There & Back Again: Schoolgirl Memories

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A lot can happen in six-tenths of a mile, the exact distance from the front porch of my childhood home to the lobby of my elementary school.  Strife, mockery, treasure hunts, arranged marriages between Cabbage Patch Kids- you name it.  I experienced all of that and more on my walks to and from school.  The walking adventures began in the 1st grade, when I was entrusted to my brother’s care to make it to school and back in one piece.  Initially I was ecstatic- 30 minutes of my big brother’s undivided attention every single weekday, excluding snow days, holidays, and parent-teacher conference days.  My brother, however, was a little less than thrilled to have a pig-tailed moppet trailing him closer than his own shadow.  He employed several carefully planned covert operations to demonstrate his displeasure and to sadistically antagonize me.  The most basic version was the walk ridiculously fast so that my little sister has no hope of keeping up plan.  This plan was very effective, but he wasn’t particularly fond of speed-walking and so he sought a way to work smarter, not harder.  He began hiding behind various shrubs, street signs and garbage cans, noiselessly waiting for the perfect opportunity to scare the ba-jeezus out of me.

 In the second grade, my best friend (who lived a street away) became my walking companion, thereby freeing me from the sadistic clutches of my brother.  We spent the majority of our walks engaged in serious discussions- which teacher was the un-fairest of them all, who had to sit on the curb at recess, and which Barbie did we want for Christmas.  Not all walks were without incident.  Like the time Stacy accidentally peed her pants halfway home.  She was mortified.  And sloshy.  We had made it to one-street-away-from-her-house when the unthinkable happened.  Larry and Terry, the neighborhood twin terrors, caught up to us.  I soon heard each of them begin to sniff in unision, faces forming identical grimaces.  The twins began flinging accusations at one another about the stink source, and they ended the discussion with a fist fight.

Our twosome became a threesome in the 3rd grade when Jenny, another girl from the neighborhood, joined us.  We had an odd group dynamic, alternating which girl was the odd girl out.  I always dreaded when it was my turn.  During one of my turns, Jenny and I engaged in a verbal confrontation over an important matter like whose hair looked better in a banana comb.  She suddenly declared, “I’m going to do what the Bible says and turn the other cheek.  Go ahead, slap me.”  So I did.  Hard.  [I should note that she is now an overseas missionary.]  When it was Jenny’s turn to be “out”, Stacy and I sneakily connected Stacy’s bike to Jenny’s bike using my bike chain.  Jenny discovered the deception and became apoplectic, swirling the bikes in the air with superhuman strength.  Stacy and I stood staring in complete awe and fear until a woman ran out of her house yelling at us.  I unchained the bikes and we continued home in silence.

Our drama wasn’t always self-inflicted.  We took on outside enemies as well, like the Christian school kids who yelled, “Your school sucks,” as we walked past the church.  Incidentally, that school closed several years ago.

I shouldn’t just talk about the drama.  We had fun times too.  We tore our neighborhood up in our pink, orange and red banana-seat bicycles (complete with baskets, bells and handlebar streamers.)  We also discovered gold in somebody’s gravel driveway- sort of.  As soon as we spotted the metallic chunks embedded in the gravel fragments, we developed an excavation site.  I shudder to think about the quantity of gravel we stole from those poor people.  We couldn’t believe our good fortune…we were going to be able to buy all of the jelly shoes we wanted, and have a little extra left over for blue mascara.  Our dreams evaporated in an instant when Jenny informed us that her dad took the “gold” to a jeweler and was informed that it was just fool’s gold.  In retrospect, I have serious doubts that her dad ever took the “gold” anywhere.  Jenny had a history of making grandiose, and often unbelievable claims.  For example, she told us that she found the skull of an aborted baby in her yard.  I made her show it to me and it did look like a skull, but now that I think about it, it was probably just a buried dog.

Junior high brought an abrupt end to our walking days.  The junior high building was significantly further than the elementary school and we were way too cool anyway to be seen walking.  So we did what any cool junior high kid would do…we hitched rides with Stacy’s dad (listening to elevator music the whole way) and asked him to drop us off 100 yards from the building.

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