I remember when I was about 10 years old being called into the office at my elementary school, Ridge Hill. The cranky, ancient principal’s assistant leaned over her 50 foot high desk and told me that I was going to be attending a new after-school program starting the next week. She didn’t say what it was. She gave me a weird smile as I walked out of the office. Was it my imagination or was she talking to me very slow and loud, like I was a Chinese tourist asking for directions in New York City and had only a cursory grasp of the English language. The next week as the regular school day closed I was adrift with anticipation as to what awesome activities awaited me: kickball, science camp, maybe even a special showing of Jaws on the school’s 8mm film projector in the cafeteria?!
The class was to be held in the Aquarius room. At Ridge Hill school our grades and classrooms were split into units and named after the space program’s missions. In grades 1-3 you were either in Vanguard or Mercury. In grades 4-6 you were either in Gemini or Apollo. Then there was Aquarius. Aquarius was set up for the special kids, kids who were different. No one used words like “learning disabled” or “emotionally challenged” back in the day - this was when the worst off of these kids were still called retarded and custodial technicians were just janitors. There wasn’t much interaction between the rest of the school and the kids in Aquarius, but rumors circulated about extended nap times and amazing feats of retard strength.
Wait a second - a thought occurred to me and I broke out in a cold sweat; was I being transitioned into Aquarius? Was this how the powers that be brought the lambs to the slaughter? Was I (gasp)…S-P-E-C-I-A-L?! I did a mental inventory – my nap times were well within thirty minutes and I actually was on the weak side. Maybe I did drool a little more than most but my bus was definitely regulation length. I certainly didn’t feel special.
The classroom was quiet, filled with an unfamiliar teacher milling around and only a handful of kids who looked as bored and confused as I was. The teacher started talking to us like Chinese tourists again, announcing that this activity was a four week program for kids who had divorced parents or broken homes. Broken homes? Our house looked fine. What the hell -no Jaws?
It turns out they were just offering some guidance to kids who lived under those circumstances, I guess trying to boost our self esteem early on or gauge if we had a broken neuron that would turn us into window-lickers, degenerate drunks who listened to Iron Maiden albums backwards and tortured hamsters, or even worse…writers. Deferring the cost of future state-subsidized mass lobotomies – very smart.
Back in 1982 the divorce rates were very low and in the whole school of hundreds there were only 5 or 6 kids with divorced parents or raised by single parents. Nowadays they would need to pack the auditorium with 60-70% of the school. I guess this was a new progressive program to start giving counseling to children who had been affected. I really didn’t know how to react and what the point was. The teachers talked slow the whole time, in hushed tones, like our heads might explode if they used normal volumes. We kids thought there was something fragile in the air in the room that wasn’t supposed to be broken, so we talked quietly as well. They told us that we could leave any time if we weren’t comfortable. What exactly about this whole exercise was supposed to feel comfortable? Hell even the bell-bottom corduroys I was wearing weren’t comfortable.
I don’t remember a lot about what we talked about for those few weeks but I do recall making genealogy charts. On oversized pieces of newsprint we recorded all of our relatives as far back as we could find, with the input from our parents. The result was a chart that looked like a NCAA tournament bracket that went back to my great grandfather in Germany. We didn’t have any family in the United States. My father’s family had come from stone masons – that makes perfect sense to me now because I like to get stoned. He had a bunch of brothers and sisters and they worked their asses off most of the year laying bricks and then had to stop in the cold winters, when the women of the house would take on sewing to help buy food and firewood. They sounded like tough, cold people who actually escaped Communist East Germany and left everything behind. By the time I visited Germany as a kid everyone was wearing socks with sandals and ate cake in the afternoons. I filled my chart with German names of people I’d never met as distant as the still-life paintings of my grandmother and grandfather in their parlor with afternoon sunlight filtering across the green velvet couch. I guess this was the first time I was conscious that there was something different with our family, that I should be feeling some sort of loss.
At the end of the last session we got ice cream sundaes. They took out a bunch of different flavors and toppings and we lined up and helped ourselves. I was even encouraged to have seconds. We were still all a little unsure what was happening, but no kid will refuse ice cream. What did this have to do with our genealogy and broken homes? Did they think we weren’t getting enough ice cream at home? Were children of single parents chronically sugar deprived? After that there were no more sessions and no one talked about this again.
Why do I tell you this story? What’s the grand moral I’m trying to impress upon you? Get to the point already? I don’t really know myself, except I wanted to pass this on to you so you can have fun trying to make sense of it so I don’t have to anymore. I’ve been on this earth 38 years and I haven’t figured out a damn thing so maybe you’ll have better luck. But maybe I have learned this; no matter what bullshit you throw at people you can always bribe them with ice cream and they’ll sit through it.
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