Childhood Horror: One of Many

Back in the early 80's when I was in 1st grade we had a little story time segment. The children would gather around the teacher, sitting on a little stool with her back to the crowd pressed up in a corner.

A decent strategic move for keeping an eye on some 20 rowdy mouth-breathers with a penchant for clumsy mischief.

There, a story of some twenty pages would be read to the earnest faces. Milk and cookies were not served, kindergarten being a fading memory in the minds of the little tykes. But the idea of story time and the special niche it filled before recess was an important one to me.

This time became even more sought after when after a few weeks the teacher announced that students could sign up for a section of a day and read stories they brought from home.

The ritual was meant to encourage reading in us wee ones. But it started me thinking down a sinister road.

A naturally shy and painfully introverted youth with a scowl setting in at age 5 that would later in life cause me to wear glasses for a astigmatism that formed in my left eye, I waited to sign up and determine what kind of material the other students were bringing with them.

It was amazing how many different tiny books that Golden Books was publishing when I was a child. I must have heard The Pokey Little Puppy poorly sounded out by 15 out of 20 children before I decided to bring material of my own.

Now, reading long tomes about sailing and sailors, desperate and thick material that a child can barely lift let alone read, to a group of people that struggled through The Pokey Little Puppy made me reconsider Moby Dick.

Not a joke, I was reading it at the time as well as David Copperfield, but in the case of the latter I was reading it because I thought it was about the magician. I may have been a genius of a six-year-old but some things you learn much later in life.

Incidentally I had a much finer respect for the magician for many years, seeing how crummy his early life was and all...

As a compromise I brought in my very own copy of The Pokey Little Puppy. But rather than read what was there I made myself little sheets and taped them into the book and created a short story about a talking plane that had a problem with crashing into buildings.

George of the Jungle was my favorite cartoon at the time, but in retrospect it has become sinister to even consider planes and buildings, even though apparently a creative 1st grader could come up with it as a plan.

It didn't take the teacher more than a few pages to sweep in and take my little home-made book away. Though I had captured the attention of the student and was reading only what I had written on my poorly crayon-illustrated pages, the point of the exercise was to read, not make things up.

Laughed at and ridiculed for being told off by the teacher it would be some three years before I sat down to write anything again. But the lessons of youth are always remembered.

Know your audience, and avoid getting caught doing anything the authorities will not understand.