Open Writing

The Rae Avenue experience was in many ways the highlight of my young life. In the first place, we lived in the 137 address for about five years, far and away longer than any place we'd lived before.

By the time I was ten, we had lived in Danville, Illinois (where I was born), St. Louis, Hamilton, (Ohio), Pittsburgh, and the Washington D. C. area (including moves from Bethesda, to Arlington, to downtown Washington itself, and finally to Parkfairfax, Virginia. All of this, mind you, before moving again to actually reside in Mansfield for the first time!).

This involved no less than seven schools (and two kindergartens) by grade 4, and my brother Gordon and I (he fourteen months younger) were to become intimately acquainted, though we did not yet know the term for it, with a sociological phenomenon known as adjustment. It would serve us well in the years to come.

Oh yea, and the one downtown Washington school we obliviously attended was an all-black institution. (No great leaders had yet arisen to inform us of our differences and the insurmountable bones we had to pick with each other). We were the only two white kids in its cavernous halls, and I'm happy to report that we never heard so much as a whisper of either trouble or racial prejudice. We, of course, would have been the victims, had such been the case.

It was an altogether pleasant experience, although I did occasionally notice that most of the kids were considerably darker than Gordon and me. There was no apparent need, however, for investigating the question of why this might be so. If our pale skin puzzled them, I don't remember anyone mentioning it. (Apparently, they weren't all that concerned about the lofty question of whether or not "pale" rubs off).

To continue on the subject of Washington for a moment, it was there that Mom took sick for nearly a full year (it would be called a breakdown today, and with none of the modern benzodiazepines or such to buffer and lull the damaged senses), sending us back to the farm once again, this time for the entire school year to come.

This in turn necessitated what would become one of the great experiences of any life, the months we would spend with Mrs. Egner in the white frame, one-room schoolhouse that topped the concluding hill of our otherwise flat country road, known then as now as Hickory Lane, or (then) also as RFD Number 4.

It was a genuine one-roomer in every 1940s sense of the word (maybe even 1840s sense of the word!). The only water came from a hand pump stuck like a grotesque and rather crooked drinking straw smack into the ground in front of the building. And yes, Mrs. Egner actually did actually pull an actual long rope to ring an actual bell tolling the actual start of actual school each actual morning, a simple fact of weekday life we all considered fairly obvious in any event.

In her entire tolling career, there might have been perhaps one kid who years before had actually heard that bell, and quickened his or her pace slightly. Frankly, I doubt it. In any event, a good whistle would have been much, much cheaper and every bit as effective.

Inside, each of seven rows represented an entire grade, with one very tall, very lonely, and frequently very cold farm boy sitting by himself in the far row next to the side window. He was the seventh grade, an eventual graduating class - if he graduated - of one!

A single coal stove did its oft-stoked best, unsuccessfully, to heat the entire room. Outhouses were provided for both boys and girls, without regard to age, religion, bib overalls, or manure-pocked shoes. All were considered equal, which meant that each froze his or her butt equally during unavoidable winter treks to the desolate twin outposts, each providing isolated cover for a single, unforgiving black hole.

I'm convinced that human imagination itself ignited for the first time at the moment when the very first person began to tentatively place his or her pastel rump upon one of these cavernous openings, from under which strange noises were known to emit, and spanning which ever-present spiders could spin new webs in far less time than the duration of a thoroughly modest bowel movement!

One didn't have to be an imaginative genius to wonder if the spiders might perhaps be pissed at our having pissed away - again! - their newest efforts towards the continuation of their vile, loathsome, crapper-doting species! I marvel even today that more of us didn't just stay inside, pee in our britches, and forget it, there being only two girls within the entire school population of perhaps twenty anyway. I know we would have had no problem keeping the overburdened Mrs. Egner from noticing an occasional quick whiz in a dark and unheated corner, to which, wisely, she seldom ventured.

Concerning girls, incidentally, this was pre-Grubaugh School, and quite a time yet before sudden and generally inadvertent crotch arousal might result in the sort of in-class embarrassment that occasionally plagued a boy.

There was, in the entire field of lower education, absolutely NO curse worse for a boy than being called to stand and go to the blackboard while in the midst of a spell of inexplicable penile swelling! It was like trying to hide a decidedly prominent tent in an otherwise flat meadow, and a guy just knew that every pair of binoculars in the county had his momentary crotch-malady firmly zeroed in.