The happy haven thread.

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I think it's when you can't leave the building. I could have gone to one a few months ago, but I didn't because it had too many people going.

If anyone has any happy stories to add that would be good. I'm feeling totally crap.

Opal (my favorite gem),
I read your posts on the happy haven (maybe you read mine?). If you could raise 12,000 USD and give it to Books For Africa on behalf of africamissionalliance.com, you could be responsible for sending a 40 foot long container of books to Rwandan schools and University! Yes, you!

I think I was happy the first day I went to see a shrink fro depression stuff, after I left. I was living at the YMCA and everyone understood the depression thing there.

I'm happy, because it's raining, instead of snowing. That means that I'll be going out with my friends, tonight. :O)

at the moment I'm unlikely to raise a smile , let alone 12,000 US.

But thanks everyone who posted

Hmmm, happy memories. How about the last day of school? In grade 1 I remember sitting at home eating Revelos after coming back from school... in grade2 our teacher gave us little magnetic chess sets or a combination of 3 little magnetic games as going-away party favors or whatever... in grade 3 our teacher broke down and cried about how she didn't want to leave us and was going to yet another school and would miss us so much... we gave her gifts at the end of the year and I had made her some bath salts with salt and other stuff... didn't look too professional at all in Ziploc bags that I had written "bath salts I made" on them but they were usable... I had also given her other stuff, some that I made... then we went to my friend Jennifer's party in their backyard. Their family weere the snooty type that wouldn't let us inside the house. One girl, Laura, sang "Joy to the world, the teacher's dead, we barbecued her head. What happened to her body, we flushed it down the potty..." and then Jennifer's mother told us to sing something else since she was a teacher... me and my friend Melissa were banned from their house and Jennifer's mother never let her invite us over again because Melissa allegedly spilled a bowl of popcorn on the grass and I "broke their swing"... aka bent a cross bar that had nothing to do with the functioning of the swings. I hadn't been the only one that had stood on it and jumped on it; one or two of the others had too; and I don't even know if I had even stood or jumped on the side that got bent... it was interesting; 6 months later when we met in the shelter during the ice storm Jennifer's little sister asked if I was sorry I "broke their swing"!


In grade 4 on the last day, I don't remember... grade 5, I don't remember... grade 6, it was the grade 6 graduation and there was a pool party after... we got to eat little things after the graduation in the hall... I was excited to be out of there for good; we had a huge grade 6 graduation cake on several tables in the hall made by several mothers and decorated by their children, including my friend Jennifer L, whose sort of social-climbing mother was involved in everything like that... my friend Jennifer W. was scolded or yelled at because she and Julia K. and Peter had been chosen to give speeches at the graduation and she had hardly written anything... we did graduation rehearsals which beat sitting in class, the other two grade 6 classes which were French immersion, classrooms 7 and 9, were so far ahead having played the ukelaile for years and we, the all-English class with 16 or 17 of the 33 of us coded with learning disabilities, and which a few adults had told us were the worst class they had ever seen, were just starting. We didn't know one note on it. We learned a few fast, I faked some of it and knew I wouldn't get caught, but I think I was better than probably half the class... three people broke their ukelailes beyond repair, my friend Jennifer W’s uke kept falling out of its case onto the floor, We were to play two songs at the graduation—The Graduation Song by Vitamin C, and Learn Everything. Devin S. was teased by other boys for having beaver teeth and I think something happened with him involving a destruction of at least 1 uke, so the boys teased him about eating ukes and being a beaver… they sang this song, “Show me the meaning… of being a beaver…” to the tune of “Show me the meaning… of being lonely…” in some song, I forget the name, sung by Celine Dion I think. Our ukes got so out of tune and one of the teachers had to go around tuning all 33 of our ukes and it took forever and then we hardly got any playing done due to disruptions and such. It was funny; even at the time it was so absurd it was comical. Another popular silly parody song in our class, room 10, was “the uke… the uke… the uke is on fire.”


All year we were yelled at and lectured by our teacher, Nicky C. stole Annemarie M’s gel pens and smeared the gel on his hands, Nick B. didn’t do his homework once and pretended he had when we were class-correcting it but didn’t even write in the answers, so the teacher yelled at him to come up and prove he did it and he went up to her with his blank notebook page and she yelled at him for his nerve, it was amazing! We got lectured about the system and life and that a lot more than we got taught other stuff, curriculum stuff, and I was relieved, it was a break from curriculum stuff. She told us about Expo 67, her boyfriend who had a piece of the Berlin Wall, how my friend Melissa L-C never wore her gym uniform to gym but wore it on the weekends, how her son’s hockey equipment was very expensive and how the hockey mothers at the rink were insufferable, how when she was a kid she went and played outside, this little Catholic boy and girl who played with condoms in the schoolyard, how when she was our age she didn’t know what a slut or b***h or whore was, how when she was a kid 6th-grade girls played with Barbie dolls and at least they had a childhood and an innocence, how those striped t-shirts that some girls wore that they thought were so cool would be considered uncool and tacky in her day, how in the future there would be freak storms, how if you’re a woman you have to be a b***h sometimes in order to survive, how she found us cocky and this and that, how when she was a kid inelementary school she had to draw the map of North America freehand, how her son’s friends threw cookies at her out the window of their classroom when she went to her son’s school, about the tornadoes in Oklahoma, about Reena Virk getting murdered, about “black magic” and “voodoo” and “flat liners”, aka the choking game, about how Vaishali P’s parents gave her very healthy lunches every day and hat’s partially why Vaishali did so well in school, but also that Vaishali learned that she still had a lot to learn, since coming to grade 6, as every other teacher gushed about perfect little Vaishali. She asked Amanda O. if at 12 years old she wanted to be called a f-in slut. How the language in the class was unacceptable, how she saw Cody L. and his friends sitting in a restaurant one day and watched through the window and listened to them talking sewer talk and using all these sexual words she didn’t know when she was 12. He talked about how her son had gotten free tickets to hockey school for the summer, but had said that hockey was a winter sport and he had his summer sports to do, and so they gave the tickets to Melissa L’s brother Trevor. “Miss Kelly” talked about how she was in better shape physically than her 12-year-old son, how she had medical problems we had no idea about, how once she helped her son make a bridge out of toothpicks for a project, how she got so exhausted she collapsed into bed at 7:00 when she came home after spending all day with us, how a lot of us came to school just to socialize and not to learn anything, how we really should take a bath or shower every day because she smelled the sour hair of two students, how she had been told not to wear those platform shoes because she’d get spinal problems bur she didn’t listen and now she had the problems, how she was the cool girl in high school but was still better, how Eric L. was one kid in the class who didn’t use his learning disability as an excuse and how she helped this dyslexic girl who was once in her class and how she got good grades in the end and was very smart but went on to become a waitress. She talked about how she didn’t think we were ready for high school, how she HAD to write good stuff on our report cards that she didn’t mean, how we were the worst class she had ever had. She read us a fictitious story her son had had to write in grade 3, a fairy tale. She talked about us. How Nicole C. was drifting from her friends’ wild ways and was starting to take school seriously, how Angelica H. and her friends tried to mimic the fake girls on Beverly Hills 90210 and how the people who actually lived there were insulted by it because they were not like these fake people. She said that Erika L. had learned from detention (and was the only one that did out of the ones that got detention), she talked about how Jennifer W. was the best writer in the class, how my grade 5 teacher had ranted and raved to all the teachers about my writing and how good my stories were. But Miss Kelly said that the most important thing in grade 6 was not to know how to write a story, but to know plot and analyse things and crap like that. She talked about how she didn’t wear Tommy Hilfiger all the time because it was expensive or to impress people—the teachers in the lounge had been impressed and said they could never afford Tommy, but Miss Kelly wore it all the time because she felt good in it and it suited her personality. She pointed out people in the class who wore stylish clothes perhaps to fit in. Miss Kelly had a tattoo of cherries on one hip and a ladybug on another, she always said “You wanna know somethin’?” and she threw a math book across the room once. Once she got her favorite student (I think), my friend Jennifer W, to slam the door for her. Once she got Jen W. to get up and talk to us and tell us about our behavior and how it was unacceptable and frustrating. I remember her saying that she wanted to punch every one of us in the face sometimes. Once Miss Kelly broke the door slamming it, and when someone was sent to the office to find the janitor, the people at the office knew what had happened and I saw the janitor fixing the door and he knew what had happened. The other two grade 6 classes said they heard Miss Kelly yelling at us all the time. Sometimes she sat there on the computer or with her feet up on her desk expecting us to be doing our work, but most of the class was talking, and then she would yell loud! She said she could be a fun teacher and she could. She was the most fun teacher when we behaved. She was proud of her loud booming voice. “I have a loud booming voice”, she said. “Not a high screechy voice like some other teachers…” “Am I a tough teacher?” she would ask the class. And everyone would say “Yes!” Miss Kelly talked about how there would be freak storms in the future, how when she was a kid there were snowbanks up to the roof of her house and there was a picture of her at 8 years old on top of a snowbank the height of her house. She talked about how she loved the Story of Us, how she laughed and cried and it was a really good realistic movie. How the Matrix was crap, how she and her boyfriend fell asleep when they and her son went to see it, and how her son was enthralled with it and paid attention to the entire thing. She told us that in the years to come we would hear her voice echoing inside our heads (and we did). She talked about how Ian L. had done his homework so well; he had even made pie graphs demonstrating every answer to show he understood, and she was impressed. She talked about a grade 6 student she had had before who had tried to get her fired, plotting with her friends. That student came back to the classroom to visit for a few minutes one day, a high school student now, with a short jacket and earphones blasting music into her ears. She said something about learning her lesson; I forget. But in a casual passing way.


