Our mother let us go into the next town, a small city,  to see a movie.  Mother never knew about Donna's secret touching of me so she trusted her to accompany our crew. Later on, we went on our own. Our gang got to travel into the city to see a movie. How exciting. The total expense per child was exactly two dollars.

 

We needed fifty cents to ride the Vermont Transit bus, fifty cents for admission to the movie, and fifty cents for popcorn, soda, and a box of Juju candies. This left fifty cents for our return trip on the bus.  We can't do any of those for 50 cents in this day and age.

 

Occasionally, there was an additional allowance for picture-taking in the booth just inside one of the five and dime stores.  It was always suspenseful as we waited for the strip of photos to begin peeking from the slot.  My scrapbook still holds some of those brown-tinted treasures.

I remember seeing a mother with her children purchasing tickets to enter one of our two movie theaters.

 

The name of the movie they were going to see was Valley of the Dolls. They must have thought that it was going to be about dolls. It was not the dolls that they were thinking of. I don't know what she did once they got in there. It struck me very funny as it was their first communion gift.

 

Mother made a similar error when she let us go to the movies. The name of the movie we watched was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Liz Taylor and Paul Newman in 1958. When Mother saw the title in the newspaper, she probably thought it was about a cat on a hot tin roof. It was not. I don't think we ever did see a cat.

 

Though we were all in the same grade, I don’t remember Trudy, Timmy, or Teddy in the school scene until 4th grade.  I don’t know if, during the earlier school years, they were on another part of the playground dealing with their own struggles of being accepted. Remember, we all lived down by the brook.  But they were right there at my bedside to wake me up when the 5 of 9 bell was ringing for everyone to go into the school which was even closer in proximity than the primary grades one.

 

Fifth grade was the year I had my favorite teacher who never belittled me or yelled at me. She only praised me and had a beautiful warm accepting smile.  Something did happen that year, that took me a long time to get over, possibly, because everything else was so perfect about Mrs. W. I had a booklet which looked like a comic book with information regarding some particular animals.

 

 My favorite was the camel, a survivor of harsh conditions.  I identified with it and was comforted to study the coping equipment: padded feet, an extra transparent eyelid, and a storage hump for water.  When I was feeling especially vulnerable, all I had to do was turn to that page and I felt better.

  

 I brought it to school one day and let Trudy look at it.  For some reason, Mrs. W. was not as enamored with Trudy as she was with me and when she caught Trudy with my comic book she took it away from her.  When she threw it into the wastebasket, I tried to explain to Mrs. W. that it wasn’t a comic book and that I needed it.

 

This is the part that hurt for a long time. My favorite teacher of all time snapped, "You shouldn’t have brought it to school."   All...day...long...I had to sit in the classroom knowing that one of my comforts was in the wastebasket and I’d return the following day and it would be gone for good, somewhere outside in a nasty garbage bin.  This saddened me deeply.

  

Since being a teacher and finding myself doing some of the same things, I have understood Mrs. W. and even wrote a poem about her kindnesses. A few years before Mrs. W. died, I was able to present the poem to her in person. I had to work on understanding and letting go of the deep hurt before I could visit her.

Despite that incident, she was the first nurturing individual in my childhood, except Timmy's mom who was a little humorously gruff but loving.

  

I love to draw.  I still have my first scrapbook of artwork from when I was eight. I've posted it on Facebook so it'll be safe there.  It was one of my ways of coping.  When Mrs W. gave us a reading assignment to draw an idea from a specific story, I drew a picture of an elephant with a tiger wrapped in its trunk.

 

 Mrs. W. made sure she showed it to the class with great praise for my talent and every class thereafter.  For at least 2 or 3 years later,  kids were coming to tell me that they’d seen my drawing of the tiger with the elephant’s trunk wrapped around it.
Below is the poem I have mentioned: 

 
         My Memory 
 

Her name came up
        In conversation 

                Mrs. W. 

 I began to draw  

        In my heart 

My memory of her 

 I drew my memory
  
of her face of kindness 

of her heart of gentleness 

of her voice of comfort 

                                 
I quickly turned to  

                    Another page 

I began to sketch 

                  Her standing there 

                      In front of us    

                          Her fifth grade 

Teaching us 

        Not just 

How to read 

How to do arithmetic 

How to express ourselves 

 
          But standing there 

                  teaching us 

                   who we can become 

                      with the gifts within us 

I turned to  

        another page 

  And without need of thought 

I drew her 

        Revealing these gifts 

                to me 

                that I knew not of  

                which lay deep within 

                my being 

 

To be discovered 

        at another time 

        in another season 

 

The next sketch  

        was me-now 

        looking deeply 

        into that gift 

                at the seed 

 
Of that gift 

        which she 

        so long ago 

                began to nurture 

 

My last sketch 

        in this book 

        of my memory 

 

Was of me 

        Giving to Mrs. W.  

        a blossom 

                from that gift