Idyll Banter (10 page)

ISAAC AND GUS SURVIVE GIRL WORLD

ISAAC AND GUS
have been to Girl World and back, and don't seem any worse for the wear. Cassidy, too.

And Dillon? Well, Dillon L'Heureux is only three, so he was happy just to be along for the ride.

Isaac Prescott, Gus Yost, and Cassidy Kearns, however, are graybeards at four and five. They've been . . . socialized. They do . . . boy things. Things with trucks. And tractors. A stick is a sword; a fallen branch is a bazooka.

Ah, but there they were at the Lincoln Cooperative Pre-school, at the wedding of the dog and the bear—a.k.a. Girl World.

Last month's ceremony was, without question, among the higher peaks of the alpine ridgeline that makes up the frenetic preschool social whirl here in Lincoln. One would never have guessed that it was only the second time that preschool teacher Kerry Malloy had coordinated the nuptials of a pair of stuffed animals. (The first, of course, occurred when Malloy was five.)

It was also a study in just how different boys and girls are. Consider, for a moment, the preparations.

The bride's entourage began arriving at 8:30 in the morning, ninety minutes before the double-ring ceremony. Among the first to arrive was flower girl Bridgette Bartlett, five, wearing a snow-white satin gown with matching shoes. Right behind her was Savannah Mayo, also five, decked out in a hunter-green dress with a scooped neck and poufed ballroom sleeves.

Meanwhile, the groom's pals came in T-shirts and jeans. Briefly Isaac and Dillon had bow ties clipped to their collars, but they didn't last long. As soon as the moms' backs were turned, the bow ties were tossed away like roadkill.

And while the girls immersed themselves in the massive amounts of costume jewelry and bridal accoutrements donated by a local bridal boutique . . . the boys hightailed it to the sand table, where Isaac ran the plow and Gus managed the crane. “We're building a road,” Isaac explained earnestly.

The big stuffed dog—the bride—had the ministrations of all the girls in the class. They clipped jewelry to her large, flouncy ears; they placed a veil upon her head. She wore faux pearls and opals and rhinestones. She was offered a gauzy blusher.

But the bear, who was merely the lowly groom, was completely ignored by the boys. Finally, Kerry Malloy used a safety pin to attach a bow tie to his woolly neck.

The two animals were formally wed by Nancy Stevens, a duly elected justice of the peace. There was a brief moment of gender confusion when she took the animals aside for their premarital consultation, since it is usually the men in this world who act like the dogs. But Stevens rallied, and started the service.

First came the bride, escorted by my own four-year-old daughter, Grace (wearing an ankle-length ivory gown, rich with embroidered flowers and lace). Next came the groom, carried by young Cassidy Kearns, four.

Grace carried the bride with the solemnity I'd expect her to show if she'd come across the Holy Grail in the nearby sandpit. Cassidy clutched the groom as if it were a giant, bloodsucking leech he'd found in a swamp.

Now, I don't mean to imply the boys were graceless. Cassidy certainly rallied, serenading the bride with an a cappella rendition of the Beatles classic “All You Need Is Love,” in which he made up for his lack of accompaniment with unfettered enthusiasm.

And, momentarily, the boys and the girls were truly of one mind: When Stevens informed the bear and the dog they could kiss, Grace and Cassidy cautiously brought the stuffed snouts of the two animals together, and then dropped the creatures as if they were radioactive.

Any way you look at it, however, it was a great event. Our planet is, in far too many ways, a man's world. But for one brief and glorious instant this spring, the Lincoln preschoolers were able to glimpse . . . Girl World.

INSPIRING TEACHERS MAKE EDUCATION WORTH EVERY PENNY

I WAS NEVER
scared of the principal when I was in elementary school. The cultural notion that the principal is a disciplinary ogre—an image that has filled children's literature as diverse as Roald Dahl's
Matilda
and a good number of the
Arthur
books by Marc Brown—was not exactly lost on me, but it was always slightly foreign.

The truth is, I don't think any kids at Northeast Elementary School in Stamford, Connecticut, were scared of the principal when I was there in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I should be precise: Nobody was scared of the assistant principal. There might have been students frightened by the principal, though I'd wager that was largely because he had the intimidating two letters “Dr.” before his name.

But the assistant principal—in my memory, at least, a heavyset man with a thick shock of hair that was just starting to gray and the sort of boxy eyeglasses that Hollywood always places on the Mission Control scientists in Gemini- and Apollo-era space movies—was always called Mr. D.

Mr. D. was Joe Dinnan. And Joe Dinnan knew how to talk to children about the things that mattered to them with a knowledge that in hindsight can honestly be considered extraordinary. It was Mr. D. who recommended to me in the school library that I read
Johnny Tremain
in the third grade and then, two years later, remembered my interest in the Revolutionary War and suggested
April Morning.
It was Mr. D. who could mediate a dispute with the potential to grow ugly, a hallway debate in which one group of kids thought Don McLean's “American Pie” was the best song ever written and another contingent was arguing with equal fervor it was the Jackson Five's “I'll Be There.”

