 illustration by Jason Stout |
moment in which you discover that they are out to get you came for me in third grade.
I was a baby boomer. In a way, the system was stacked against baby boomers.
We stretch the infrastructure of all the institutions we encounter. When we
were born, modest maternity wards expanded to take up several floors. When we
were a little older, diaper services flourished. As we reached school age,
class sizes swelled and temporary buildings went up — not just two or three
temporary buildings, but whole fields of them — even around River Oaks
Elementary, which was about as well-heeled and well-appointed as any public
school in the state of Texas.
That was where I went to school. It was a geographic accident of Houston,
where zoning was considered a Communist plot, that a few poor children got
lumped in with the very rich children. I learned to be oblivious to being
patronized by future Junior Leaguers and future country-club golfers, too, but
that is another story.
Boomers still are a big demographic bulge –that is what the excitement about
the fate of the Social Security system and Medicare is about. Eventually, there
will be a cemetery crisis, I suppose, or a long line at the crematorium.
The crunch as we boomers hit the school system was more than temporary
buildings, because someone had to hold the classes in the temporary buildings.
The obvious solution was temporary teachers. Emergency teaching certificates
were handed out like pizza flyers in a college town. Teachers were encouraged
not to retire, and a number were recruited to come back from retirement. Kids
always see their teachers as old battle-axes, but for us there really was
an extraordinary percentage of old battle-axes, as well as bubbleheads,
nincompoops, and just plain jerks.
My third-grade teacher’s name was Mrs. Bartlett, or something like that. And
for a child’s sense of a pun, that was close enough to Battle-Axe that we
called her Mrs. Battle-Axe, and sometimes by accident she was called that to
her face. My child’s memory is that she was ageless, perhaps in her
mid-thirties. She had an emergency certificate and did things differently from
the unretired professionals who usually merely droned at us from the teacher’s
edition of the text. She did things that today would be called “hands-on
learning,” but that concept did not exist in elementary education then.
Unfortunately, things did not always work out well.
Reptiles in the terrarium died almost immediately. Somehow the baking soda and
the vinegar did not fizz properly and the balloon did not fill with carbon
dioxide. The candle in the inverted jar just wouldn’t go out. The project to
measure the length of the shadow cast by a stick at various times met with
problems; the mowing machine kept running over the stick and other classes
erased our chalk marks on the sidewalk. When approval to take us out to measure
the shadows did come — approval being required to leave the classroom except
for a scheduled recess — we were required to pass quietly through the halls in
a double file, holding hands. This was a problem for third-grade boys; some
objected to holding hands with girls, some objected to holding hands with boys,
and many objected to holding hands with anyone. The worst was being odd-man-out
and having to hold hands with Mrs. Battle-Axe.
Mrs. Battle-Axe had great ideas, or as great as elementary teachers ever have,
but she was jinxed or something. It was worse for me, as avid fan of Mr.
Wizard, because unlike many of my classmates, I knew how the experiments were
supposed to turn out. Maybe Mrs. Battle-Axe was cribbing from Mr. Wizard, I
don’t know. She tried to recover from the worst disasters, � la Julia Child when the pot roast has become airborne, and many other children
never knew when she had flubbed things.
One day Mrs. Battle-Axe brought her husband’s extensive rock and mineral collection to class. I was
delighted. I had always been interested in rocks and minerals, I had a Golden
Book of rocks and minerals. I think it is still in print, but the pictures of
cars and clothing and rocket ships in it are now unbearably quaint. I liked the
pretty rocks in the pictures. But there aren’t any pretty rocks native to
Houston.
Houston — if you can find a rock there at all — has fossils. And all fossils
looked pretty much like dog doo-doo to me. I had an unfortunate experience with
the neighborhood bully and dog doo-doo which I won’t go into here, but the
result was a lifetime aversion to dog doo-doo-appearing things and this may
have cost me a career in petroleum geology — which is what a little boy in
Houston learns is what fossils are good for: finding oil.
Mrs. Battle-Axe’s husband’s collection was a dream come true. There were
geodes with thousands of sparkling needles inside, many large perfect crystals,
almost all of which turned out to be quartz, garnet schist — which did look
slightly like shiny dog doo-doo with rubies stuck in it, calcite, topazes,
jade, and all kinds of pretty rocks.
We lined up at the windows so we could see the light through the specimens,
and Mrs. Battle-Axe passed the specimens down the line of students. This threw
the lecture out of sync, for she would explain a specimen and hand it to the
first student in line who would pass it on so that whatever you had in your
hand at the time bore no relation whatever to what Mrs. Battle-Axe was
discussing, and what with the extensive oohing and aahing and random wandering
about of students, there was quite a commotion.
The most remarkable specimen, by far, was a rather flattish quartz crystal
with an amethyst inclusion. A child has difficulty distinguishing among wonders
— and almost every specimen was a wonder — but this one stood out even. In
the middle of the quartz crystal was a purple, triangular prism, perfect in
every way. Nothing in the rock and mineral book compared with this — not the
fly-in-amber, not the diamond-in-matrix, nor the curved crystals of gypsum. It
was the most remarkable rock I have seen. All of us in turn held on to it a
little longer, rotating it in the light, trying to figure out how the
translucent purple triangle came to be in the middle of the quartz. I too held
onto it until the rocks coming down the line began to backlog. Then I passed it
on. There were plenty of other wonderful rocks, though none as oohie and aahie
as the one with the amethyst inclusion.
