I was seven years old. My father always blamed it on the germs hiding in the crevices of our old house which was at one time a schoolhouse. He said with all those sick kids mingling together in one room it would be natural for the walls to be permeated with sickness. Whatever it was, my poor mother had from two to six kids to care for each time, and at one time, my father, too. When we all got sick with scarletina, both my parents got sick. My mother always claimed she and my father were sick at different times so at least one of them felt well enough to care for the others. I'm not sure I believe that. Of course besides all these sicknesses, we were also infected with cold and flu viruses. I can't imagine what they went through.

When I was seven, we moved to a different town and all of us were exposed to a different set of infections. Those of us who didn't get sick with mumps, chicken pox and pneumonia  the first time got them this time. I remember my younger siblings and I being sick with mumps at the same time. I then caught a cold which developed into pneumonia and my older brother managed to get sick, too. This was his second time with pneumonia. My younger brother escaped chicken pox the first time but he caught it the second time. Again, my mother bore the brunt of the care.

In those days doctors made house calls. We lived in small towns and everyone knew each other. The doctor in the first town was a crotchety old guy, but he managed to find the way to cure my younger sister of meningitis when none of the big city doctors at the hospital could. She almost died. He also attended all of us at home when we were sick with the other diseases. In the second town our doctor was a member of our church and lived just down the hill from us. He also made house calls. One time when I was trying out my brother's brand-new birthday scooter and managed to fall and put a big gash just below my right knee, he drove to our house, inspected the damage, and then loaded my older sister and I into his car and took me back to his office for stitches. I guess he knew I would need someone to hold my hand and my sister was available. He also was the doctor who removed my tonsils. I can still remember him explaining about the ether mask and telling me to count backwards after he put it over my mouth and nose. The orangey smell is still with me.

My parents must have run up quite a medical bill in both towns, but no one that I knew of had insurance, so the doctors let them pay in installments. Even the hospitals used the installment plan for the births of myself and my younger siblings, and also for the time my sister was sick with meningitis. I don't know what they would have done otherwise.