Recollections

Hopefully you all will enjoy this exercise as much as I did. I am working on extending my memory. Here are some of my earlier memories from California:

My teacher leans over my shoulder as I kneel on my desk and manipulate my hands so that I can learn to tie shoes. She kindly tells me about two bunny ears and how they cross and then voila, I have a pair of tied shoes. It was frozen bliss there in Canada. On the other hand, my first day in California kindergarten was a rude awakening to the hard gang culture that was already bubbling up at such an early age. The year was 1975. Bell bottoms were the rage. Apparently, for my kindergarten teacher, eating was the rage also. This enormous fat lady walks in and begins to explain to the class, remember, it is my first day but everyone else is halfway through the year with this same teacher. We moved in February, I think. So in she walks, and begins to explain that the class has been misbehaving too much. The next one to misbehave, she says, will wear diapers and drink a bottle in front of the entire class. I am sufficiently cowed to not say a word. The next day, Rene, a rowdy boy of questionable English skills, must have misbehaved. My memory doesn't extend to what he did to enrage the teacher. I was certain that the teacher was going to pull his pants down in front of the entire class to apply his diaper. Quite frankly, I was mortified by the loose morals the California culture was presenting to me at such a young age. Instead, the teacher decided to save my impressionable mind and applied Rene's diaper on top of his pants. She then held him and forced him to drink a bottle in front of all of us. Rene never recovered. Even in tenth grade, I, and I am sure all of my classmates from that fateful day, would look at him and see him wearing diapers. Luckily, I never wore diapers and must have made it through the rest of the year with minimal problems because I don't remember a bit of it. Although, maybe I am repressing something. Wouldn't you?
First grade and I am the only blond headed child in a class of thirty. My parents, aiming for a well rounded education but not quite understanding the code words of political correctness that even then were invading the educational system, enrolled me in a bilingual class. Their impression was that I would walk out of the class speaking not just English, but perfect Spanish as well. Ole? The real purpose of the class was to teach thirty or so migrant children how to speak English, not so that one lonely Canadian with misguided parents could learn Spanish. Needless to say, I did learn many Spanish words. The majority of them would have earned me a serious spanking had I chosen to use them around my parents. Maybe, I would even have had diapers applied. Even though they didn't speak Spanish, I am sure they would have had a fairly good idea what the words meant. And they didn't mean, Hi, how are you? The family rumor is that by the end of the year, I was speaking fluent Spanish. I think, in reality, by the end of the year I was just blabbing words that I had made up because I had just spent an entire year with no one to speak to.
The one exception was my wonderful teacher Mrs. Obeso. She obviously could speak Spanish. I was her favorite. Maybe because I was scared she might put diapers on me also. I was unused to being surrounded by people who wanted to diaper me up. Later, several years later, I realized she was actually an extremely nice person. She always spoke highly of me to my parents and soon they were convinced they had an Einstein on their hands. Can you imagine the pressure? Where was there to go from this high pedestal? Although, well meaning, Mrs. Obeso put me in a bad place. She spoke highly of me because I did well on all my tests and in all the class assignments. I did better than all of my classmates, I firmly believe, because none of them could even understand what was being assigned. It is easy to excel when the competition no habla.