School Days

Who doesn't look back at the beginning of their school days with a bit of nostalgia? A bit of bemusement for how innocently we begin that long and laborious journey of twelve years of public education. Of course, if we dig a little deeper, those halcyon days of our youth are never quite as perfect as we think; still, the joys of one's youth should never be discounted as trivial. A person of six is no less a human being than a person of sixty. And all the events of our lives--both the past and the present--continue to shape us even now into the persons we are today.

When I was in kindergarten, my mother took me back and forth to school every day in our old Pontiac. But beginning in first grade, I was considered old enough to walk to school with the other neighborhood children, unless it was raining. This was a great privilege. It was the beginning of my independence--a step away from my babyhood. We all walked or rode our bikes to school without parental supervision, and incredibly, we all made it to school and back home again every day. If you were tardy to class in those days, it was because you dawdled on your way to school and deserved to miss recess.

At the start of my first grade year, my mother, as so many others, walked with me, to show me the way and to teach me the safety rules. We would travel up Hirondel street and turn left at the edge of a big wooded lot. There was a mysterious “shortcut” path through that wooded lot that the older kids used, but I was strictly forbidden to go in there—and didn’t for years. I was afraid of the dark shadows cast by the huge old trees, and the rumors of a crazy man who lived in there.

We turned right at the end of the woods, walked another block, and then we arrived at the corner of the huge complex of Our Lady of Mt Carmel Church and parochial school. You cannot imagine the mass exodus of children on foot and on bicycle from our neighborhood every morning. We all walked to school together for years. But for most of the children in Overbrook, their destination was the Catholic school, and the rest of us Baptists, Methodists, and Lutherans had to walk on and leave them behind.

Another few blocks and we left Overbrook for the neighborhood of Garden Villas by means of a bridge over the lazy, muddy Sims Bayou. That bridge scared and fascinated me all at the same time. When I was very young, it felt so high. It was wide enough for two lanes of traffic, with a partitioned sidewalk for munchkin foot traffic on each side. Looking down through the metal safety bars at the brown sluggish water slipping by below made me dizzy with fear and excitement. Sometimes we would see a snake swimming in it. We used to scare each other with rumors of giant alligators that lived under that bridge. Sometimes it would rain, and then the bayou would rise up in a churning boiling mass of swift, hard current filled with swirling debris and unfathomable muck. The water would be louder then, and crossing the bridge felt like an excursion across the mighty and mysterious Amazon.

Once safely over the bridge, however, it was only another block until we arrived at Garden Villas Elementary school. Ancient-looking even then, it was constructed rather unimaginatively of square corners, sturdy red bricks, and old-fashioned hand-cranked windows. It was tall, foreboding, and made human only by the enormous pecan trees and live oaks dripping with Spanish moss that adorned the grounds. Huge old ligustrums were planted rather haphazardly around its foundation, and to this day, the smell of ligustrums blooming evokes a sense of nostalgia in me so strong, that I will all but stop in my tracks to breathe in their heady perfume and remember the smells of my childhood.

The inside walls of Garden Villas were pea green. Horrible, unrelenting, disgusting pea green. Every wall, every hallway, even every bathroom was green. There was no relief from it. I read one time that someone somewhere did a study (probably in the 1950’s) and determined that GREEN was the color of choice for school walls. I personally have no problem with most shades of green. But I have never ever been able to look at that particular shade of pea green without feeling slightly repulsed by it.

The floors were study, hard-wearing linoleum tiles, and so damn monotonous. No pattern to them, just a series of green and gray flecks, perpetually dull and scuffed, except at the start of each new year when they were buffed to a high glossy shine.

Each classroom came equipped with a blackboard, a globe, an American flag standing in the corner, and old-fashioned wooden desks. That was it. No colorful posters or bulletin boards, no reading corner with colorful rugs and bean bag chairs, no cubbies filled with enticing crayons and paints, no aquariums on the windowsill with pet frogs, no hint of anything beyond a strict academic atmosphere.

Perhaps that was the point. There was nothing for a child to do except look at the blackboard and the teacher, or stare daydreaming out the window.

In those days, children didn’t stay in school all day long as they do now. Most mothers didn’t work, and afterschool care wasn’t much of an issue then. Children were slowly and gently introduced to the disciplines of school and gradually built up to a full day. Kindergarteners went half a day. They either went to the morning session, from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. Or they went to the afternoon session from noon until 3:00 p.m. First graders got out at 1:00 p.m. Second grade dismissed at 2:00 p.m. And finally, in third grade, students stayed until 3:00 p.m.

There was no air conditioning in Garden Villas Elementary School. Given Houston's heat and humidity, this almost seems inhumane, until you remember that the school was built early in the 1940's, perhaps even in the 1930's, long before the advent of air conditioning. So each classroom had a solid outer wall of tall, old-fashioned hand-crank windows. I can remember the teachers dutifully working their way down the bank of windows each morning, cranking each set of louvers open as wide as they could go. Classroom doors stayed open, in the hopes of drawing in a cross breeze or two. Large double doors flanked every hall way, and stood open to the world to draw in as much air as possible during the sultry September heat. Security wasn't an issue then. Comfort was.

And so, in September of 1962, I bravely entered the hallowed halls of Garden Villas Elementary School with a lump of nervous fear in my throat, butterflies in my tummy, and my mother's hand clutched rather desperately in my own to begin the First Grade.