graynation: The very first day of school

In 1949, I entered first grade at Ben Milam Elementary School in Dallas. (Ben Milam was a fighter in the Texas revolutionary war against Mexico.) There was no kindergarten then. Before the first day of school (traditionally the Tuesday after Labor Day), my mother and I completed my off-to-school shopping. Her name was June, and she was a worrier. My good young grandchildren, you may have your own thoughts about mothers who worry, but it is far better than having a mother who doesn't. When you are 20, you can start weaning them.

My mother bought a fabric coinpurse, with a gold metal clasp, in which I would carry my lunch money. She reasoned it was more difficult for a six-year-old to lose a whole coinpurse than it was to lose the loose coins themselves. Off I went, the first September morning, with my pencils and ruler and tablet and the coinpurse in my pocket.

Ben Milam was huge, brick, and imposing, in the early 20th century style of elementary schools, two storys and a basement. It was in the Cole Park neighborhood of Dallas, where highway crews were busy excavating the right-of-way for the North Central Expressway, the first urban freeway in Dallas, just across a temporary fence from the upstairs apartment where my family lived on Keating Way. I and some friends had found our way through that fence one weekend, after a rainstorm, when all the huge machinery was still, and we returned home with only the whites of our eyes peeking through the mud.

Susie, my grandmother, could barely restrain herself at the sight. She filled a hot tub and parked me in it, but that was not enough. A few minutes later she re-entered, with a spatula (she called it a pancake turner) in her hand. She hoisted me onto my feet in the dark water and flailed at my bottom until she was satisfied.

But I digress, though I must say I would have preferred a spanking in a muddy tub over being in a line early on a Tuesday morning to have my picture taken in the basement of Ben Milam Elementary. The cafeteria was also in the basement, and 60 years later I remember its scent, though I still can't describe it. It was somewhere between mashed potatoes and peas. In the photo queue, I became a Bluebird, like half my mates, while the others were Redbirds. So early, in our lives, to whet our competitiveness.

I do not remember my teacher's name, but as lunch hour approached, she kindly explained the lunch protocol to us. Then she smiled and held up an object. It was my coinpurse! She said: "What little girl has lost her coinpurse?" It certainly was not worth lunch, or two nickels, or my entire educational future, to respond. I played dead until she gave up and placed the purse in her desk drawer. I was trapped in a startling day in a startling world within a startling world, and I saw no choice but to run.

I had to wait. I didn’t know the penalty for a shamed first-grader bolting for freedom and relief on the first morning of school in the Texas educational system of 1949, but there must have been one. Eventually we filed out of the classroom and marched to the basement, and lined up as Bluebirds or Redbirds, on either side of the hall at the cafeteria doors. Only, when I saw the portal and stairs that I remembered as the way we had come in that morning, I broke for it. I ran up the stairs and out of the school and down the sidewalk three or four blocks to home and unrepentantly threw myself against the apartment door, wanting in.

The next day, I reluctantly walked back to my second day of school at Ben Milam, with two nickels rattling loose in my pocket. I took it as a victory of sorts.