Chapter 2, Part 2
LaFevre DreamsJoan LaFevre was the type of woman most parents dreamt of recruiting during the late 1950’s. She was single, without a prospect of marriage, and educated as a nurse. She was progressive enough to feel that exposing children to literature and music was important, and fundamentalist enough to believe that such material should be strictly regulated.
She began our mornings with ballet stretches, led us to lunch with passages from C. S. Lewis’ “Narnia” books, and sent us home with a creative assignment each afternoon.
In all, she seemed like a perfect teacher until I realized that her creativity and mine were unable to coexist. This became painfully apparent during our first school reading contest.
The contest was held with some outside source; schools with the most books read per student could win an entire set of encyclopedias for use in the school library. HCA was small and poor, and any type of gift could be well useful to the student body. I was thrilled with the idea of reading books competitively, and felt like this was a chance for someone of my bookish nature to excel.
That weekend my brother and I went with my father to the book store. While on a quest for books that my brother would enjoy, I wandered idly through the shelves before finally asking my father the question weighing on my mind.
“Dad, what are some really important books? I mean books everyone should read.”
“You mean classics?” he looked amused.
“Sure, classic books. What books do they make people read…?” I had no idea what I was really asking. I merely wanted to bring home books that would test my mind, and show how smart I was.
“How about Shakespeare? Or Homer?” he was on the edge of laughing.
“Are they good?”
“Some of the best ever written. I tell you what, if you promise to actually try to read them I will buy some for you. If you give up, then you have to give the books to your brother.” Was that pride on his face?
“I won’t give up.” I certainly wasn’t going to concede some books to my brother.
“You’re sure?”
“Promise.”
And with that I brought home three shiny Signet Classics of “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and “The Iliad.”
Ms. LaFevre had instituted a policy that all reading materials for the contest must be brought to her for approval. This, she explained, would prevent smart fifth graders like us from wasting our time with silly books like “The Cat in the Hat,” and cheating the intent of the contest. On Monday morning I proudly set these three literary classics before her for approval.
“You want to read these?” she asked?
“My dad says they’re important,” I felt tall and mature when I said this.
“I don’t know,” she looked skeptical. “Let me hear you read this one.” She lifted the corner of “Hamlet” and eyed me critically.
“Where do you want me to read from?”
Flipping through the pages she found something in particular, placing her index finger on the passage she indicated for me to begin.
For the first time I began to read, “To be, or not to be. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…” I read haltingly, but it made sense. I had, after all, learned to read on a King James Bible. Shakespeare was dense and poetic, but I could make the words out confidently in the stillness of the classroom.
“I’m still not sure you can do this,” she seemed to be staring. “Let me ask Mr. Falkenburg if he thinks it’s okay.”
“Okay,” I said. Of course it would be allowed. My dad called them “classics.” He said everyone should read them. Why not now?
At the end of the day I found all three books in a neat stack on my desk with a small yellow note with the words “inappropriate reading material.”
That evening my father was furious. “Shakespeare? Inappropriate? What kind of people are these?” he was almost yelling at my mother.
“They should be happy he’s even trying it at his age.”
“Maybe they think it’s too hard for him,” she placated.
“Maybe it is, but why not help him read the books then? Encourage him.”
“We’ll just have to find him some other books,” she sighed.
In the end, I read only one book for the contest; the hardcover version of “James Herriot’s Dog Stories,” a fat eight hundred page collection of his experiences as a British vet.
The day I finished the book I plopped it on Ms. Lafevre’s desk proudly.
“Finished it finally.”
“I’m not sure you could read all this.” She said it with that same look. I was very confused by that look. My dad was happy when I finished something, but she seemed upset.
“I did though.” Why didn’t she believe me.
“Okay, let’s see…” she flipped through the heavy volume’s pages. “What was this story about?”
“That was about Mr. James going to do surgery with another vet somewhere in England. The other vet liked to drink beer, and they stayed up all night drinking and James said he felt sick. What are pickled onions? He said they were eating them at the bar…”
“Okay, okay,” she cut me off. I would talk all day and ask questions if she let me.
“How about this chapter?” she flipped to a new page.
