School Photo

We all have incidents in our lives that we never forget.  I had one such incident when I was in the 6th Grade. My school was a small one.  There was one classroom for each grade K-6 so the teachers knew us all.  It was a nice way to do school.

Even back when I was a child there was the annual school photo.  As a parent I loved those photos.  They were my annual update on how each child had grown and changed. Looking back at those photos now, I love each one.

But back in 1956 I wasn't the mom.  I was the kid and I had acne.  It was horrible.  I wanted to crawl into a hole that year.  I knew everyone was staring at me.  I was embarrassed beyond belief!  And then came the day of the school pictures.  I wasn't smart enough to be sick that day.  And so the pictures were taken as they were every year.  But I made sure that my parents understood the great humiliation associated with this particular year's photo and so we didn't purchase them.

It was my teacher who was the problem.  The photographers didn't do a group class photo back then or even a compilation.  The only way the teacher got your photo was if you gave her one.  And my teacher wanted my photo so she purchased them.  Can you believe a teacher would do that!  She said she needed this photo so she would be able to remember me. I don't know if she remembers me but I remember her and always will.  In spite of acne, I had a teacher who cared about me.  She was an amazing teacher.

Tsunami

I had been back to the neighborhood of my childhood several times.  I had watched it deteriorate and sadly I visited once to find only a vacant lot where my childhood home had been.  But recently I took Lynn to see the old neighborhood.  I was not prepared for what we found.

The memories of childhood

fill my mind with happy thoughts.

I close my eyes and

see home and school and

friends of long ago.

Yesterday we drove around

that neighborhood.

Neither house nor street remained.

Like a war zone there

was little left.

The few houses we saw

were vacant or boarded up.

Only the phantoms of my memory

remain to remind me of

a wonderful place of long ago.

 

The Magic Street

Childhood memories are not always accurate.  The child's eye sees beauty in the common.  The mind remembers what it felt as much as what it saw.  Bauman Street in Detroit is the magic place of my memory.  We walked it every day on the way to school.  That half mile of road was filled with so many memories.  We played "Step on a Crack, Break your mother's back" as we walked along.  The drugstore was off limits on the way to school but the grocery store wasn't.  The candy store was saved for special days.  I can see them all in my mind's eye.