Just after my sixth birthday, my family moved from the suburbs of Chicago to a small town in Georgia. In Illinois, I'd had it pretty good. We lived in a subdivision filled with kids, and the streets were ideal for riding Big Wheels and playing Kick the Can. In the summers, we'd collect moving boxes and build shopping mall-sized forts in a big undeveloped lot. We'd all bring our sleeping bags and spend the night in the fort until the cardboard began to rot from the morning dew. Some summer nights, there were hot air balloon races nearby; so the whole neighborhood would gather on the sidewalks to watch the balloons drift overhead and land in the cornfields that bordered the subdivision. The wintertime was even better -- several hills in the area lent themselves to all-day sledding excursions, and my family took weekend trips to go cross-country skiing in Wisconsin.
Beyond the idyllic confines of our neighborhood was my kindergarten, a Montessori school in a tony suburb a few towns away. The main building of the school was a Cape Cod style house, which contained three main classrooms, each divided into the Practical Life and Sensorial sections. My favorite spot in our classroom was the reading nook, where you could lounge on cushions and read for hours. Outside, the school had an extensive playground with all manner of jungle gyms and swingsets. It also had a nice pool for the summer session. But the crowning touch of the Barrington Montessori was Lucky. Lucky the pony. My kindergarten HAD A PONY. He had a cozy little stable where he munched hay and we could visit him and feed him carrots. Occasionally, Lucky was available for pony rides. But I was content just to pet his forelock and feel his velvetly muzzle. It was like having your own pony, except you didn't have to clean up any poop.
And so, with a great neighborhood full of friends and a school with a pony of its own, I was not terribly thrilled when we had to move. I was even less thrilled when we arrived in Georgia. The dirt was a funny color and it was unbearably hot outside. We had a pretty house on a lake and our neighbors had a boy my age that I could play with; but the days of sledding and Big Wheeling with tons of friends were gone. And then I started school.
Northwest Primary occupied a single story brick building that had all the charm of a Communist bloc retirement home. The building squatted in the middle of a vast, arid expanse of red dirt that could have passed for a vacant lot. A half-hearted jungle gym and a tired swing set seemed to sigh in the blazing August heat. A line of tires half-sunken into the ground completed the sorry excuse for a playground. There was no pony in sight. And who goes from a pony country to a non-pony country?
The physical plant aside, Northwest Primary was not a child-friendly place. The first time my teacher asked me a question, I answered, "Yes." She looked down at me scornfully and said, "Yes WHAT?" I was stumped. "Yes....uh..." "Yes, MA'AM," she demanded. Thus, my intense fear of authority began.
A few days after the beginning of school, I saw a teacher out in the hall with another first grader. The teacher was yelling her head off at the kid, who was cringing in the face of her wrath. To drive her point home, she turned the kid against the wall and smacked his butt repeatedly with a rolled-up magazine. It wasn't the only time I saw kids getting hit -- in my fifth and sixth grade school, the principal regularly made an example of misbehaving kids by bringing them into the main hallway and paddling them with a monstrous piece of wood. The blows echoed throughout the entire school. I lived in utter terror from first grade on.
Oddly juxtaposed with the corporal punishment and intimidation tactics were the frequent injections of church into our school day. We sang prayers before lunch and heard gospel music at assemblies. Since the school system in our town had been one of the last holdouts to desegregate, I guess it wasn't out of character for the teachers to resist the concept of separation of church and state as well.
The kids at school didn't take much of a shine to me, the weird-talking new kid. They made fun of my accent and mocked my wardrobe, which consisted almost entirely of dresses. They said I thought I was "so great" because I could read and write. It was basically decided from Day One that I would never be popular. And I wasn't. Even the teachers in Georgia didn't really know what to do with me.
Thankfully, during the first week of school, I met a girl who would become my lifelong best friend. We had the same middle name and shared a love of the Little House books, so naturally we were destined to wear Best Friends charms and share Shine Free makeup years later. People started referring to us as the Bobbsey Twins in elementary school because we spent so much time together. Without her, I'm not sure I would have survived being a transplant to this foreign and unforgiving place. She was almost enough to make up for the lack of a pony.
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