The whole class in grade 6 was obsessed with Pokemon, except me and maybe my friend Jennifer W. I saw about 3 copies of the official Pokemon handbook in that classroom on people’s desks, lol. Drilling holes in the desks with pencils and stuff was a popular pastime too, carving into the desks, talking of course, yelling, making creations to put on their desks with little milk cartons. There was this milk program for giving milk to schoolchildren. Whoever wanted milk would raise their hand. The hands were counted and one or two students would go every day to this lunchroom and get that many cartons of milk out of the fridge there and bring it back to the class, where we drank it right there. It was the first time I remember being allowed to eat or drink in class except when we had hot dog lunches and pizza lunches; those were fun in the earlier years where we would sit in the classroom and eat Lafleur hotdogs and chips and juice, or a little pizza and chips and juice. And also during Halloween, Christmas and end of the year class parties, of course. In grade 4-6 it wasn’t so fun because we just took our pizza across the street to the high school cafeteria and ate it there and it was a normal lunch.


I got into gel pens after seeing them in our grade 6 class. I started collecting them. I also read all the Med Center books that year, well the first 5, which were in the class. I also got into the Janie Johnson books by Caroline Cooney—The Face on the Milk Carton, Whatever Happened to Janie?, and the next year in grade 7 we had The Voice on the Radio in our classroom closet so we read that. I hated the analyse-this-book things, it took the fun out of reading but I still read books under my desk when I was supposed to be listening to a lecture. I started this habit in grade 4 and continued thru grade 6. I was able to do it a little in grade 7 and 8 but not much. I remember wondering why I wasn’t invited to my friend Laura D’s party and then her wondering why she wasn’t invited to mine… the boys made fun of Laura D. and called her Fruitcake since grade 3, I think… that was the year she came to my school. At the end of the year she signed their autograph books “Fruitcake” because they asked her to, then wondered if it was a good idea. Once in grade 6 I did an impression of her whining to the teacher about being called fruitcake, for a bunch of students who asked me to do it again, and then Miss Kelly walked in and was amused and asked me to do it again and found it had a good point or something. Miss Kelly told thewhole class me and Melissa L-C were the ones who used up the most Kleenex in the class, how Melissa left lots of used kleenex in her desk and how I got up in the middle of class to throw it in the trash. Hmmm, I suppose we could have just saved it in our desks and thrown it in the trash when the bell rang… oops. Miss Kelly talked about everything; how she saw kids holding up their heads with their arms/hands/fists and “Don’t you have a neck?” I think she talked about poor posture too. She was mad at Philippe B. for sitting there smiling.


Our first unit in language arts, aka English, was mystery, being a detective. We had to write a mystery story with that kind of complex plot and mine sounded more like a newspaper article, shallow sort of, and so I got an average mark on it. I didn’t do that well in writing that year; another time when we had to write a newspaper article mine was so detailed it sounded like a novel sort of story… my mother helped me so much with this essay analyzing this stupid kids’ book with a moral that Miss Kelly read us that I didn’t consider it my essay any more, but I got almost perfect on it, and it was I think her favorite one and she read it to the class along with the two other best ones. She also read the worst most comical ones, I think.


She seemed to know everything about our private lives, she said nothing got past her (though once Angelica H. asked me to give her a perfect score once when we were class-correcting, to save her from getting yelled at by Miss Kelly for once, and I did, and Miss Kelly congratulated her and said “What do you know, this is what happens when you actually put in a little effort and pay attention”. Miss Kelly talked about how a previous class of hers had chopped up and thrown or spat around $50 worth of erasers… hat they had picked up all the bits of eraser and put it together and calculated how much the average students’ parents spent on erasers for them, and calculated that $50 worth had just been cut up and played with and lost. As a punishment she made the class clean the windows of the classroom during lunch hour, and that was why one day we had seen them outside cleaning the windows as we walked back from the cafeteria at the high school.


Miss Kelly said she knew what was going on in her class, she talked about how some kids who said “Well, I live in the projects on 45th Avenue” were all just spoiled little brats like the rest of us, she said they don’t know what real ghetto life is like, how Annemarie M. had a really great mother but she treated her like s**t, she knew about this party at Annemarie’s house where everyone went nuts and things got broken. The school spent a LOT on anger management classes for the students once or twice a week, none for the teachers tho haha. Once we had to do this exercise where we decided how we dealt with anger usually, or a combination of them ,or whatever—stuffing, withdrawing, exploding, triangling, blaming, and/or problem solving. We had to raise our hands if we thought so-and-so was this or that; they got us to do that for a few students randomly selected. A lot of people put up their hands to say Harley R. was an exploder… and then Miss Kelly, overhearing from her work, exploded at us. There was no way Harley was an exploder! It was scandalous; like the people who put up their hands were calling him a bad person almost. Once, that same day in anger management, Nicky C. said he killed his hamster once when he was angry, but by accident. That was another fun moment with questions and confusion and wondering.


It was pretty scary that I was chosen to go to enriched (grade 7) math with the other best students in my class and some really good math students in the other two grade 6 classes. We did decimals all year in the grade 6 class. ALL YEAR. It was supposed to be a quarter of the year, but we never got past it… so we did it all year and we would have been doing it for 2 or 3 years if one grade lasted that long. Enriched math was fun. Some was easy and some was hard. I learned about pi there. It was nice being away from the rest of the class. All the teachers knew about my story-writing; even that teacher who was also the art teacher knew. On the first day of enriched math she asked us all the two things we liked to do and when it got to me she asked me “Do you like to write?” I said yes, I liked writing stories. She asked me another thing I liked. Wow; all the teachers knew. In grade 6 math, the days we didn’t go to enriched math (which was only one or two days a week) we got these puzzle things for homework. My father, who was really into math and had a collection of math books he read for fun, had a fit, ranting and raving about them giving us trigonometry in elementary school and the “cutesy word games” and how my math homework was ludicrous.


