The Wanderer
S.E. Schaible
The first time I recall being branded a backtalker was in 2nd grade. My teacher, Mrs. Aalholm, had cautioned me about being more focused on schoolwork several times in September and October, but the warnings failed to take. To her credit, she followed through on her threat to tell the principal, Mr. Grover, and he discussed it with my mother when he saw her at school one day. Mom was a registered nurse and worked regular hours at Inglemoor Nursing Home on the other side of town; she also served as the alternate school nurse for the Livingston School System, so on any given day she would cover a morning or an afternoon shift at one of the schools I attended. She was one of the cool moms, certainly that was how my friends described her, based in part on the fact that she never hit my brothers or me with a wooden spoon. I am certain that her occasional official presence in a white uniform at school helped me to gain reduced or suspended sentences for assorted infractions. On this particular day, Mr. Grover had a stop and chat with my mother and passed along that I was not abiding by the schoolmarm’s direction. Again.
I lived close enough to Monmouth Court School that I was deemed a “walker,” the term used for kids that walked home to gobble a quick lunch. It was a half-mile walk or bike ride each way, just enough time to eat fast and return to school. Other friends that lived just a few houses farther from school were “lunchers,” so I was on my own every day. I would open the unlocked front door at noon and find my mother making a sandwich or spooning hot SpaghettiO’s with Sliced Franks into a bowl. Top 40 DJ Dan Ingram kept her company, spinning tunes from New York City on WABC-77 AM through the clock radio in the kitchen. By lunchtime my mother was two cups into her 2nd pot of Mr. Coffee and had filled an ashtray with half a pack of Parliaments. She’d pour me a glass of Kool-Aid or crack open a can of Mountain Dew, and fifteen minutes later I would be walking along Northfield Road back to school, cars zooming past at 40 miles per hour. Nothing like this would ever take place today; the only kids eating lunch at home are the home-schooled variety.
After lunch I’d meander my way back, occasionally stopping at Canoe Brook to catch snakes sunning themselves on the boulders, or sneak up on bullfrogs in the shade of the overhanging willows and ferns. Sometimes I would pop into the five and dime store, Variety Fair, and buy a pack of baseball cards to flip after school. Unlike in The Little Rascals, no truant officer or policeman ever asked why I wasn’t in school. The biggest complaint my teacher had was that it disrupted class when I returned late from lunch, which I didn’t take very well because I wasn’t doing anything disruptive. I didn’t saunter into the classroom making outbursts like one of Mr. Kotter’s Sweathogs; I just opened the door and took my seat. Sometimes there might be smelly brook water oozing from my sneakers, forming a puddle under my desk, but nobody looked up or cared when I sat down. I explained to my mother that the only distracting part about it was Mrs. Aalholm making a big production out of my entrance. “Nice of you to join us, Mr. Schaible!” she would exclaim in an emphatic, snarky voice. She pushed me with her tone, so I reflexively pushed back.
“Is there some reason you are seven minutes late, young man?” she would frequently ask, tapping her Mickey Mouse wristwatch.
“Well, the crowd at Seymour’s recognized me from Romper Room, so I had to sign a bunch of autographs.” I wasn’t late in an intentional way. I just wanted to take my seat but once she started in on me, I would crack wise and act up. Some of the girls thought this was funny and a hubbub would follow. My clowning would start a rumor that I had been on Romper Room, which I had not. These were just creative retorts I rehearsed to clap back – they were a protection mechanism. Her age and position didn’t matter to me – I treated her like a bully because that was how it felt.
“That’s enough! Let’s focus now,” she would shriek, her vocal cords trembling. I explained to my mother on several occasions that the teacher always started it, that I had a right to defend myself if she picked on me. I maintain to this day that my teacher played it all wrong with me – she was elderly, and her anachronistic methods didn’t work in the 1970s. If it had been allowed, or if this were Catholic school instead of public, I am certain she would have rapped my knuckles with a ruler. I could never understand why she cared if I was a few minutes late. I didn’t care about learning cursive or tracing words, and negative reinforcement wasn’t going to change my mind. Making an example of me just got my hackles up. I didn’t mind if any teacher sent me to the front office, and luckily neither did my parents. In most situations I was as reserved and respectful as the next kid, but all bets were off if someone tried to denigrate or belittle me or went after someone I cared about. More than 50 years later little has changed.
My mother picked up a day shift at the nursing home over the holidays, so I began carrying my lunch to school and eating in the cafeteria with the lunchers. This spared me from pulling on my Totes galoshes and Sears parka mid-day during the coldest months and in the springtime, it opened me up to a world of lunch recess activities I never knew about – playing king of the hill, kickball, kill the guy with the ball and other playground favorites. I began coming home with bruises and torn pointy collars, but nobody seemed to mind. Overnight I was reliably in my seat on time after lunch. Things never recovered with my teacher – our personalities continued to clash. At one point I decided I would stop speaking to Mrs. Aalholm altogether. I made it through three days of being nonverbal, nodding yes or no, and she threw something of a fit over my silent treatment and sent me to the office. Mr. Grover called my house and my mother tiptoed through the conversation while I rolled my eyes.
My father sat me down and said he understood why she wasn’t my favorite teacher and told me to just play the game for a few more weeks. “Listen Buster, you’ll be at Roosevelt next year – you’ll probably never see her again.” He was right. And by then I had another, bigger problem in the form of an older boy named Sy bullying me – bashing my head with a hairbrush almost every day after lunch, swinging it like a hammer onto the top of my skull, hitting me so hard I would see stars. It gave me a newfound empathy for my friends whose mothers would brain them with a wooden spoon – oftentimes right in front of me – for neglecting to take out the trash.
Read my last story- Twisted Selvage