Notes on Childhood

 29 Sep 2021

 

So who was that little kid, and why did the cello have anything to do with it?

 

Oh, and what does Dr. Nicholas Coleman Pickard have to do with me, or you?

 

Well, simply put: my mother was raised by a Victorian lady. And I know that now because I know about Dr. Pickard. I have recently been wading through the family history, trying to find out who everybody else was. In the process, I found a clue to who I am.

 

Consider: my grandmother was born in 1883. Queen Victoria died in 1901: my grandmother would have been eighteen when Her Supreme Majesty (a little nod to my husband, who takes this all very seriously) died. But the Victorian Age—however you define it—lingered in the United States, and all of the colonies much longer. 

 

And so my mother was raised by a Victorian, and in a Victorian house. Or at least, something close. And then she was raising me, in the late 50’s and 60’s. Which meant:

 

Rules: lots of rules. I got up at exactly the same time and ate the same meal and said the same things and went to school on foot, which was perfectly safe, although I now know that it wasn’t. But because we didn’t know it wasn’t safe, it was—and if you can understand that, then you understand the 50’s. The classroom had the damn flag of the United States (we’re coming to that) and we said allegiance to it. The little desks were magical affairs: the seat was joined to the desk, which opened up so that you could store all your books, papers and school supplies in there. And whatever else you might want to stick in there, because I had found these neat leaves on the way to school and I thought I could use them if I had a science report. To stick on the cover. Which needs to look really good, since the report is going to be pretty “C” material. Why? Because I will have spent all my time making the cover (much more fun), and not doing the report, and if you can understand that…

 

…then you understand me.

 

So there are leaves in there, and also the orange that my mother put into the lunch sack a couple of weeks ago because I really need Vitamin C. Or because my mother needed someone to eat the damn orange, since she had bought it and now she has it and nobody else is eating the orange so here it is. In my sack. And not just an orange, but a MORAL OBLIGATION! Because oranges are not cheap—not in the midwestern United States in the year 1965. No, they actually are making a transition from being the rarity of my grandmother’s day (her one Christmas gift—HER ONLY CHRISTMAS GIFT-- was often just a simple orange, which she would peel reverentially and then section carefully, and then offer to her dear brothers and sisters the pieces. They would say no, of course, but how dear, how sweet of your blessed grandmother to think of them BEFORE HERSELF. She didn’t expect thirty brightly and expertly wrapped gifts under the Christmas tree! She didn’t wonder if this year you would actually get a BIKE, and not some stupid underwear. OHHH, YOUR GRANDMOTHER…..

 

The problem being that I hate oranges. Actually, I don’t—they taste good on my mouth. But I don’t like peelingoranges and I don’t know why. I just don’t. My hands get sticky and it’s too much work….

 

TOO MUCH WORK! WHEN YOUR GRANDMOTHER WAITED AN ENTIRE YEAR…..

 

So I can’t throw the orange away, because that would be like spitting in my grandmother’s face—and I really love my grandmother—and now the orange has assumed the moral weight of the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, and every other sacred text ever written or indeed ever to be written by man.

 

And giving it away?

 

HAH!

 

So of course I put the orange away in my desk, as something that I will definitely eat when I have achieved the moral purity and devoutness of soul which the orange demands. Which means I am waiting for nirvana and did I mention that the orange appeared two weeks ago? Or maybe more, because I really don’t remember when I put the orange in the desk. But it is sort of odd that every time I open my desk, people start saying, “Phew, what stinks around here?”

 

Well, well—guess some other people haven’t achieved nirvana either! Picky, picky! Always have to have their noses—quite literally—in other people’s business!

 

Though it is odd that I actually haven’t seen that orange. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be an orange at all.

 

Though I certainly can smell something.

 

Anyway, I probably can’t see the orange because in addition to the leaves, there are some other things as well. Newspapers, since some kids have started to wrap their books in newspapers, and is that cool or is that nerdy? Not sure, but one day when I was verging toward the “cool” end of the judgment, I grabbed some newspapers, just in case. When inspiration comes, you know….

 

So there’s that and several other lunches as well, because the peanut butter sandwich that I negotiated for as an unrelenting part of my lunch in place of the damned fried eggs my mother wanted to give me for breakfast ….well, I’m tired of peanut butter sandwiches. And I’m still fighting the issue of those damned eggs. Why did I have to eat them every damn morning? Who set that rule? Why not sugared doughnuts, which is what Sven’s mother gives him, sometimes.

 

Sven’s mother is Swedish.