Miss Bird, the art and enriched math teacher, was fun; once in fifth grade Thomas M. used an expensive, $75 paintbrush for something he wasn’t supposed to use it for, thinking it was a regular paintbrush. He got yelled at big time, and then again back in Mrs. Byrnes’s classroom, and we knew about it before the end of the day. We wondered what the big deal was with using the wrong brush; we weren’t doing art that required a particular kind of brush. The next day Miss Bird, Mrs. Byrnes, and maybe another teacher or two took us all into the teachers’ lounge. It was nice compared to the rest of the building, and I had never been in it before. E sat around on couches, armchairs and the floor and she explained that the brush was expensive, it was probably fine, Thomas could not have known, she shouldn’t have let it be left lying around, she was sorry for yelling at Thomas and wanted to apologize to the whole class and then she gave us Tim Horton’s timbits, haha.


It was also fun in grade 5 when we went to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts or of Art or something, and my mother was one of the chaperones. Me, my friend Laura D, Thomas M, and Christina D. were in her group. We had fun running around the museum and looking at weird things and wondering why they would put a big blank black canvas and a big blank white canvas up in the museum. Anyone could do that; why was it so special? I could do that, and I wasn’t rich and famous! (After that I did some art that I thought was better than the art in the modern section at the museum). It was an interesting place you could get lost and play hide and seek in. I would have loved to be locked in there at night. After school me and my mother went to the mall and had Greek food.


I enjoyed most field trips in elementary school. My school had no sports teams so they just decided to send the fifth-graders to the basketball jamboree that had like 10 or 20 schools going to it. All the others seemed to be the basketball teams from those schools. We were just the fifth-graders. It was so funny; our school was so pathetic. One girl from another school, I think she was also in fifth grade, said she was on a team and didn’t know how we could be there if we weren’t on a team.


Winter carnival was fun because it took us out of class… they gave us each a donut and some hot chocolate in the morning and then we either went skating or playing games in the park. There was also Aquatics Day, where the kids either spent half the day in the pool or at the park. One year, in grade 4, my friend Laura D. got her underwear thrown over the fence by one of the boys who somehow managed to get it. My favorite year for aquatics day was in grade 2. It was overcast, the night before me and my dad were sitting in the living room talking, I was staying over at his house. We talked about fan blades, it was fun, lol. Then my dad made my lunch, putting some powdery donuts and a sandwich in it, and maybe some milk, I’m not sure. I enjoyed talking about our fun day at lunch at school after having fun in the pool on that overcast, threatening-to-rain morning. It was overcast and not sunny at all and that was how I liked it. I think I may have had Seasonal Affective Disorder and not even known it, lol. At camp when I was 8 I was so depressed when it rained. But when I was 9, I loved it when it rained at day camp, and at school, for years. I preferred to be sitting in a classroom on a rainy day than on a hot or scorching or sunny day. Maybe we all have Seasonal Affective Disorder. No, wait, I just didn’t have it. Well, I did a little because even though we were at day camp playing games outside all the time when it was sunny, I preferred to be doing activities inside. I still do. I wish there was a thunderstorm right now.


I enjoyed safety stuff when I was a kid. I enjoyed it when the guy from CP Rail came to our classroom in grade 2 and passed out CP Rail pens and safety workbooks to all of us and lectured us on safety. I also enjoyed other lectures on safety, from the teachers or whatever. My CP Rail pen was green and became my prized possession right away. I loved the color and the fact that it was a CP Rail pen.


I enjoyed grade 1 a lot. It was the most fun year at school. It was so simple and easy and innocent and straightforward. I loved getting up and going to school. I loved doing homework. Our desks were arranged in groups and I sat next to Jennifer W, one of my best friends, and then when the groups changed I sat next to Franklin F, another best friend. One day was red day; we went thru magazines cutting out red things and pasting them onto a poster and then all the red stuff was put up on the wall, then the next day was orange day, there was blue day, brown day, black day, we went through all the colors and then all the posters were up on the wall. Each group had its own poster for each color. Jennifer W. was just a classmate at the time and Mrs. Walker was passing around magazines and asked me and Jennifer if we’d share one and we said “Sure!” the fact that she said “Sure!” and sounded enthusiastic and like she was having fun alerted me that she was a really nice friendly person and we were friends from that day on. Once when it was White Day, we cut out news-like aarticles with a white background and glued it onto the poster, and we made up news stuff pretending to be reading it and making up things it said. “So-and-so broke her legs at school because she was fooling around with the ladders,” Jennifer made up, tracing her finger across a line of type as though she was reading.


Melissa invited me to her birthday party near the end of September and we were friends from then on. She had been in my class during the whole of kindergarten and I had always found her really nice and she seemed fun to be around, but I don’t think I really registered her existence for some reason, it never occurred to me to make friends with her anyway, I just never thought about it, I’m weird. I don’t think Jennifer was there. I think they became friends through me or something. My mother ahd gotten me this unique sort of “kitt box” (a plastic box with hinges for pencils, calculators and stuff, basically a pencil case) and we got Melissa one for her birthday, and then when it was Jennifer’s birthday in October we got her one and the three of us had the same kitt box and Melissa came over to our group and she and I and Jennifer stood there holding our identical pencil cases and looking and them and looking at each other and giggling nonstop and not saying a word, for a minute or two or three, until the teacher told us to sit down in our seats or something.


In the center of every group of 4 desks desk there was a plastic sour cream container with the cover removed. In it were the plastic tokens the group or its members earned for being good and lost for being bad. If a student did really well or answered a question in a way that impressed the teacher, the group would be given a token. Once these students in one group got into a fight outside during recess and 30 tokens were taken from one group. Another group that participated had so many tokens taken from them that they were in the minus numbers (they were asked to hand over more than they had), but I don’t think it worked that way; they just had zero. (We didn’t do the number line in math until grade 2.)


We were taught simple easy things in grade 1, things some of us had learned in kindergarten and I had learned at home. Like how to cross a street, colors, adding, reading, writing. Everyone else read very slowly and uncertainly, one word at a time, struggling and wondering if they were getting it right, and me and Jennifer W. actually read. I was the best in the class and Mrs. Walker praised me a lot for my reading skill, Jennifer the second best and very close to being as good as me. We each had a journal with the bottom half of the page lined and the other half plain white, so that we could draw a picture on the upper half. We wrote in it every Monday, I think. Or every day, I’m not sure. A lot of it began with “On the weekend”… or someone would just write something like “I like apples.” And draw a picture of apples on trees. I remember some of mine. “I like school.” And I drew a classroom. I wrote sometimes that I went to Melissa’s house, and Mrs. Walker wrote “Did you have fun at Melissa’s house?” or “What did you do at Melissa’s house?”once that I played school with my teddy bears, and Mrs. Walker wrote in response in her red pen, “Are they good students?” She always wrote responses to let us know she really read our stuff. We did art, we did simple math (I mistyped that and wrote “meth” by mistake, but luckily caught it… ). Mrs. Walker taught us greater-than and less-than sign concepts in a way that was easy to remember… the shark’s mouth is always open to the larger amount, because it’s greedy and wants the big amount, not the small amount.


I remember memorizing Mrs. Walker’s wardrobe for a while. She was fun and chatted with us; she told us how she had split her leg open stepping into a drainhole on the weekend, how there were 28 students in her class one year and luckily only 23 this year and there weren’t enough desks to go around and some kids sat at a table with drawers.

