The Kindergarten

The year was 1995. I was in kindergarten. My parents enrolled me in a Christian school supported by a local church.

The small Christian school was a split level. As you walked in the front door, the stairs to the right led up to where we had chapel services and where the offices were. The stairs on the left led down to the classrooms and the lunchroom.

Directly to the right at the top of the stairs were the bathrooms. Past the bathrooms, off to the right were stairs leading up to a small attic. There was a window up there where we put our class project: seeds wrapped in wet paper towels or planted in tiny flower pots (I can’t remember which). We came back a short time later, and they had sprouted.

At one point, I had missed a day or two because I had been sick. Up until then, I had a box of Kleenexes under my desk. When I came back, those Kleenexes weren’t there. And I desperately needed them.

I looked around and saw the box on the teacher’s desk. It was the exact size and had the same print on the outside that mine had. So I went and got them. The teacher came in and noticed that the box of Kleenexes was gone. She asked what had happened to them, and I told her I had put them back at my desk.

Her face turned a deep shade of red, and she yelled at me for several minutes about taking others’ personal property. I told her it was my box of Kleenexes and she shouldn’t have taken them.

She took them back to her desk, and I had to wipe my nose with my hand, subsequently wiping my hand on my jeans. I had white streaks all over my jeans by the end of the day.

I wasn’t one to shy away from helping others. During a chapel service, I noticed the principal needed to use his handkerchief. He had dried spit in the corners of his mouth. I raised my hand. He didn’t respond. I put my hand a little higher. No response. I waved it back and forth.

He looked down at me, “Yes, son?”

“You have white stuff in the corners of your mouth. You need to wipe it.”

I heard all the teachers gasp. Then they offered me the opportunity to go to the back of the room and sit by them. Then I discovered my teacher could yell and whisper simultaneously. I was only trying to help.

There was another chapel service in which I raised my hand because I had a legitimate question. I heard loud finger-snapping from the back of the room. I turned around. I saw the stern face and disapproving frown of my teacher. I decided against asking any more questions.

Outside the front door and to the right, the only other boy in the class and I were playing with rocks. We decided it was a good idea to try and smash them to smithereens. He held a rock steady on the ground while I raised one in the air. I brought it back down with all the force I could muster. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

I missed the rock. I bulls-eyed my friend’s fingernail. There was a big crack down the middle of it. I didn’t get to play for the remainder of the recess.

One day, we were walking through the playground, and a little girl was sitting on the top of the swing set while her friend hung upside down from it — this was the 1990s — she hollered down at me, “Caleb, I’m gonna marry you one day.”

“I don’t think so!” I retorted.

“Yes, I am! You don’t have a choice!”

“I’d rather die!”

“You can’t until you marry me.”

“I don’t want to marry an ugly girl.”

“Well, you’re not gonna marry her.” She pointed to her friend. “You’re gonna marry me!”

“I’d rather marry her!”

“You have to marry me!”

“In your dreams, Matilda.”

It went on like this for the rest of the recess.

I remember the nap times. The teacher would play hymns on the tape player. I remember hearing, “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior.” It was my favorite.

In 1996, I started attending a different school. And I never returned to the other one, which closed about ten years later.

Then a few years ago, a family member, who had attended that church, passed away. After the graveside, the church had dinner for the family in the former school’s chapel room, up the stairs on the right, where the offices were.

I walked in that front door, and nothing had changed. Memories flooded my mind. At some point during the dinner, I wandered down to the stairs that led to the lower level. I opened every door that wasn’t locked. I saw the old lunchroom and several of the classrooms. It was almost as if I could smell the smells and hear the voices from twenty years before.

And then I realized that I was probably trespassing. So I went back upstairs.
But not before I grabbed a box of old Kleenexes sitting by themselves inside an old classroom.

to the kindergarten graduating class of 1995,
– Caleb