 

   Well! That answers that, since we are Norwegian, and the Norwegians hate the swedes (lower case mistaken but now intentional) because the swedes stole all of our iron and then forged steel and then became a bigshot in the neighborhood and conquered Norway and held us in hideous subjection for years until dear Queen Maud—who was, by the way, the daughter of her Supreme Majesty—married Olaf or Knut or somebody and let us be independent as well as loyal subjects to Her Majesty.

 

SO! WE’LL HEAR NO MORE ABOUT THE SWEDES!

 

Anyway, that explains the other lunches with the peanut butter sandwiches and the leaves and the newspaper and the orange, which is in there, obviously, but not. In fact, there’s a whole lot of stuff in my desk, not just the ghost or the divine essence of the orange past or…

 

…it really does kind of stink, doesn’t it?

 

Oh, and the teacher, Miss Steensland (who I like because she is—guess what!—Norwegian) has smelled it too. And now she is telling the class how proud, how very proud, she is of this class, because we are the neatest class she has ever taught (and she started back in the days of dear Queen Maud). Nor does she mean “neat” in the sense of “cool.” No, she means orderly, well-arranged, tidy, clean, spotless, immaculate, without stain or blemish and…do I need to get the thesaurus? So that’s why we are about to have…

 

DESK INSPECTION!

 

Oh fuck, I say, even though I can’t say it because I didn’t know the word because I am eight. But I’m saying it now, still cowering at the thought of Miss Steensland (who will undoubtedly tell Queen Maud, who very likely will include it in one of the many, many letters that she writes to her dear mother, HER SUPREME MAJESTY)

 

So the blood is pounding in my ear and my mouth is dry and my palms are sweaty but wait. I’ve played this rodeo before so I quickly arrange all the books—which have shredded leaves all over them and in them (don’t know how that happened)—in one organized pile. Then I find the one largest and emptiest dead lunch bag, and put all the other dead lunches into that bag. So now I just have one “lunch,” which I will toss after lunch break is over. I probably won’t eat anything at all today, which is a little upsetting, but I won’t upset Miss Steensland and the Queen and Her Supreme Majesty. Who is very, very happy because Mindy Peckham has presented her with just the cleanest desk, and all of her colored pencils are arranged in order by their place in the color spectrum. So that when Mindy is consulting her color chart, which she has carefully taped to the inside of the desk drawer (such a nice touch), all she has to do….

 

OH, Miss Steensland is so happy!

 

So she moves away from Mindy and now is only two desks away from me, and so I squeeze the damn lunches together as hard as I can and that’s when I hear something plop and…

 

…it’s the damn orange!

 

Yes, now seriously shrunken. It looks, I observe, strangely like a walnut, though blacker and a lot smellier. Really putrid, in fact.

 

Whew, does it stink!

 

Of course, it could also be a shrunken pygmy brain….

 

So I’m thinking about that, and then I realize that Miss Steensland is standing over me. 

 

“And what do you have, Marc?”

 

So I remember salvation, which appears here in the form of a hole, an inch in diameter, which is cut into the metal bottom of every desk in the entire world, including mine. So I grab the shrunken orange / walnut / pygmy brain and I stick it in the hole and put the bag of dead lunches (and some newspaper and leaves that really did get shredded, somehow) over the orange and I slam my fist down.

 

Hoping it will fall, I will catch it, and put it in my crotch.

 

It doesn’t fall.

 

It gets stuck in the hole.

 

Which Miss Steensland can see and so can all of the class, because she has summoned them all over to look with horror at what a messy desk I have.

 

And now, I have not only failed in my obligation of the Holy Orange, more sacred than all the prayers and mediatations that have been offered up to Christ, Buddha, Om, Mohammed and the Great Spirit. Now, I have descended to the temporal level, the everyday level, and I have killed any joy that Miss Steensland might have had in her decades-long teaching career. Not to mention…

 

DEAR QUEEN MAUD AND HER SUPREME MAJESTY!

 

But no time to think of that, because guess what! Miss Steensland has had to do the one thing that in HER ENTIRE LIFE AS A TEACHER she has never had to do. And there is now the maintenance man, standing over me, and he is watching me empty my desk of the books and the pencils and all the stuff that should be there (including that color chart that we all made and that dear Mindy…). And now he is lifting the damn desk, with its newspapers and leaves and dead lunches and most especially the more-and-more odiferous orange. There is no hope for the desk--“you’ll  never get the stink out of the wood,”--the maintenance guy tells Miss Steensland. So he’s taking it straight out to the dumpster.

 

Oh, and they give me a new desk!

 

Can you imagine!

 

A perfectly good new desk to a terrible boy who destroyed his old desk and the lives of his teachers, ancestors, Queen Maud and Her Supreme Majesty.

 

That was my childhood.