Grade 3 with Mrs. Merkle for heaven's sake, emerging from the infant haze, slowly establishing myself in a new space.
Grade 4 with Ms. Holmgren, joining five other students in an accelerated program, which was basically that we took grade 5 classes all year. Glimpses of culture and nature, of proto-scholarship and the life of the mind!
Grade 5, by Mrs. Scott, in which those parents all opted to have us go back to our original grades. Shakespeare! I was Macbeth. (And Lion, and either Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. I can never keep those guys straight.) I want to reaffirm that those rumours about my arrogant comportment on stage are slanderously untruthful. Who did that Grandma Duncan think she was, anyway? Same year, me becoming aware of how some of my mates were kind of wandering their way over to the vicinity of the first entry into the vestibule of a potential forbidden path. Wished them well. Left them to it. Probably always continued associating in a reasonable friendly fashion.
Grade 6, Mr. Ammon, Ms. Lacy, and the apex of my entire academic career. Of my whole life, actually. Brookside Elementary's most outstanding student! An award I had to share with the infernal Lynn Ferrier and her dumb huge glasses!
I'm back in Grade 3. Fourth day here, at recess. Eric Salmon, who lived in this house just down the road ...
... (and then moved to Malmo [not in Sweden though] the very next year, alas), asked me if I wanted to join him and these other kids for a game of touch football. From uncertain to engaged, due to the kindness of a stranger. Whom I saw that Sunday at church. Could have gone that way! Went this!
Boot racks, twisty wet socks and toque-head in the winter time. Snow plow-piled to outlandish heights on the tarmack out back, leading to amazing extended bouts of King of the Castle. Hurling each other down, and savagely! The best was in Grade 5, when I rolled down and bonked my eye on my knee. That felt new! When we went in I looked in the mirror, in time to see my eye swelling to a close. Triumph!
The big library in the Dewey-ite Open Area, right in the middle there. The Moomins, beckoning to me from that shelf there. Detectives in Togas. Chaplin's My Autobiography. Homer Price, book-reported with a Mum-assisted batch of doughnuts. Glimpses of Alexander the Great and the immeasurable Roman Empire.
Field days in June, floor hockey through the winter, an astonishing four day field trip to Jasper National Park, where we all slept in the barest and most evocative of slotted log cabins; Film Board films projected in the gym, and Christmas plays enacted in the same spot, which is practically to say my future moral-ethical allegiances, vocation and avocation alike ...
