cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A whole history suddenly asserts its self I wandered across what seemed like an impossibly broad meadow at the time, but in retrospect was nothing more than a short stretch of grass between a few rows of townhouses and some apartments. Somewhere on the apartment side I met a boy of about my age. Perhaps a year older. We played together and then we walked to his apartment on the ground level of one of the buildings, from behind. I did not know what an apartment was at the time. He or his mother had in a cage 3 parakeets. THREE! All together in one cage. It seemed magical. I had the one in a cage on its own and this boy had the makings of a flock. In this cage that was more or less vertical. They were 2 greens and a blue. Three parakeets, in one cage. Well. We played together and I told him that this was about it. His parakeets were excellent but I was moving away this very day. There was a big truck and boxes and my parents were very busy and we would move away that day and probably never come back. Later that day I went to The Playground. I remember going down the slide once more. Through the partial fiberglass covering over the slide and down to whoosh out over the mulched ground. I stood there and looked around and at the sigh with the rules, blue type on a white background. I was about 7 years old. It was a wonderful day and my play was triumphant. I played with many children and it felt as though I was drinking very, very deeply of life and I knew that I would leave and would be gone and not come back. And eventually I wandered back on that bright, sunny day and I helped to push my bike into the moving van and we left for the new house and I did not come back. And there was the childhood. Yes, there was the whole first phase. There went that house, where I had been for all that I remembered except for the year or 2 in London. There went the room that I shared with my brother. In the new house with an apple tree in he backyard I had a room of my own. For the first week or 2 my brother and I crowded together into his room or my own, sleeping in the same bed, confused by the space and the isolation. Later I came to accept the sense of private ownership. Pieces of Construx building set scattered about. Batteries and feathers and rocks everywhere. His room and my room diverged. He, neat and orderly with paints and drawing sets and models so neatly organized. I with bones and stones and birds nests and ad hoc robots made of cheap electric motors taped to sticks and batteries and gears and wires and it all sort of worked sometimes. I read 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Little Men' under the blankets alone. I did not know what he did anymore. We got a bigger cage and another parakeet to keep the first company. A deck was built and I put a bird feeder on it. Someone gave me a camera for Christmas and I saw a yellow pamphlet with a goldfinch on the front in the mezzanine of the public library. I sent in my two dollars and became the y0ungest member in the history of the Audubon society. I received mailings with listings of bird sightings and counts and read through the figures and statistics, nodding approvingly. I took pictures of birds on the deck, pecking at seed in the feeder. I read books by Roger Tory Peterson and contemplated my future career as an ornithologist. ____________ There was school and I didn't care and there was nothing interesting there anyway. I started second grade briefly and was promoted to fourth grade abruptly and without explanation. This was more interesting. We learned of weather and electricity and geography. I memorized the islands of Japan, listening to a record in the classroom, already ancient and dated at the time. "Honshu. Shikuku. Hokaido..." The record in Ms. Young's class droned on. She was very old and black and wrinkled and I thought it strange that she was called Ms. Young. I never saw the boy again with the 3 parakeets. I never even thought of him or the parakeets until this night. The other children in my home room were all larger and older than me. Proper 4th graders. Yet they were invariably kind and I was adopted as a sort of mascot. I had friends. 4th grade was good. ___________
___________ Huh. I didn't mean to write about that. The memory of that day that we moved just suddenly welled up and I started writing and this was what happened. My parents have since claimed that they had no idea that my brother and I had skipped 2 grades and been moved into 4th grade; thus they had no notion of ensuring that our promotion carried over into the new school. Having a 6 year old of my own now, I cannot fathom how someone could be so disinterested in their own child's life and education as to not know that their kid had SKIPPED TWO FUCKING GRADES. And do you have any idea what it was like to be bumped back to second grade after moving? This terrible mistake had been made but I didn't know what I was supposed to do about it. My formal education ended at that point. It sounds like exaggeration, but I literally did not learn anything else from school from that point onward. I spent many an afternoon and evening in the public library and by taking home at least a dozen books each week I eventually educated myself. I learned science and geography from maps and by reading National Geographic. I read massive amounts of science fiction. I devoured Asimov and Heinlein in elementary and middle school, gaining some footing in the physical sciences through those authors' collections of essays and using those as a basis for more research into various topics. English and writing came from everything I read. Mostly science fiction, pulp fiction hardbacks from about 1915-1935, and a ton of gilded age literature. Lots of Lousia May Alcott and Mark Twain and Ernest Thoms0n Seton and Jules Verne. Anything being taught at school was almost by definition too retarded to even consider paying attention to. I openly flouted the program of study. Homework was assigned and, literally, from the age of 7 onward, once I was moved back into second grade I did not do a single homework assignment for the rest of my primary school career. In retrospect, my decision never to even consider doing homework was one of the smartest things I ever did. Fuck their worksheets and textbooks. On the first 2 nights after being given a new reading textbook, I would read the entire thing form cover to cover and then put it away. That was generally the only thing worth looking at at all. With the fullness of time and shit in my favor, this was very wise of me. Everything that I was reading and building and fiddling with on my own was so much more worthwhile than anything they were assigning me in school. I figured that neither my parents not teachers could really make me do homework if I obstinately refused, and that it would never really matter, AND I WAS RIGHT. Homework *was* retarded. This was a fact and I am so very much happy in retrospect that I gave everyone the finger and completely ignored school as much as possible. It was a complete waste of time and my parents should have just dropped me off at the public library for 6 hours a day instead. 2:14 a.m. - 2010-11-28 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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