Back to School, or "That Ain't My Cow, Ma!"

Here in Ohio the kids are already back to school, which always gets me thinking of the late summer days when I returned for another year at Saint Pius X. I don't recall ever going back any earlier than the day after Labor Day, however. (If you had told 10-year-old me that we had to go back TWO WEEKS before the holiday, I'da been pretty ticked.) I don't have kids, so this is all pure nostalgia for me, since I've never had to relive it through a child with each new school year.

Being a Catholic institution, St. Pius had a dress code. I remember going to Thom McAn or Fayva for the Diocese-approved suede shoes, and then getting the appropriate ties, pants, and pullover sweaters. Gosh... should we go with blue, or gray, or... uh, grayer... how's a guy supposed to choose? (Luckily, I wasn't. That was all mom.)

Picking out a lunchbox for the year was a far more serious, personal decision, although it became a no-brainer once Star Wars arrived to dominate my imagination (and chore money) for the rest of my elementary career, fourth grade on. The years before that, I recall a bright green (slime green?) plastic Scooby Doo, Where Are You! pail, with a front decal that gradually slid off as the months wore on.

My lunchboxes were bought from the drugstore where my mom cashiered some evenings. Maybe she got a discount, which would probably also explain why I own, to this day, eight billion Star Wars/Empire Strikes Back trading cards. If this store had a name, it was and is lost on me. It had a non-descript storefront, but it was topped almost end-to-end by the word DRUGS in enormous red neon letters. With the stone's-throw proximity to our home, it would forevermore be known to my family as simply "The Drug Store." (Until it closed in the late 80's, anyway. I doubt we talked about it all that much afterwards.)

Another thing I recall for some reason: those new Thermos lunchboxes often came with a pack of Trident gum. I don't know why that was such a thrilling bonus, but it was--even though it was sugarless!

There may have been a piece or two of the glucose-free stuff in the dental hygiene kit we always got at the start of the year. These had a toothbrush and a small tube of paste, and also included those tiny red pills that revealed, when you sucked on one after brushing, where you weren't scrubbing attentively enough. I usually looked like I got busted in the kisser, the scarlet-stained choppers betraying a lackluster brusher. I swear I can almost taste that pill right now.

Bus drills were early in the year, in case we needed to hop out the back door someday, which I tried not to think about too much because it terrified me on several levels.

Getting a new bus stop from year to year was always a possibility, and some were more convenient than others. There was one year, maybe two, that I was picked up and dropped off right by my front door--now that was service! That meant that I could watch The Banana Splits every morning right up to the end, without missing any of "Danger Island!" Uh-oh, Chongo!

While I can remember bits of the first day of Kindergarten (it didn't go well, I was kind of a pussy about the whole thing), my earliest memory of Pius, a year later, is of the orientation day that occurred a week or two before the first day of first grade, in fall of 1975.

We new kids were corralled into the lower wing library, parents off to the side (or maybe ushered out, I forget), and we were introduced to Miss Klausman, our teacher. She may have played us some folk guitar, and she probably wore her rose-tinted Billie Jean King glasses. (I mentioned this was the seventies, right?)

The greenhorns were each then paired up with a Pius veteran--that is, a soon-to-be-second-grader. My vet was Tommy L_____, who was smaller than me and very nice. I tended to be an anxious kid but he put me at ease, with an enthusiasm that was not too off-puttingly eager.

As an example of what we newbies could expect from our days in the classroom, we were shown a filmstrip (beep!) of a story that at some point involved a cow in a boat. Once it was over, we were asked to draw something we saw in the filmstrip, and Tommy said we should draw that. He proceeded to take over the assignment by drawing a rudimentary cow--a boxy body with an oval head and four matchstick legs--standing in another box, between lines meant to be the river's edges.

I was frustrated because I was an artistic kid, so I knew I could have drawn a much better seafaring bovine, but Tommy had done all the work and then instructed me to sign it. I was mortified but didn't want to insult him, so I tried to hide my reluctance as I printed out the letters.

At the end of orientation, we were told to take the picture and bring it to our parent. My anxiety rose: what if mom believes I drew this and thinks to herself, "Boy, what a terrible job"? Or worse, what if she just accepts it as my work and is compelled to lie and say, "Oh, that's very good"?

I handed the scrawled-upon paper to my mom, who was in a line of parents by the blackboard, and, sotto voce, I immediately disowned it: "I didn't draw this!"

She smiled at my insistence, looked at the crayoned sheet and whispered, "I know."