Chapter 32: My Third Year in Kindergarten, I Learned That All Stories Have a Good Ending

BEFORE YOU GO THINKING I was a really dumb little shit, let me set the record straight about why I was three years in kindergarten.

Back then, in those olden days fifty plus years ago, there wasn’t an organized nursery school or preschool program, and kindergartens were taught mostly by volunteers in church basements. That was what got my mother into the classroom. She had been a campaigner for teaching the children of Swedish immigrants how to speak proper English and putting them on the road to success. When Pastor Olmquist called on her with a proposal to start a kindergarten at the local Swedish Lutheran church, she couldn’t really say no, even though she was nominally Catholic and publicly an atheist. She believed that religion kept the masses down, and she ran her family as a good socialist would.

But she also knew a good thing when she saw it. Having a podium to advance the education of Swedish children in America was all it took to get her to say yes.

I was four years old—too young for regular admittance into kindergarten, but because mother was the teacher, I was permitted to attend.

I learned how to make snakes out of clay and to weave the snakes together to make little clay baskets.

The next year I was five and eligible to attend kindergarten. I had already learned how to make snakes out of clay, so I allowed my curiosity to get the best of me and started looking at books. They were mysterious things, these books. When mother opened them, they had wonderful stories in them. When I opened them, they were filled with secret scribbles that meant nothing. I even attempted to put my own stories in them with scribbles, but mother disapproved and said that my marks made it hard to read the words. So, she began to teach me to read.

By the end of that year, I could read simple books to myself or out loud. It was wonderful.

A silly rule was implemented by the school district that year. The school board decided that they would move the cut-off date for the age of being admitted into school. It went from September 15—my birthday—to September 1. You had to be six by the first of September to be admitted into first grade. Mother protested, and when the school principal learned that I could already read, he was willing to admit me to school.

Then the illness came. According to the doctors, I’d had an untreated strep throat condition during the summer and less than a month later, I contracted Rheumatic Fever. It was pretty severe, and for a while mother thought I was dying. I fought through it, and recovered. But by this time school was six weeks in session and the principal was adamant that he would not allow me to start at such a disadvantage at such a young age. So at six years old, I found myself under my mother’s tutelage again in kindergarten. I spent my days reading. I had little care for anything else that was being taught to the kindergartners because mother had insisted on only English being spoken in our home, and I’d long since mastered the art of making clay snakes. I emerged from my cocoon in the reading area only for arithmetic lessons. I hoarded the books. I drove away smaller children who wanted to read them.

But I couldn’t protect them all, all the time. I sat one day to read a book that had interested me only to find that the last dozen or so pages had been torn out by an enraged five-year-old some weeks before. I was furious. I cried. I stormed. I kicked my feet. I was six and I would never find out the ending of the story.

My mother weathered the storm. She sat down beside me and told me that it was indeed a terrible thing that pages had been torn from a book, but that children who did not know the secrets of books often did not value them as I did. And, she revealed, I had not yet learned all the secrets of books myself.

I was shocked. I read well above my age-level for all that I was stuck back in kindergarten again. My first grade contemporaries were still struggling with “see Spot run” and I was deep in Hardy Boys Mysteries. What did I have to learn about books?

My mother told me that true masters of books often did not need to read the ending. They were quite content to put down a book without finishing it because they could tell the ending themselves. A true master of reading knew that all stories have a good ending. So they could simply close the book before the last chapter and imagine what that ending would be. Often, if they went back to read the ending of a book they had previously skipped, they were disappointed that it did not end as well as they had imagined.