Suddenly, the process stopped. Mrs. Battle-Axe came down the line, removing
the specimens from our little hands and ordering us back to our desks. I did
not understand what had happened. There were still specimens up the line that I
had not seen, and Mrs. Battle-Axe had hardly passed out half the collection.
This was an abrupt end to the lesson, and it was obvious that Mrs. Battle-Axe
was steamed.
What had happened was this: The child at the end of the line, whenever he had
accumulated a handful of rocks, had been returning them to Mrs. Battle-Axe at
the head of line. But when it came back to her, only about one-third of the
crystal with the amethyst inclusion was left. Once we were seated, she held up
the remaining fragment. Clearly, it was ruined.
It had been fractured through the heart of the inclusion. It was utterly
ruined, and no one could have been clearer on the fact that a tragedy had
occurred nor have felt the tragedy more deeply than I did. I did not have to be
told that it had been a special specimen and that all of its specialness had
been destroyed.
Mrs. Battle-Axe was furious and I don’t blame her for that. What she did next
was one of the most unfair things that teachers do: The
everyone-puts-his-head-down-on-the-desk-until-the-guilty-party-admits-it-or-somene-rats
routine. I don’t think it is right, and I do blame her for that. At first, we
were supposed to put our heads down and the guilty party would hold up his hand
— on the theory that no one would be peeking and no one would know who did it
besides Mrs. Battle-Axe and the culprit. Fat chance.
Mrs. Battle-Axe wanted to recover the remainder of the specimen and while our
heads were down, she went around the room looking for the other fragment. At
last Mrs. Battle-Axe called for stool pigeons. She threatened we would stay in
through recess if the truth did not come out. The promise of anonymity had
evaporated when Daryl raised his hand timidly.
It figured. Daryl was a troublemaker. He would have been the one, I thought,
and he probably broke it on purpose, although how anyone could have broken it
accidentally or on purpose — at least without calling attention to himself —
remains a mystery to me yet. It wasn’t long enough to provide the leverage to
break it like a pencil. Perhaps it could have been smashed with a hammer, but
that would have been noticed. And why it fractured through the inclusion
instead of around it I still don’t know.
“Do you have something to tell us, Daryl?” asked Mrs. Battle-Axe.
“Uh… yes, ma’am.”
“Then come up here and tell us in front of the class.”
Daryl was playing his part to perfection. He was going to be a manly boy and,
although reluctantly and belatedly, he was going to admit it and face the
music. It took him a few hems and haws to get started, but so it did whenever
he addressed the class. But then he blurted it out in one breath.
“I saw Larry…” as I was then known, “…break it, and he put the other piece
in his pocket.”
I was astonished and outraged. I only made matters worse by refusing to turn
out my pockets. I had not done it. I knew I had not done it. I had said
so. And that should really be enough for them.
Naturally, Mrs. Battle-Axe persisted. Daryl repeated his story in several
variations with increasing glee. Under threat of being stripped by the school
nurse with the supervision of the assistant principal, I did turn out my
pockets. There was the other fragment of the specimen.
First, I blame the khakis my mother always bought and which never fit right, so that the pockets were
always open mouths, exposing their white linings. I think jeans would have been
different, if only I could have worn jeans. I don’t know when Daryl slipped the
fragment into those ballooning pockets. I know he did it, or at least he knew
who did it, because otherwise how would he have known the rock was in my pocket
when I did not know myself?
Second, I blame myself for not seeing that it was hopeless to continue denying
knowing anything about the broken specimen once the evidence turned up in my
own pocket. But of course I did continue to deny it. I have not, even at my
advanced age, yet learned to think strategically. A really sharp boy would have
cut his losses, salvaged something in the manly-boy-admitting department, and
garnered a bit of playground respect for being so bad. My mind won’t work that
way, and through the years I am certain that has cost me a lot.
I was innocent and I continued to say so until I was in tears, Mrs. Battle-Axe
was permanently exasperated with me, counseling sessions were scheduled, and my
mother — who I think never did believe my side of it, either — was called at
work. I do not blame Mrs. Battle-Axe so much for believing the evidence she
could see with her own eyes. But I do think she could have caught clue from the
joyous way Daryl ratted and how gladly he reacted as my struggling tightened
the noose. We were past the tattletale age. A kid that age who is forced to rat
on someone in order to have recess does not have quite so much fun doing so as
Daryl did.
Daryl was not bad. He was evil. Furthermore, although we certainly were never
friends, there had never been any kind of incident between us before. He was
more than evil; he was gratuitously evil. I feel somehow if we had real
teachers instead of emergency certificates, a real teacher would have seen
Daryl’s evilness and would have been prepared to have some doubt about the
evidence in the light of my heartfelt denials.
Framed? Yes, I was framed. And afterwards, Perry Mason and defense-attorney
clones got a sympathetic hearing from me.
They were out to get me. At least some of them. I wish it was a lesson that
had stuck, because each time I have to relearn it, it comes as a surprise. I
should never have believed in accidents, in inadvertent oversights, or in
simple mistakes again. There really are not any mistakes, you know. Daryl was
not mistaken. He was plotting against me. I wish I could remember that the
world has plenty of Daryls. I still catch myself sometimes thinking that the
truth will out in spite of intrigues, thinking that some affront or bad turn
was an accident. And then the lesson comes back to me.
If this is a story of lost innocence, then it was the world that lost its
innocence. I was innocent, damn it. I’m still innocent. Of breaking the rock,
anyway.
Lars Eighner, best known for his book Travels with Lizbeth, recently
moved to San Antonio, where he continues writing.
This article appears in January 31 • 1997 and January 31 • 1997 (Cover).