I loved gym class. It was so easy and fun. We played with different-colored spongelike balls, we were told to do simple things like play with a ball a certain way, bounce it a certain way around the gym for a few minutes, or throw it up in the air and catch it a certain way. We played this game where we had to run from one end of the gym to the other if we were six years old, if we were seven, if we went trick-or-treating, if we ate a lot of candy, if we dressed as something scary, stuff like that. Gym classes were conducted in French to introduce French into our life.


My favorite color was orange and my least favorite blue. I always seemed to the blue of everything, and this girl I was already jealous of, Amanda O, always got the orange. She got the orange ball in gym and I got the blue one. She had the orange smiley face on her nametag on her desk (but mine was green, not blue, and I was happy enough with the green one). She got an orange Christmas pencil and I got a blue one. She was made to pick up the orange laminated paper triangle in French class in kindergarten when we were learning shapes, and I got a red circle, but I liked circles the best, and red was a nice color, and at least I didn’t get blue! There were other circumstances too in which she got orange and I got blue, I thought it was a curse or jinx or something. Right down to her food… we were talking on the phone once in kindergarten and she said she had macaroni and cheese for lunch!


My second favorite colors became pink and purple. But my favorite was orange. I felt unique too because not a lot of people had orange as their favorite color. For all the girls who had a favorite color, it seemed to be purple or pink. They became my second and third favorite colors, so I was normal enough. I remember once in Sunday school we were making cards and I chose orange for the color of my card, orange construction paper, and chose orange for the color of the construction paper shapes to glue into my card but for no reason the Sunday school teacher got annoyed with me for wanting the same color shapes and background. I collected orange things in grade 1; I had a pink plastic box with a handle that I wrote “orange things” on. I stole a little orange token from class (one of those see-thru plastic circles the diameter of a penny that we did math with at school), and for some reason I forget the other orange stuff I had. I also collected Lion King things. A lot of the class was into The Lion King. We had a lion king day in class, I think. At one station we made lions out of pieces of egg crate and other stuff like yarn for hair and little eyes meant to be used for this kind of stuff. At another station we sat and listened to music from the movie. My classmate Chanelle really loved it and sang along, and I loved it too and wanted to sing along but was too shy. I collected Lion King things starting then. Little advertising circular tags saying “Coming soon to a theatre near you” and my little lion I had made and other stuff. At the end of the year my mother got me a Lion King singalong sort of thing, with a book with the lyrics and pictures from the movie and a tape with the songs on it. She said it was a reward for good grades. I played it a lot, like all summer, and it made me less shy about music and singing and that.

I memorized the class list in grade 1; hanging from a poster-hanging thing above one of the blackboards was the list of students, numbered 1 to 23. Jennifer W, my friend, was last, number 23. Penny, the girl Franklin said he had a crush on and was his girlfriend even tho everyone thought it was me, was #1. She also had a birthday in the same month as me; hers was January 13 and mine January 2. I was number 6. I liked that number. I started seeing sixes wherever I went. Once at the hospital me and my mother were directed into examining room number 6 and I noticed. There were other times too. 6 was now my favorite number. I think I consoled myself about getting the blue pencil and the blue ball and that, thinking that number 6 was blue in my head (it had been since I was about 2 and had a set of letter and number magnets in which the number 6es were all blue). Later I took to the number 9 as my favorite number, and not just because it was orange, but because it was odd; not many people had 9 as a favorite number or favorite digit. I was unique. I was on the 393 bus in kindergarten and liked that number. I liked multiples of 6 and 9; they were my favorites. I liked 1s, 3s, 6s and 9s. I wished I lived in the borough of Montreal my friends Franklin and Melissa and Amanda lived in. They were together on the same bus, a bus that had a number that was composed entirely of some of my favorite digits. They were also together in the same neighborhood, even though Amanda and Franklin were not friends and Franklin and Melissa usually didn’t hang out either. I was now on the 114, I think, or the 117. But I only found that out after I got on the 393 on the first day of grade 1 thinking I was still on that bus like I had been in kindergarten. Amanda and I found a seat, I think Franklin might have been absent that day and Melissa and I weren’t friends yet at that time. One by one, the students got off at their stops. I looked out the window, silently watching everyone get off and their families waiting for them. It seemed like hours went by. Amanda was one of the later ones to get off, and her family stood around waiting for her, with a little kid drinking from a juice box, a woman with yummy groceries I could see through the thin bag, someone with a lunch box like Amanda’s I think. Soon I was the only kid left on the bus. I was embarrassed and a bit nervous I would get into trouble or people would think I was stupid because I was on the wrong bus. I told myself subconsciously that I wasn’t on the wrong bus; I couldn’t be. I wasn’t that dumb and not a screw-up like that. I hoped nobody would make a big deal about it. The driver sat and waited for a minute or less with me sitting halfway down the bus in my seat, wondering what to do, and then the vice-principal or principal of the other school the bus was parked at came onto the bus to talk to the driver and saw me, as the other kids from the other school crowded into the bus. She told me to go with her. She knew what had happened. She told me to wait on the steps of the school. She went into her office and called someone, then came back out and said a mini bus would come to take me home. We waited together and talked and then the driver of the closest bus that wasn’t busy finally came, and me and her were the only ones on the bus. She was talking to a man on the radio and then a woman. I thought it was a bigger deal than it was, being in grade 1, thinking I might be in trouble or would be until I explained it was a mistake, or that my mother would make a big deal thinking something horrible had happened to me or that I was hurt and I hated being treated like I had gotten hurt because my mother made a big deal about everything and embarrassed me. I asked the driver if the man was my father and if the woman was my mother and she didn’t understand English so she said yes. Finally we got to my part of town and we got off and she took me into the buildings there and rang doorbells asking people something, probably if I was their kid, and I think I might have said I lived in a building I could see from there that was mine, but she didn’t understand English and it would be rude to just start walking away and I thought I was supposed to meet my mother at the bus stop so I didn’t want her to go to the bus stop and not find me and then go all over looking and never come home and I’d be locked out. So then my mother and my vice principal from my school arrived in the vice principal’s van and everything was fine and we all found it funny and laughed about it.


I was in the breakfast club in kindergarten and grade 1. At the beginning of the year in kindergarten I told my mother I wanted to have breakfast at school and was there any way I could have breakfast at school? I loved school and I loved breakfast. Why not combine them? So she called and found out about the breakfast club. Franklin was also in the Breakfast Club, as was Jennifer L, who later became my friend, in grade 2. The breakfast club had yummy food. Little yummy pizzas and cereal and milk and cookies and other stuff. I went to the breakfast club years later once, in grade 6, with my best friend Stephanie, and it was still fun and the food was still very yummy. The breakfast club was on the stage that looked out on the gym. The curtain was drawn unless there were performances happening. In grade 1 we also ate lunch there. There were tables and benches. It was also the detention room and our lunchroom in grade 3. In grade 1 in the later part of the year, and in grade 2 we ate on tables and benches out in a very wide hallway in the junior wing of the school.


In second grade on the first day we were waiting in our first grade class for our second-grade teachers to come and get us, and when we learned that our second-grade class was in the “portables”, a bunch of trailers that 3 classrooms were in, an addition to the school, my friend Melissa whooped with joy or said “Yay!” or something, and I was happy too because we found the Portables cool. We went through a curving hallway with glass walls to the trailer with the three classrooms. This was the second attempt at portable classrooms; someone had burned the first ones down.


Mrs. Hadida was our teacher in grade 2. She yelled a lot and could yell loud. Like Miss Kelly, she had a deep voice rather than a high or shrieking voice. Years later in grade 4, my friend Jennifer L. was in her class. She was now teaching fourth grade. All the kids in her class were talking about her on our way to the cafeteria at the high school to eat lunch one day. Tania P, also in her class, exclaimed that it was child abuse. I perked up, interested. Apparently, Mrs. H. had pulled on the ear of a boy, slammed a heavy dictionary over a boy’s head (not the same boy, I don’t think), and given one student 300 lines and another 500 lines because they had been talking in class… even though they had just been trying to help each other with a math practice assignment and according to the other students, it wasn’t cheating.