“This is about some lady that brings James a smelly dog with gas. He can’t find a home for it for a while until he meets an old man who has no sense of smell. Then the dog lives with the man and…”
And so she went through the entire eight hundred pages (fifty different stories) asking over and over for a synopsis. Each time I told the stories as though they had happened to a family member.
“You really should’ve read something smaller. Here we are at the end of the contest and you have only read this one book. You should be less lazy, Mark. You’re very bright when you apply yourself. And you could have helped your school by reading more books…”
“I’m sorry,” I looked down at the floor and blushed. What she didn’t know was that I had read “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and the “Iliad,” before even looking at the James Herriot book. I wondered if I had sinned… but my dad said they were “classic.”
Chapter 2, Part 1
I’m RightFourth grade progressed quickly for me, with a minimum of mishaps. I had been in trouble a few times, spanked twice, but the year stands in my memory as mostly unremarkable.
The following year the system of HCA began to crystallize, and my life took a strange and surreal turn. To begin with, there had been some fear among the teachers that our older students (those in eighth through tenth grade) were full of “worldly values.” The decision was made to prune the HCA tree, and send these willful minds back to the public schools. This meant that in 1989 my brother became the oldest child in HCA, and the top of our social pyramid.
In addition, rather than having the teachers I had begun to understand in the fourth grade, I was shifted with the younger class under a teacher named Joan LaFevre. At first I was quite excited with how things had changed, although I was sad that I had been shifted socially further still from my main friend, Spike. Secretly, I was happy because I learned that Shannon had been held back a grade, and this shift of teacher allowed me to still see her every day.
The main reason for my distaste and disinterest in Ms. LaFevre, was that she had been the cause of some considerable pain for me on the last day of the fourth grade.
Our final day of classes had been spent at Clute Park on the shores of Seneca Lake. The sun was shining from behind fluffy white clouds, and we were all giddy with the concept of the freedom from classes for the summer. Mr. Falkenburg, the school’s principal, had announced that (although the weather had been slightly chilly,) students in the fourth through tenth grades could wade in the lake rather than swimming.
Because I loved the water, because I was fascinated with the lake, and because it would give me a chance to walk with Spike and talk about aquatic mysteries and comic books, I was fairly happy with this announcement.
Even though Joan was the teacher for the two grades below mine, and I was no real concern of hers, she stopped me as I was stripping off my shoes to walk into the lake.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Going wading.” My smile was huge.
“No, you aren’t.”
“But Mr. Falkenburg said…”
“I am also a teacher, and I have decided that it is too cold for you. You’ll get sick.”
“I’m not going to swim,” I pleaded, “I just want to walk and look around!”
“You know what disobeying me means. Some day you will thank me for this.”
Then she turned her gaze from me and ended the conversation with “Find something else to do.”
So I wandered off puzzling about the chain of command, and wondering if I could avoid a spanking by circumventing her to ask Mister Falkenburg if his original edict still stood. I was taught by my parents that such a thing was disobedient, and decided to try and find some other type of entertainment.
Wandering through the playground I found younger children occupying themselves with swings and monkey bars. There I found an older boy from Spike’s grade pushing squealing kids on the merry-go-‘round. Here, I decided, I could still hang out with an older student and feel grown up.
Jumping between the welded steel bars of the merry-go-‘round while he paused, I stood my ground and asked him how fast he could get it to spin.
“You’ll want to hold on tight,” he warned me.
Suddenly he began to sprint with his shoulder against the bars, and the inertia began to pull me off the giant metal disk. Further and further I drifted as the wheel spun, until my feet were waiving in the air, and my fingers alone kept my grip on the vertical metal bar of the merry-go-‘round.
At last my chubby fingers gave up, and I flew through the air several feet until I skidded face first through gravel. My knees were shredded and small bits of stone were ground into the wounds. Blood poured down the fronts of my legs and began to pepper my socks. Worst of all, in front of all these people new to my life, I began to cry.
As I was dragged off somewhere and teachers began to roughly scrub the dirt out of my knees, I looked at Ms. LaFevre with distrust.
“The worst that would’ve happened if I was wading is that I would’ve gotten wet,” I thought.
“Now I’m bleeding. I won’t thank you someday. I won’t thank you ever.”
