Summer Before Fourth Grade

It was H-O-T hot in Laredo all during the summer, but especially during the dog days of mid August, which my mom called la canicula. 

Time during the summer stretched stiff and slow as a piece of taffy. The last school year seemed so long ago. Now there were endless days of watching TV, riding bikes, and during the cool of the night, sitting on the porch listening to the grown-ups telling stories. 

The new school year‘s arrival was still too distant to warrant any serious consideration. What did occupy my mind and time was the Confederate troop I was a part of (my neighbor’s toy long rifle fueled that historical wandering) and also my travels in outer space, which I explored straddling a rolled-up quilt/saddle atop my dresser, which served excellently as the cockpit of my spaceship. 

I was about to start fourth grade the summer I was allowed by Mama to travel solo on the bus to our town’s library, a place I secretly felt was as wonderful and sacred as any church I knew. The magic was in finally getting to do something on my own. It was thrilling.

I pulled open the doors of the air-conditioned library on the second story of Laredo’s City Hall. I was lucky to feel confident that the public library’s  gatekeepers, two gray-haired Anglo-looking ladies seated behind the checkout counter would approve my entry into such a venerable place.  They looked much like the nuns at school, except for their exposed gray curls and ears. 

For hours I walked slowly scanning titles from both the children’s and adult sections. I loved titles and wanted to grow up to make up my own titles. Was that a job? I took home as many books as I could carry. While waiting for the bus I bought with a spare 25 cents a copy of a tabloid newspaper with photos and a story about an Italian family barbecued and eaten by their madman father. When I got to our stop I left the newspaper on the bus seat on purpose. Mama would not approve of either my buying or reading it.

Trips to the library were my first steps in exercising my imagination into reality. It was my idea to get a library card and also my decision when to go there and when come home. Yes, there were still morning forays into neighboring Yankee territory, and space adventures avoiding asteroids during the hottest part of the day. They didn’t compare with wandering the aisles of fiction and nonfiction at the library. I breathed in the aromas of old colonial furniture polish mixed with paper from new and vintage books, magazines and newspapers. It was more than intoxicating adventure, it was liberating.  I had discovered my agency, true, but equally important was that in simply browsing the titles of hundreds upon hundreds of books I birthed the idea that life, however it unfolded, would be plentiful with stories. I wanted desperately to know how other people lived, what they did and what they thought. 

My stacks of horse biographies and joke books fed my imagination during the summer as much as the nuns did with spelling bees, religion class and long division during the school year. 

At the end of la canicula , a rain shower would fall and remind me that just around the corner was the start of a new school year. Soon Mama would drive us downtown, past the bus stop, newsstand and library for the yearly purchase of a pair of white oxfords. I had little time to miss my dangerous incursions into foreign territories whether Yankee or astral. Summer was like that, there endless and forever, then suddenly over. 

Oh, the good old days of no social media

Is anything as heart wrenching as a teenager's mauling and cruel self judgment? Eighth Grade made me step back in time into my moccasins, tee shirt and cut off jeans when my world revolved around (some) my family and (mostly) friends.

1968-69 my eighth grade year ranks as the worst year in my until then much loved and secure life. That fall, I got tossed out of a girls catholic school I'd attended for nine years for exercising my writing and artistic abilities on school bathroom walls. And since my subjects were both innocent and came from powerful families, the nuns showed me the door. I never even got a chance to give my reasons for the graffiti:  a full-on war had broken out between two neighborhoods. It was rich versus the poor and the victor (the rich) had taken the spoils: the boys in my old neighborhood had left us girls they had grown up with for new girls who owned swimming pools, and whose maids served sodas to visitors. Was I pissed!!!

The spring semester of eighth grade I enrolled in public school where I knew not one person. My mom and I had to scramble for clothes for me to wear. I had no school clothes, only my old uniforms (bye bye) and play clothes. Add to this the general awkwardness of being 13, the onslaught of puberty, the crushing beauty of everyone around you-- except your own--to which you were blind. 

I made it to the end of eighth grade in my new school with some new friends to replace my old gang from catholic school and when the next year began, I flew like an eagle, joining clubs and becoming a junior journalist. I ended the ninth grade semester being awarded more recognition at the school assembly than I thought possible. There was a God and she was two people, my Journalism sponsor, Margarita Newton and my Physical Education coach, Gracie Alderete.

The heavy lifting during this hard time came from me, however. Losing like a cocoon the protective environment of my old school, where I had made merry mischief since kindergarten was harder than I expected. I cringed to think what people said behind my back, but thank God that I had no actual proof or even an idea, because there was no social media to document the gossip and rumors. 

Watching Eighth Grade makes me think how much harder it may be to grow up today because of the the additional pressures of images and text to tell you exactly what everyone is writing and saying about you --or not writing and saying. 

Return of the 8th Grade Mystic, Clairvoyant Catholic

Remaining: the 4 square blocks of the old Ursuline Academy school boundaries in Laredo, Texas. The school is now named St. Augustine. Most of the old buildings are still there, including the High School and Convent where the nuns lived, and the courtyard there where we held dances with a rock and roll band.

Gone: the giant mesquite tree near the 5-8th grade classrooms under whose shade I memorized Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl," the trees on the corner where we carved our initials with boy's names we had crushes on, now forgotten; the grotto where I had my only moment of accidental mind-reading: After lunch at home two blocks away, I sped to my classmates on my bike and blurted out the name Sam Jaffe, the name of TV doctor Ben Casey's mentor. The girls spun around and said "shhhh!!!" as they were playing charades. I don't know why I blurted his name. I had plucked the name from the air and said it out loud before I even knew they were playing charades.

Gone: the 3rd floor open room in the convent where we were gathered to watch (great fun) a film. A film about the horrors at Auschwitz (what is most the opposite of great fun?) We cringed and cried to see the mounds of skin and bones. Where was God in all this terror?

Remaining: the office where I sat as an 8th grader, stunned to know I was being asked to leave my school of 9 and a half years (since kindergarten), and would be enrolling at public school. Less austere today is the office than when the nuns were in charge. It is now bright orange in color and students and staff breeze in and out, as I careen between the present and past, its shadows and whispers from 40 years ago.

Remaining: the chapel where we sat each week for prayers or Mass on the first Friday of the month, little Kleenex's pinned to our heads when we forgot to wear our beanies (little caps). The chapel has had a make-over, with new stained glass windows. The square chairs are still there, and the old plaster statues are fragile from the years of standing guard in the humidity of Laredo. I see the statue of the Virgin Mary there, and gaze carefully to catch her eye. I remember the week we learned about the miracle at Lourdes and we all prayed so fervently to repeat the miracle. One girl (not me, I swear on sharp cheddar cheese) thought she saw Mary shed tears and the news of the vision spread from class to class. For days the nuns played traffic cops to a little parade of penitents praying before the statue hoping they could witness her crying.

Gone: the scared 8th grader that was too much for the nuns. She left the old school shamed, but collected herself in short order, making new friends and learning from new teachers. The nuns, when they said good-bye promised to pray for her. The girl is grown and approaching 60, and thanks them for their prayers; she is thriving and so is the old school. There were more than 3 million dollars in scholarships awarded to the 120 graduating seniors this year. Isn't that miraculous?

I miss the old mesquite, the dances under the night sky, the conspiracy of little mystics. I am so happy to have returned and seen how well we are both doing, the school heading toward its 150th anniversary, and one of its once-clairvoyant minor mystics moving well on her divine path, whose journey of learning in life was so strongly shaped within those 4 square blocks.