Mrs. Hadida, like Miss Kelly, was very fun or very not fun. She would make someone restart a long essay from scratch if they made a mistake. Erasing was not tolerated. Erasing made a mess. You started over when you messed up; erasing was not allowed! During Jewish holidays, she would bring in food like motzahs and jam and peanut butter to go with them and hand some out to everyone in the class. Maybe she was trying to convert us. We sang Hanukkah songs, read Hanukkah cartoons, listened to her talking about Hanukkah. At the end of the year our class went to La Ronde, a sort of Canadian Six Flags.


In grade 3 we had Mrs. Parker for a month, then she left and for the rest of the year we had Miss Brown, who came to see us years later on the day of our graduation. She had gained a lot of weight and remembered us well. She hung out in the classroom with us for a while.


In grade 7 I thought it would be confusing having to run from class to class and back and forth from my locker. But it wasn’t. We had desks, and homerooms we spent most of our time in, and the teachers moved around, not the students. We only moved around for gym, lunch, French and art, and in grade 8, math. First days of school were always fun, and last days too. Mrs. Gattinger made math seem fun, telling us to decorate the flash cards with 0 thru 9 on them and make them look all snazzy. A way of telling if she was on the same page as the class was giving us a problem and telling us to hold up our answers.


Mrs. Macdonald was a strict science and religion teacher. Old-school sort of. Not unlike professor McGonagall but not quite as shouty. But maybe we were just better behaved as this was an all-girls private school. Students would give her their leftovers from the bake sales, perhaps trying to soften this old woman up. She was nice and chatted with us though. Once Crystal M, my classmate, didn’t have her stuff ready and said or did something inappropriate and Mrs. Macdonald yelled at her or told her off or something, and told her to get out her work, and Crystal asked in a confused voice, “Are we going to the lab?” thinking it was science class. It was actually religion class. She taught us both science and religion. I found it so funny; that was a classic, and Crystal’s inattention and resulting scatterbrainedness reminded me a lot of me.


My least favorite subjects in grade 7 were geography and French. Carolyn K, who sat next to me in our homeroom, hated English and French, which I found amusing… the two only languages most of us spoke. “I like geography. It’s cool.” I found it cool later on in the year too, in units I found easier. Once we had a substitute teacher when Mrs. Flowers was absent and she called me smart because I had so many right answers! That was one subject I did not expect to do well in. I got 80 one term and Mrs. Flowers said I could do better. We didn’t learn boring things like “this is located here” or “that was located there”… we learned about the types of rocks… igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic, and combinations of those… we learned about the Tuareg, the tropics of cancer and Capricorn, new stuff, stuff you could understand, stuff that wasn’t just names. We learned about volcanoes and once they put us in groups making volcano simulations with baking soda and vinegar and red food coloring. Me, Callie M. and Shawnee J. made it creative. We cut out little people out of paper and when Callie and Shawnee were visiting together in their neighborhood they made a recording on a little tape recorder of people crying “Help me, help me!” and making scared noises. People found us a little weird. There were some snooty sort of students who spent a lot of time making their volcanoes look nice and neat and tidy but realistic, and we just stuck it together, and that was realism for us, because nature doesn’t really make things neat and tidy, does it? So why should we bother? I think the others were jealous but some found it funny and the teacher found it cute. I think we had also put little houses on it.


My favorite subject was science. We learned the scientific method, the names of all the pieces of equipment in the lab, about observation, the order of classification (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species—King Paul Comes Over From Germany Saturday), the five types of organisms—plants, animals, monera, protista, fungi—and all about ecosystems and adaptations and how to use a Bunsen burner and biology here, chemistry here, physics there. It was all in one called Integrated Science, in grade 7 and 8. My best mark was almost always my science mark. My lab partner, Christina B, got even better than me and was good in science too (and everything else except perhaps gym) but was never, ever snooty about her good grades. She was the best in the class, perhaps in the year, but she was one of the nicest people there.


You learned a lot about your classmates just by the stories they told in class. In science class I learned Christina B. had OCD and so did her father who was a doctor. In religion class people would come out with their confessions and examples of how they were a hypocrite once or how they were similar to this Bible character in this way or examples of how they had to face a challenge and have faith through it or whatever. I learned that Katie U, the girl who picked on people, usually me, was adopted, had an autistic little brother, had ADD that could be ADHD. She said to me once, to pick on me, “Don’t you ever learn?” and twice picked on me for not paying attention. “I pay attention, unlike you.” She was picked on by people for the same reason… probably by adults. She probably wanted someone else to feel the same way she did and empathize with her, or wanted to feel like the one who paid attention for once, the one who learned, the smart one who was telling the dumb ne off or knew better than the dumb one. Her mother was a doctor who had a brain tumor, and she didn’t work, just stayed at home making quilts. Quilting was expensive and her mother told her whenever she bought supplies not to tell her father. Katie bragged about having her own hairdresser, how removing her mole would cost $3000, how she lived in a big house but it was only a company house and the family had a big car but it was only the company car. She bragged about her beanie baby collection and “It was so funny during the ice storm what we were doing with the video camera”, and worked the company house and car and her beanie baby collection into a confession in religion class where she felt bad about a friend who was poorer than her or felt poorer because she didn’t have the stuff Katie had. And how Katie wasn’t so rich after all, or thought she wasn’t. Beautiful, sweet, rich, modest Katie. Now this is weird… she went to get a mole removed from her knee, and came back to school two whole weeks later or a month later or something, with a leg brace that she wore for a while. What exactly was going on??? Did they cut it out and did it get infected and go to the bone and break it or did they have to cut out muscle? We’ll never know, I guess! What kind of a place did she go to?


I learned in class a lot about students who told their life story. Shawnee’s mother had her when she was 16 and drank and did drugs and worried that Shawnee was doing the same when she was out late or she didn’t know where she was. Shawnee talked about her family a lot. Callie M. had an older autistic brother, who was15 when she was 12, and a 9-year-old autistic brother, and she got blamed for things they did and ignored. Once Callie was even locked out of the house and had to sneak in through a basement window. Her mother had had the first boy, then when pregnant with Callie got all these books on autism thinking the second child would also be autistic, but Callie wasn’t. So then she had the third child, after putting the books away, and he was autistic. Callie loved poutine like me, had the same sort of sense of humor as me, and had a weird, almost monotone way of talking that I found interesting.


I learned that Christina B. was a loser and picked on in sixth grade, Samantha O. was beat up and thrown in a garbage can in elementary school until she punched the bully in the face, Jessica P. was Ukranian and her mother wouldn’t let her choose what color room she wanted if the rooms in the house were being painted, she wasn’t allowed to go to the mall with her friends until grade 8 before buying clothes she had to show her mother how they looked on her and if her mother didn’t approve she couldn’t get it. There were some really weird parents of students at that school. My friend Jennifer L, whom I had been friends with since second grade, said her mother wouldn’t even let her close the door when she was in the bathroom, let alone lock it. Her mother said it was for her own safety! She also had to dress or undress with the door open unless she had a friend over. Again, for her own safety!1 Caitlin B’s father didn’t like his little girl growing up so she would leave for the school dance wearing pants and a casual sweater or whatever an her mother whispered to her, “Change at the dance!” and she would change into her dressy dance clothes at the dance. Erica A. had Chron’s disease, Vanessa P. had been in the hospital for ages while they tried to decide whether to operate and finally decided not to and the appendix problem went away, Callie M’s cousin had stuck a tampon in the wrong way and it and the string had gone way up and she had to have a special operation to get it out, Laura H. had been swimming in the backyard pool with her pet goldfish when it went up the filter, Shawnee J.’s family had pet turtles that they let out to roam on the lawn and then someone decided to mow the lawn and “you know what happened next”.