Chapter 1, Part 2
Set the Stage The first morning was fitful and misty as we all stood outside the brick and blue exterior of the former St. Patrick’s Catholic School building. Wisps of dew and fog lay across the busy lanes of Dennison Parkway as we collected in little groups chatting idly with our friends and nervously waiting for the first day of classes at Hope Christian Academy.
Most of what we knew about this school came from that first meeting, and a hastily Xeroxed handbook containing our dress code, the school’s system of written rules, and the outline of our disciplinary system. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was the philosophy of the school’s architects, and all of our parents had to sign a corporal punishment waver that released our professors to spank students in cases of extreme disobedience. There was also a complicated demerit system in place, designed by the principal and his fellow teachers to document and track our sins in a public forum. The system, given the acronym “H.O.W. I. A.C.T.” was intended to observe and mark each infraction by type and by frequency. In their logic, the teachers hoped to identify behavioral problems and modify them be keeping a record of consistent types of misbehavior.
The “H” stood for “hullabaloo,” any form of noisy and distracting mischief committed by a student in an otherwise quiet class setting. “O” was for “out of order,” for whenever a student committed any act that was outside expected behavior. Incomplete homework assignments would be noted with a “W” for “work not in.” “A” stood for “attitude,” and was used to discipline a student for a blatantly uncooperative demeanor. Social complicity was enforced with “C” for courtesy. Talking in class would be awarded a “T.”
The most dreaded category in the entire system was the “I,” which stood for “intentional disobedience,” the most grievous of offenses. A student earning an “I” for direct contradiction of his teacher’s orders would be sent immediately to the office for corporal discipline, and a note sent home to his parents.
The system was designed with a large cork board in every room. The board bore the names of each grade’s members in descending vertical order, and seven envelopes horizontally from the name to mark each type of offense in the “How I Act” system. The numbers varied by age, with tolerance for disobedience lessening by high school, but the basic premise was that perhaps fifteen total infractions in a week, or six in a single day could earn a student a spanking. When the student was spanked, the teachers were instructed to clear the slate, and start counting the daily sins and failings anew.
While I was apprehensive about these demerits, or “tallies” as they were called, I felt that a good boy like me in my fresh white oxford shirt, grey slacks, and maroon clip-on tie couldn’t possibly be so unfortunate as to earn himself a reputation as a troublemaker.
Still apprehensive about the new society in which I stood, I scanned the other children standing outside the glass doors of our new school searching for familiar faces. My older brother, a gregarious and humorous sort, was standing and chatting with other boys in his grade.
My eyes came upon two people immediately: the first was my first love, Shannon Little. She was a sweet little Hailey Mills look alike with giant blue eyes who I had known since I was six. Her father and mine worked together, and her family had recommended Christian Hope Center to mine when we first moved to the Corning area. I stole a few glances at her standing in a plaid jumper and remembered us drawing in crayon on the floor of my father’s office when we were little. Her excitement about how real and amazing my crude little drawings were made me want nothing more than to draw every minute of every day for the rest of my life.
The second person I noticed because he made me feel less out of place. This chubby little fellow with glasses and a crooked tie looked like I felt: brainy, socially awkward, quiet, and slightly uncomfortable in this setting. To add to our immediate kinship, he held in his hand a nearly concealed Transformer, a small token of his interest in what passed for high science fiction at our age.
I knew this boy’s name because his mother taught Sunday school at the church, and his older brother and mine were becoming close friends. Everyone who met him noted how incongruous his introduction seemed; this chubby little boy was called Spike. I knew nothing of the story how he got his name, or if he had a real name, all I knew was that he was also out of place, and would be easy for me to talk to.
I can’t recall exactly how I broke the ice, or what precipitated our chatty exchange about the transformer in his hand, but I immediately admired him for being smart, and for being aloof. Where the rest of us seemed to be looking for comfort, or for a clique to join, he stood by himself in the mist and thought.
Grades at HCA were broken not by age or by teacher, but rather by quantity. Usually two close grades were grouped together under a single teacher, and since the school only went as high as ninth or tenth grade, the number of teachers was small. I found, to my disappointment, that Spike was grouped with the high school kids, and no one was quite sure where fourth and fifth grade belonged. I realized quickly how disorganized this experiment had become.
