I’ve written in this space about nearly flunking kindergarten. If not for my father stepping in and telling Mrs. Booth “no,” I would have spent another year intentionally circling the wrong elephant on worksheets and graduated a year later from high school and college.
My grades really didn’t improve until the third grade in 1984-85. Two years earlier, I got through my first two quarters of the first grade in tiny Anderson, Missouri, with a few C-minuses and a slew of Ds.
I can’t even remember my first-grade teacher’s name (any classmates reading this, please send me a message), but I do remember she was a kind, elderly woman and seemed to like me, even if I wasn’t a very good student.
That was also the year we spent the holidays with the Halls, a wonderful family who took care of my brother and I while my father worked 20-hours days at a Christmas show that essentially covered one-half of the family’s annual income.
The previous year, Mom and Dad were so busy trying to keep up with their craft show in Joplin that we spent a decent amount of time staying with my Aunt Donna and Uncle Wayne.
“Your mom was working the show, and I was working 16 to 20 hours a day to make the stained glass,” Dad said. “We were trying to keep up with the demand. We’d never made that much money before on stained glass or anything else.”
To be clear, that wasn’t exactly a fortune. It was enough to give my brother and I a generous Christmas and get us through the winter months, during which there were no craft shows.
What little I remember about my brother and I’s stay with our aunt, uncle and cousins is that I was in trouble often, and the punishment usually entailed being put in a bedroom with nothing to do for quite a while.
One of those punishments came after Dan (my brother) and I decided it would be a great idea to get into a Christmas present early. All it took was for our aunt, uncle and cousins to step outside for five minutes. In a matter of seconds, we had a present open. Imagine our disappointment when we unearthed a T-shirt.
I was 5 and Dan a few weeks shy of 4, so neither of us was an expert at wrapping presents. I can still see it sitting there, with the ends wound up like the outside of a Double Bubble wrapper and a butchered tape job. That little stunt bought us an hour in that boring, lonesome bedroom.
My other memory of that Christmas is that my parents were so busy that they didn’t have time to wrap presents. We arrived home from Columbia, where Aunt Donna and Uncle Wayne lived, on the morning of the big day, and the old man walked us to our bedroom, where all our gifts had been placed on the floor.
Not opening presents took some of the excitement out of Christmas, but that “disappointment” didn’t last long, especially considering we each scored our first bicycles (each a Huffy) and a Lite-Brite, which, ironically, helped me learn to read better, make shapes more interesting and scrape by in kindergarten.