I liked talking about the books in English and we chatted a lot with the teacher in English. I enjoyed The Witch of Blackbird Pond; I read the whole book long before we were finished it, The Outsiders too. I had read Catherine, Called Birdy before the school year even started and it was fun and funny and I really enjoyed talking about it in class discussions. A Murder for Her Majesty too. Actually, just about every book we had to read in English class I read before the class was halfway through it. Essays were easy for me, my favorite being the narrative one because basically all I had to do was write a story.


In music class I learned how to play the recorder, a cheap plastic flute. I don’t even know if it is a flute, actually; I saw a real flute the next year and it didn’t look like a recorder at all. A lot of us lost our recorders and were given new (or rather, old ones other people had lost and people had found). At the beginning of the year we were supposed to bring in $7 to the music class to buy a recorder. When we got them, my mother picked it up, looked at it and exclaimed, “THIS is it? THIS is a recorder?” She said she had been expecting some fancy contraption or device!


One day, Callie’s math book went missing and she found it in the classroom recycling bin. Someone was stealing textbooks. About 7 of us had our copies of the Witch of Blackbird Pond stolen. It was weird.


I enjoyed the trip to the Museum of Science and the Museum of Nature, in Ottawa. I got souvenirs from it: a slimy blue hand, a dried out ice cream sandwich in a special package (space food you’re supposed to add water to), one or two other things too. I saw a very interesting, cool pair of earrings the looked like dangling pizza slices with multicolored modern art painted on them, as well as a glass contraption that looked like an hourglass but not really, it was different, and wasn’t, and had different colors of liquid moving around inside it and if you did something to it it would go this weird way and spurt up through glass passageways or something, but I had already gotten the other stuff, and couldn’t afford them.


I dreaded French oral presentations. I really was not that good in French. I learned a lot of French but my marks were average or fail marks. I was so relieved when I had done a French oral so it was over and I didn’t have to worry about it anymore.


I enjoyed doing exams. Or maybe it was just end-of-the-year or Christmas-holidays excitement. For some reason I liked doing tests though, especially exams. My father helped me with math at the end of grade 7 and I got 69% on the exam, the best math mark I had ever gotten. I started making pie graphs for fun, thinking of things to make them about. I made one that was a work of art in my opinion and I stored it carefully in a large book, and started making some other nice ones. I found them pretty. I wanted to decorate my room with them.

Haven on earth topic

As a seven and a half year old fishing by myself on a rock jutting out in Maclean's Bay in Gravenhurst, Ontario, July 30, 1962. I had my own pole, little hook, a sinker, a bobble, a worm. there was a reel on the pole. I wore an orange puffy life jacket, shorts, a T-shirt, and flip flops on my feet. I caught a little sunfish, had a picture taken of me with it, and then I tossed the fish back.

The elementary school barbecues were so fun as well; it cost 25 cents (no cents button on this keyboard) for a cupcake or a piece of banana bread or a rice krispies square or a muffin or piece of cake or whatever. The hamburgers and hotdogs tasted good, as did the baked goods parents made and contributed to the barbecue. I had fun playing in the school playground equipment with my friend Melissa one day. On another day it rained later on and it was fun going home in the rain after it.


I was enrolled in the after-school daycare in grade 3, when my parents would both be working and they were talking about what to do with me. We were right outside the high school for some reason, and my father said what about putting her in the daycare? And so they realized, why not? The day care was at the high school across the street from the elementary school I went to. They had an extended kindergarten and a daycare, basically babysitting but no educational stuff. So they talked to the daycare people, who were sitting outside watching the daycare children playing on the playground equipment at the elementary school. Soon they called everyone to come with them and everyone walked back across the street to the daycare, which was in three classrooms next to each other in the high school. I knew I would be in it as Peggy, the woman in charge, talked to my parents. The lockers surrounding the three classrooms had nametags on them in hollow letters that the locker’s occupant had colored in and then the nametags had been laminated. We stood in one of the classrooms, which had a fridge with some students’ food in it, and talked. Peggy asked if I knew anyone in the daycare and I said I knew Joel and Laura, two of my classmates who were in the daycare. She said Joel and Laura were both there. I remember saying I preferred to be called Chatty (an affectionate name I had given my stuffed bear Charity at home, and I could sort of be Charity but this name Chatty (spelled Chaty because I didn’t know how to spell it right) made sense because I talked a lot. She took me into the other room where the kids were sitting on the floor watching the movie Little Giants and paused it for a second and announced there was a new girl, Kate, but that I was comfortable being called Chaty. “That’s Katherine, from my class!” Joel exclaimed.


I liked the daycare. We all played together a lot. The kindergarten and grade 1 students were in a group called the Blue Jays, in one classroom, with a woman named Laura and Peggy’s daughter Cathy. The Lightning were the first and second-graders, with Sally. The Sabertooths were in Peggy’s group, and were the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th graders. There were two sixth-graders, Tanya and Sophia, who sort of sometimes helped out with the younger ones. Tania P. and Stephen R. from another class in my grade, but in French Immersion, were also in the daycare. Stephen R. smelled like stink bombs, these absolutely nasty-smelling things that fell from the trees outside. That kid STANK! That was what people remembered about him. Tania P. was really nice and fun half the time and the other half the time snobbish or snooty or something. A week or so after I joined the daycare, a fourth person in my class at school, Jillian R, registered, and now there were four of us from my class: me, Joel, Laura and Jillian. Later Michael V. from the French immersion and also in my grade was registered in the daycare. Thse three girls who hung out all the time at school too and were a year below me in grade 2, Liisa (yes, with two “I”s), Kelly-Ann(e?) and Katie, all hung out together in the daycare too. The next year my friend Jennifer L. and her little sister Jessica were enrolled in the daycare.


We did activities in the daycare. Homework, arts and crafts with a woman named Josie who came in about once a week or two, Mad Science, playing in the elementary school playground almost every day, free play time, playing on the snowbanks outside or outside on the grass and in the trees in front of the high school sometimes, or in the fenced-off asphalt enclosure surrounded by people’s backyards that was the school’s back yard, or going up to the gym and watching high school students play basketball, baking in the home ec room, watching movies every Friday, and every Christmas we did a play for the entire elementary school, once in the daytime in front of the whole school and again at night in front of the parents who go to see the choir concert and the daycare play. Usually we would wait for everyone to arrive at the tables in the junior section of the school, in the hallway, and then go outside to play in the park for half an hour, then go inside and have snacks. At Halloween and Christmas we had parties where some parents contributed baked goods, candy, whatever and all the kids got to eat their fill, pretty much. There was Nintendo at the daycare. I always sat and watched people play Nintendo and played when I could. I was good at it for someone who had never played it before. I think I made one or two of the boys jealous, and they scapegoated me as a bad player because I was the beginner who played the most often. “Even Chaty knows that secret!” “Die! Die! Die!”


I think I started reading even before grade 4; I started reading lots of little kid books in the daycare for something to do. I also liked playing with the Marbleworks stuff, where you build a race for marbles with different things for them to go through and race them to the end. It seemed to be based on luck or who put their marble where on the starting thing you tipped to start them rolling through the maze or track or whatever it's called that you created.


The movies we watched on Fridays were fun with a few boring exceptions. We watched The Pagemaster, The Swan Princess, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Jamanji, Paulie, Spice World, Mr. Magoo, a Spice Girls music video, a Backstreet Boys video, and many others.

