FanStory.com - Moviesby Liz O'Neill

Background
We continue to learn more out about Lizzy's first 5 years of schooling. Age 10 for her was a very important turning point.

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