Kindergarten at P.S. 86

I started Kindergarten in the fall of 1959, when I was four and a half years old. I don’t remember a lot about that year but I do remember that Mom got an older girl to walk with me the five blocks to the school. The next year, when I was a five-year-old first grader, I walked back and forth on my own. What a different world it was. Today, no one would allow a child that young to go to school alone.

I was almost a year younger than the oldest kids in my class, small, skinny, and not very mature. I got into trouble several times that year. Once, I decided to give myself a haircut, and I positioned myself above the garbage pail and hacked away at my hair with a scissors. Mom immediately took me to the hairdresser to get my hair back into some kind of a neat haircut, instead of the raggedy coiffure I created for myself. I suppose in the East Village today that self-inflicted haircut would be acceptable!

The other trouble I got into involved a little Asian girl who joined our class. She was actually too young to be in kindergarten, but apparently the school made an exception for her because her older cousin was in the class to “look out” for her. Now I wonder if her mother had to work and couldn’t keep her at home.

Anyhow this little girl attracted me. She was a tiny, golden-skinned beauty with hair like black silk. I wanted so much to be her friend, but she spoke no English, only Chinese. I could not figure out how to communicate with her, so I tickled her in order to get a reaction. Each time I tickled her she would run to her cousin and tell on me. Her cousin spoke English and a few times she warned me to leave her little cousin alone. But I kept it up partly because I liked to hear her speak in her mysterious foreign tongue. Finally her bigger cousin told the teacher.

The teacher must have sent a note home to Mom telling her I was tormenting this little girl. I couldn’t explain why I did it. When Mom asked me, I had no answer, but I knew I hadn’t meant to hurt her. I knew I wanted to find a way to be friends with her but I didn’t know how. Faced with no reasonable explanation, Mom punished me by making me write lines. Probably I had to write, “I will not tickle (girl’s name)” 100 times. I felt like it was a horrible punishment and I wrote the lines with tears coursing down my cheeks. I never did figure out a way to become friends with that girl.

Another memory of kindergarten was the day we made butter, passing a miniature butter churn filled with heavy cream around in a circle and each of us taking turns working the churn until it turned to butter. Then the teacher produced crackers and gave each of us a cracker with a pat of butter on it. It was sweet and melted in my mouth. No butter I had ever tasted was quite so soft and delicious.

Finally, I remember that the teacher gave birthday spankings. At the start of each month, any child who had a birthday coming up that month would line up at the front of the room and go across the teacher’s lap for a few mild pats on the bottom (one for each year) and a slightly firmer pat “to grow on.” That, also, is a custom that has gone by the wayside, as any teacher who did this today would certainly be accused of child abuse and hounded out of his or her job.