One day at the end of the year the daycare went on a field trip. We went to Dollarama where we were each allowed to pick out something for $1 (I got a slinkie or “magic spring” in all the colors of the rainbow), we went to Wild Willy’s where we could have a chocolate ice cream, a vanilla ice cream or a “twist” (a combination of both with one side chocolate and one side vanilla). I think we went to Harvey’s to eat. We went back to the daycare after and watched Mr. Magoo.

I got $40 for babysitting for 5 hours He was only awake for 2 hours! Got to love that rate!

im moving in two days! you know i was thinking and prayers do get answerd. because my mom was going to stay in this house that im living in now but at the last minute i got a call from the landlords and they said they would be taking back the house, freeing up my security deposit. now i can get my fire gate ring made, and move! oh this is wonderful!

Our second unit in language arts in grade 6 was war. We watched WWII videos. Some people read Anne Frank’s diary. Around that time it was Miss Kelly’s 40th birthday and the student teacher, Allison, arranged a surprise party for her. She was in the computer room doing work and Allison was in the classroom with us. We decorated the room a little, got some cards and presents and stuff and put it on a table or something, and then Allison went to the computer room to get Miss Kelly. Someone had also made a Tommy Hilfiger logo and taped it to the blackboard at the front of the room, which was decorated. We all hid behind the teacher’s desk and other stuff and in a minute Allison came back with Miss Kelly. She said “I don’t know where they would have gone” and sounded puzzled, not noticing the little decorations at first, then we jumped out and shouted “Surprise!” and Allison turned on the light.


Then it was Allison’s birthday coming up and Miss Kelly wrote on the board “Bring $2 and a picture for the yearbook” but really, the $2 was to go towards a birthday present for Allison and the picture was for a book for her to remember the class. So she had a book of colored pictures of us and our profile things we filled out and wrote some stuff to her saying what we liked about her or whatever. Miss Kelly got her 2 or 3 quality things, one was a bath and shower set and I don’t remember the rest. “So much for the $2 and the picture for the yearbook,” Miss Kelly said as she and Allison flipped through the book of student profiles thanking her for doing this or that.


The school sold tubs of frozen cookie dough to interested families to raise funds for the social studies trip to Niagara Falls that sixth-graders at that school took every year. We also each got McDonald’s coupons to sell for $1 but parents protested that they were not sending their kids door to door selling that. We were supposed to have sold a minimum of 12 or so but some people just couldn’t; all the people in their neighborhood weren’t interested! We had had sixth-graders in previous years come to our classrooms selling Fruit Roll-Ups or Fruit by the Foot or other stuff to raise money for the Niagara trip.


Sometimes cupcakes and popcorn were sold. I remember getting two bags of popcorn in grade 2, one to eat at school and one to take home. I remember also getting several cupcakes in grade 2. In kindergarten once some or most of our parents didn’t give us money for cupcakes so the mother of a boy named David in my class got cupcakes for all the kids who didn’t have them.

I made friends with four girls eventually, Amanda, Cassandra, and two others… I put some Easter egg candy in a little piece of paper that I folded, taped shut and wrote my address and phone number on, and gave them to them and one of them showed the teacher and proudly said, “Look what Kate gave me.” I remember talking to Amanda and Cassandra on the phone.

Tore and Steven didn’t like me, especially Tore, who would step on my toe on purpose and say he hated me when he was standing near me (and I hadn’t said or done anything to him).


Kindergarten was easy and fun. I enjoyed the books and toys and the activities with blocks. Once I was put with Steven, who was giving me a hard time, and I called him a stupidhead and the teacher overheard and told me to watch my language! (He was the boy who ate glue and paper in grade 1.)


In grade 2 on the first day I felt so important; I was a big kid now, I was in grade 2! I had felt that way a little bit about grade 1 but not much. Grade 3, same thing. Grade 4, same thing. Mostly grade 2 though. Grade 5, less. Grade 6, more. Grade 7, yeah, because it was high school now. Grade 8, a little bit… now I wasn’t a freshman or a newbie anymore or whatever they call them. From grade 9 on I didn’t really feel much older or cooler starting a new grade. Or at all.


I enjoyed sailing camp the summers I was 13, 14 and 15; it was the best summers of my life. Especially the summer I was 13; I was so excited to get up in the morning and go there, knowing more stuff would happen in one day at sailing camp than in one year at school.

Haven on earth part two topic

Ana54! I am glad you have some great memories! I almost felt sorry for you after reading some of the other stuff you have posted.

Um, thanks?


I enjoyed sailing camp so much—the boy talking about how someone took a s**t in a sink in the boys’ bathroom, how another time there was a sparrow in the boys’ bathroom that stayed in there for 2 weeks and died or something(??), people throwing things at Karl and him using a garbage can lid as a shield, Zoe giving me like half her lunch—she had everything, she said she nibbled a lot so her mother gave her nibbly things. Grapes, Crispers, chocolate cookies like Oreos but with hot pink or bright yellow or blue or green filling instead of white, other stuff, in this big lunch box. She couldn’t eat half of it! She also gave me one of two or three juice boxes she had, apple grape juice. My dad thought I was stealing kids’ lunches for a while when I brought it home and stated eating it for dinner.


On the first day it was hilarious. At the beginning of the day I thought it would be awkward and how would I make friends? I was nervous about my own nervousness. I was sure I might screw up like I did at school. I sat down on some road blocky thingies where some other kids were sitting; others who seemed to know each other were sitting on a wooden lockbox under the balcony that went halfway around the two-story building. There was a laundry room upstairs and probably other rooms. Downstairs, inside, was a bigger room with benches and pieces of derigged sailboats standing in the slots on the walls and floor that they were supposed to be inserted into. There was a tiny little passage inside, a few lockers, a little office, and locker rooms. The girls’ locker room door said “Gulls” on it and had a picture of a gull painted on it, the boys’ had “Buoys” and a picture of a fancy, lighthouse-like buoy painted on it. There was a door in the little passage outside the bathrooms leading outside to the same spot the double doors in the big room with benches led to.


As I sat looking around and waiting, a little girl with big curly dark brown hair came up to me talking about her brother, saying he wasn’t the kind of brother you would like, and we started talking. Her name was Zoe and she was 8 years old.


Soon they told us all to go inside and sit on the benches and we did. Zoe’s mother told her to go sit next to Michayel, a boy around her age who was also new, but Zoe said she wanted to stay with me.


The head instructor stood in front of us wearing a worn blue life jacket and told us of the traditions and made the new people feel right at home. The other instructors stood with him, wearing life jackers like vests, like it was a piece of stylish clothing that was in style; it was so cool. He told us about Rock and roll call… when we heard rock and roll music we went inside for attendance. “Roll call”, I said. He called me a hotshot jokingly. Then there was the word/phrase/paraphrase/quote/dirty joke/life lesson of the day. Then there was the Life Jacket of Shame. If someone was caught on the dock (when we said the dock we meant the wharf) without a life jacket on they had to wear the Life Jacket of Shame, an ugly life jacket sometimes called the Cube, because it was basically a big square of life jacket material with a big floaty cushion inside, with life jacket straps and buckles. On it, written in permanent marker, was “The Life Jacket of SHAME”, “This is for the loser who goes on the docs without a PFD”, “Shame on you loser”, “Shame shame shame shame shame shame” written like 20 times, and other stuff, I think also the names of all the people who had to wear it. It hung with some other really ugly or nonfunctional lifejackets on a bunch of pegs on a wall labeled “The wall of Shame” in the same permanent marker. These were the life jackets you weren’t supposed to wear because they didn’t work. One was falling apart and taped together, one was a baby’s life jacket way too small for anyone, one was huge and too big for anyone there.


