Snippets of Childhood

My grandparents had a grocery store with Grandpa’s butcher shop in the back. Miller’s Market. Kansas City, KS. At some point my parents and I moved in with them and lived in the apartment over the store. I think it was after my mom had a miscarriage. I remember one Christmas getting roller skates, and my mom pushing me up and down the wooden-floor aisles of the store after hours. I can still hear the sound of those wheels on the wood.

I also discovered something really cool. For some reason I was in tears and sitting in the front room with the Christmas tree. I noticed that my teary eyes made the lights on the tree look awesome! I kept trying to nurse those tears for a while so I could make the lights twinkle more.

For kindergarten and half of 1st grade, I went to Bethlehem Lutheran in So Cal. It was a great financial sacrifice for my parents, and I wish I could’ve told them how much it meant to me in later years to have had that sound Christian base. Miss Robin was my K teacher. We had cubbies for our naptime blankets and milk and crackers for snack. One day I was playing with some kind of block toy and something didn’t go right with it and I said “Darn it!” Miss Robin gasped and said “Who said that??” I raised my hand, said “I did,” and was going back to the blocks when Miss Robin read me the riot act about NOT saying that word. I had no idea why that was such a bad word. I heard it at home all the time. I realized you had to be very careful in what you said in a church school.

Every week we would have some kind of chapel time in the church proper. After we got back to the class room, the best behaved child got his/her name on the blackboard. It was a high honor. One time I was wedged between Miss Robin and another child and fell asleep. When we got back to the class room I was STUNNED when Miss Robin wrote MY NAME on the board! I felt very guilty because I wasn’t well-behaved…I was ASLEEP! But I kept my mouth shut and accepted the honor…

In first grade, Miss Vanders was my teacher. We would start the day with the pledge, a hymn and then recite our Bible verse assignment from the previous day. One by one, we would go up to the teacher’s desk, recite our verse(s) and then she would mark in our prayer book the next day’s assignment.

One of the most vivid memories I have is singing the hymn, To Thy Temple I Repair. This was learned by rote, not reading, and all I knew about the word ‘repair’ was that it meant fixing something that was broken. I knew ‘temple’ was another word for a church. So I had a very clear mental picture of us kids walking into church, each of us carrying a large hammer so we could repair it.

As in Kindergarten, we had chapel each week. One time I was sitting and happened to be chewing gum. I don’t know if one of the kids alerted Miss Vanders, but she turned in her seat to face me and said “Do you have gum?” but she said it so fast that I misunderstood her. I thought she asked if I was dumb! Of course I’m not! I said “NO.” She then asked what I had in my mouth. I took the gum out and said “Gum.” Had NO IDEA this was a no-no. And of course, since I had said ‘no’ the first time and then brazenly showed it to her, she took that as impudence. When we got back to class after chapel, she had me up to the front, drew a small dot on the blackboard and had me stand there with my nose to the dot for a period of time. What a fall from the grace of Kindergarten!!! Once again, I get notice on the blackboard, but for the heinous crime of GUM!

The last day of school before Christmas vacation we all had our little manger we had made out of paper with a tiny rubber Baby Jesus to put in it. I was sitting at my desk with my little manger and looking around the room with all the Christian Christmas decorations and thinking how much I loved it all. When we did our recitations that morning as usual, I went up for mine, and Miss Vanders marked my next one, but laughed a little while doing so and said “I don’t know why I’m doing this. You won’t be here.” I didn’t quite grasp that this was going to be the last time I would be at this school. We moved up to Chico during Christmas vacation, and that was the end of parochial school for me. There was no Lutheran school in Chico.

After vacation, I went to Parkview School in Chico. We did the pledge, we sang God Bless America, but there was no hymn and no Bible recitations. I missed that.