Mr. D. understood the fact that the New York Mets were in the World Series in 1969 was an event of legitimate historical importance, and we should be witness to it. He allowed my class to watch the game on television—yes, Virginia, once the World Series was actually played in daylight so children could see it, too—even though we were supposed to be learning fractions.

And, what is probably the greatest gift any teacher or administrator can give to a child, he knew how to make us feel special. When, somehow, I would find myself completely alone on the playground during recess or lunch, separate from the running and the goofing and the noise, it was always Mr. D. who would track down a baseball glove, hand me mine, and patiently toss a softball with me until it was time to go in.

Town meeting is fast approaching, and either on Monday night or sometime on Tuesday, many of us will be staring at the rows of numbers that comprise our local school budgets. Sometimes, it's easy to forget that behind all those figures are flesh-and-blood teachers and administrators who, more times than not, are inspiring and impressive and wise.

The principal at the Lincoln elementary school, Bill Jesdale, is a lot like Mr. D. I understand on occasion he is even called Mr. J.

Likewise, I have every faith that the Lincoln teachers my daughter will have—the ones who will teach her to read, the ones who will tell her of Rosa Parks, the ones who will have her watch baby chicks hatch—will be every bit as wondrous as my best memories of the teachers I had when I was a boy. I imagine the same can be said of the teachers in (for example) Richmond, Colchester, or Cornwall.

Consequently, when you look at those charts at town meeting a little later this week, remember that as helpful as those numbers may be, they can never convey how on any given day a good teacher or administrator will make sure a group of small children will know that they matter.

WILL SLEEPING BEAUTY WAKE
FOR SCHOOL?

THERE
'
S A SCHOOL
bus stop at the end of my driveway, which for the past two years served as my four-year-old daughter's alarm clock. The Gale and Brown children who would wait there for the bus were the only thing standing between Grace's getting to preschool on time and the inevitable destruction of a million-plus brain cells that would have accompanied her sleeping till 9:00 and then watching the midget Martians who've infiltrated PBS and call themselves Teletubbies.

My daughter would hear the inspiring sounds of the older children waiting for another chance to go to school—a boom box blasting Marilyn Manson, the wheels of in-line skates smashing onto asphalt from the height of the nearby church steeple—and she would peer out her bedroom window with interest.

My wife and I would then be able to cajole her downstairs and get her ready for preschool. The school bus alarm worked wonders because the bus would arrive shortly before 8:00, which meant we had the full hour we needed before preschool began to convince her that Oreos weren't breakfast, and then find an outfit that would appeal to buddies Bridgette and Ellen—a profound enigma, since Ellen wears only overalls and Bridgette wears only skirts.

Now my point isn't that it was difficult to get my daughter out the door—though it could be.

My point is that my daughter sleeps like a mummy. There have been times I've been tempted to put a mirror over her mouth, and mornings when she's slept through the world's most cloying alarm: The Barbie Clock Radio.

“Ding, ding, ding. Hi. I'm Barbie. Ding, ding, ding. Hi. I'm Barbie.”

Then it starts emitting the sort of beep that engineers at nuclear power plants hear when a radiation leak has just started twisting carrots into pretzels.

Once, my wife heard the alarm beep eighty-one times before Grace turned it off . . . and then went back to sleep.

Well, tomorrow morning, a few minutes before 8:00, that school bus will once more coast to a stop at the end of our driveway, but for the first time my daughter will be expected to get on it. Tomorrow is her first day of kindergarten, the day she begins going to school.

And so, like many parents, my wife and I have spent weeks wringing our hands at the prospect. We wonder two things:

• How did she grow up so quickly?

• How are we going to convince the neighbor children to start waiting at the bus stop at 7:00
A.M.
, so we can get Grace out the door by 8:00?

These are universal questions. It really does seem like yesterday that I tried to console my sobbing daughter a few days after she was born by offering her Placebo Breast: I held a pacifier to my naked chest, and told her my chest hair was a sweater. (It worked, but only because Grace was less than a week old and hadn't yet met her fashion-conscious friends Bridgette and Ellen.)

In any case, the first question is easier to answer than the second. Yes, in three months Grace will turn five, but a half-decade isn't really a long time at all. Our president has sex scandals older than that.

The second question poses a real conundrum, however, and my wife and I indeed wonder what we're going to do weekday mornings for the next thirteen years. Our hope—and we cling to it the way I do to every strand of hair on my folliclely challenged cranium—is that by getting her to bed early, she'll wake up early. Perhaps, we delude ourselves, we've simply allowed her to stay up too late all these years, playing and reading and watching Jay Leno. We'll see. We'll certainly know by this time tomorrow whether putting her to bed right after breakfast today did any good. With any luck, she will have gotten on the bus with her lunch box, waved to her parents from the window . . . and not noticed that the two of us were sobbing into our coffee cups.