I'm in the mood for cliche and bad retrospective.
This morning I've been thinking about second grade. Probably because in second grade there was a poem on the door to our classroom. I was 8 years old so I hadn't seen this one yet. We all know it:
If You Love Something Set It Free. If It Comes Back, It Was And Always Will Be Yours. If It Never Returns, It Was Never Yours To Begin With.
There was a purple dove in silhouette below the words.
I liked it. I found truth in it. Seemed like people had been bailing out and something about the no nonsense truth of those words made it all okay. I'm not sure if I got the point but it seemed like a good test. If I could just set everything free - anything that came back would be real, everything else...well fuck everything else. Maybe this morning I saw it different - I'm probably just getting soft in my old age.
I know I learned how to cheat on the multiplication tests that year (there was a pattern to the answers and it seemed easier to learn that then to do the math). Our class was split into two groups for the first time. My group was given the "King on a Swing" reading book. Mrs. Maxwell, our teacher, didn't categorize the groups but everyone knew that king on a swing was for the slow kids and the more aptly named "second grade reader" was for the smart kids. I knew I shouldn't be in the swinging-king group but what could I do.
It was that time in my life where the adults around me all had been treating me different - squatting down and talking to me face to face - full of half hearted reassurance. The advice was always in the same vein - they would tell it forward and reverse for good measure. Their eyes, their expression would be saying "you are kinda fucked so good luck" and their words, played forward sounded like "you are the man now, step up" and in reverse "don't take it all so seriously, you are just a kid".
I don't remember if I really listened to the words or if they just sank to the bottom. If I had paid more attention in the years that followed I would have seen it happening around me. Mrs. Conrad, our third grade teacher, squatting down injecting the words into the twin girls, and then into Randy and then Cameron and then so on. I guess we all sank to the bottom. I don't know any of them anymore.
This morning I've been thinking about second grade. Probably because in second grade there was a poem on the door to our classroom. I was 8 years old so I hadn't seen this one yet. We all know it:
If You Love Something Set It Free. If It Comes Back, It Was And Always Will Be Yours. If It Never Returns, It Was Never Yours To Begin With.
There was a purple dove in silhouette below the words.
I liked it. I found truth in it. Seemed like people had been bailing out and something about the no nonsense truth of those words made it all okay. I'm not sure if I got the point but it seemed like a good test. If I could just set everything free - anything that came back would be real, everything else...well fuck everything else. Maybe this morning I saw it different - I'm probably just getting soft in my old age.
I know I learned how to cheat on the multiplication tests that year (there was a pattern to the answers and it seemed easier to learn that then to do the math). Our class was split into two groups for the first time. My group was given the "King on a Swing" reading book. Mrs. Maxwell, our teacher, didn't categorize the groups but everyone knew that king on a swing was for the slow kids and the more aptly named "second grade reader" was for the smart kids. I knew I shouldn't be in the swinging-king group but what could I do.
It was that time in my life where the adults around me all had been treating me different - squatting down and talking to me face to face - full of half hearted reassurance. The advice was always in the same vein - they would tell it forward and reverse for good measure. Their eyes, their expression would be saying "you are kinda fucked so good luck" and their words, played forward sounded like "you are the man now, step up" and in reverse "don't take it all so seriously, you are just a kid".
I don't remember if I really listened to the words or if they just sank to the bottom. If I had paid more attention in the years that followed I would have seen it happening around me. Mrs. Conrad, our third grade teacher, squatting down injecting the words into the twin girls, and then into Randy and then Cameron and then so on. I guess we all sank to the bottom. I don't know any of them anymore.
trilobyte
Black Rock City, NV
February 2003
APR 30, 2005 11:40 AM
APR 30, 2005 08:18 PM