We sang Happy Birthday for someone whose birthday it was, then they split us into our groups—Learn to Sail (White Sail 1 and 2), Learn to Race (White Sail 3), Bronze 4, Bronze 5, Silver Sail 6. We were to meet together again later to go out in the boats together.


Zoe and I were in Learn to Sail. Our instructors were Christian and Theresa. We played a game where we threw the ball to someone and said their name until we knew each others’ name. There were 15 of us: me, Zoe, Alyssa, Rebecca, Victoria, Stephanie, Camille, Fraser, Karl, Adrien, Edward, Francois, Michayel, Kevan, and Alexis.


They showed us the Optimist sailboat, a cheap little one-person sailboat, and parts of it. We had to make a map of the Junior Squadron compared to the rest of the yacht club. Karl called the Junior Squadron the Midget Mansion and the name stuck.


We had an hour for lunch after that. We ate it outside or in a room upstairs with couches, chairs and tables. Zoe and I sat together with some others from Learn to Sail and she gave me a bit of this and a bit of that and said take it, take this take that, it was so funny. I forget what my father had given me for lunch but she didn’t want any of it.




In the afternoon, that’s where the fun began. They split us up, two Learn to Sail students and two Bronze students in each two-person boat. They told me and Fraser that we were with Louie. We didn’t know who Louie was. “Hello, I don’t know who this person is,” Fraser singsonged as we stood around looking around and wondering what to do. Fraser went inside at one point to take off his best shoes and put on his sandals. He worried that his best hat would blow off, his best shorts were getting wet from sitting on a wet boat, his best polo shirt would get wet if the boat capsized.


Bridget(te?) and another Bronze guy were arguing. “We can’t have two little kids and two of us in a Laser II, it will sink!” Bridgette said. In the end, though, Louis came along and the five of us got into the boat! It worked for about half an hour until we were sinking and they took me and Fraser into the “crash boat”, the instructors’ motor boat. I think they had two other kids they wanted to let on, but two kids always had to stay in the motor boat because all the Laser IIs were overloaded. One had seven people in them and Adrien was literally hanging off the back, lying facedown in the water, wearing his purple life jacket. (This was the first time I saw life jackets in any color besides red, orange and yellow. Victoria had a green one, Zoe had at least three and one was totally yellow, there was the head instructor’s blue one and others too.) It was dark and cloudy and some drops of water came from the sky and we wondered if there would be a storm. That would have been fun. Boats sank and capsized, and people made a big deal out it, the new kids because it was exciting and the Bronze students because it was irritating and took time away from their racing practice. It was the best day I had in a long time.



The second day I was with Eddie in boat number 11, Eddie had to leave early to get a pencil lead removed from his finger, and in the afternoon I was with Francois. He was sitting in the stern steering and I was pulling the sail at the bow. There weren’t enough functional boats to go around so they put us two to a boat, except Adrien, the biggest one I think, who had a boat to himself, and he was also there last session so he was more experienced. Adrien was Mr. Cool, with his red-tinted sunglasses and lying as if he was asleep in his boat but sailing perfectly. So I was sailing along in boat number 11 with Francois and I feel something wet on my butt. I look behind me… and the bow of the boat is going down into the water! I go over to Francois’s side but the boat keeps tipping and sinking! He yelled, “Chris! CHRIS!” Chris throws us two bailers, pieces of a Tropicana orange juice jug that was cut in half, as we get out of the boat. He wouldn’t let me back into the boat after he got in. I hung of the side of the boat and bailed and he sat in the boat and bailed. He asked how much I weighed and I weighed 150 pounds, but I lied and said I weighed 130. He said “I think you’re too big for this boat.” !11 So he yells for Chris again as we’re about half done bailing, and Chris comes by and asks what’s going on and Francois tells him he can’t let me back in the boat because I’d sink it, but he doesn’t speak good English, so I think Chris thought he meant that I sunk the boat whenever I tried to get in, so he took me onto the crash boat and a few people switched boats and then about a minute later I was put in boat number 11 alone. I ended up in the weeds. Then Fraser and Karl in boat #8 went into the weeds to help me get out and got stuck themselves. A lot of the little kids made a big deal about the weeds because Chris and Teresa called it the Danger Zone, because the boat could get scratched on the bottom by rocks or get broken, as it was very shallow. Zoe actually thought our lives were in danger when she and I were in it together once.


So Fraser calls to me, “Stay calm, Katherine!” as if it was a huge deal and we’d have to pay for any boats wrecked (they gave us the crappy boats so that we could crash them and learn, though of course try not to crash them), or as if our lives were in danger or something. Soon everyone was talking, shouting to each other from boat to boat all over the harbor. “Can someone tell Katherine she has to swim with the boat?” Victoria yelled, always helpful. Actually, it was too shallow to swim. We had to walk with our boats through the ankle-high mud and waist-high seaweed… actually, I think Fraser and Karl got out by steering the boat a certain way, and I was far from the outside of the weeds. It was time to head in and so I pulled my boats toward the dock as everyone else docked their boats and got out and started and finished de-rigging them and I was still trudging through the muck with an audience. Finally I get to the dock and Alyssa and Rebecca go “Eeew, you stink,” and Alyssa or Rebecca said “At least she saved the boat”, and Francois was acting all weird and obnoxious-little-boy.


I think it was the day before, the second day, when we went to the sandbar in a motor boat and I found a light purple plastic comb in the water and saved it in my life jacket pocket as a souvenir. I think I was with Francois in the morning on the third day, and in the afternoon. I remember us being assigned a boat together and he asked if I could skip. “What’s that?” “Steer.” I was totally new but I forget if I said yes or no. Stephanie had her baby sister's life jacket (she was 9 and the sister was like 2) and it wouldn't even zip up. The instructors impressed that she really needed a new life jacket.


The next day I forgot to put the rudder on my boat. Stupid mistake. Went in the weeds again, heard Fraser say from his boat “Yesterday it wasn’t Katherine’s fault…” I ran up the bank from the weeds to grab a rudder and spent quite enough time pulling the boat back to the dock, going up the harbor again to catch up with the others and trying to stay out of the weeds and look like I had actually learned how to sail, like I knew what I was doing but the wind was just nonexistent or something and that was why the current was taking me towards the weeds. Luckily it was time to head in for lunch. Zoe gave me some more of her huge lunch of nibbly things. In the afternoon we did some theory and then they paired us off to go sailing again, assigning us different boats. I was with Zoe. I think I was still in boat number 11. So we’re out in the harbor sailing. I think I’m getting better and improving. I’m steering and she’s pulling or letting out the sail. Then the wind picks up, the boat gets jounced around a bit, and Zoe starts wailing, and the people in the other boats are asking what’s wrong, she says we’re stuck in irons (facing the wind), that did I ever listen to what she told me? (She was like a schoolteacher sometimes, giving me little quizzes on sailing but she really didn’t understand much or anything herself; she had taken sailing the year before or something and had sailed with her brother in his boat and thought she knew it all because of it). She was scared of drowning or something, we seemed to be moving, but she said we were in irons, eventually she shouted to the instructors, “Katharine doesn’t know how to sail!” People are gossiping about us from boat to boat, wondering what’s happening; the way the kid is wailing it’s like I’m torturing her. So Zoe demands to steer and we switch places, and we end up in the weeds! She says I did it, I say she did it (but diplomatically). She sit in the boat as I pull it towards the dock, the closest way out. I lose my sandal in the mud. I reach down where I had just stepped and it had come off, but I can’t find it. I start looking for it frantically. Zoe says, “Who cares about your sandal, what about our lives?”


Alyssa and Rebecca had gotten into a fight and Rebecca wanted to be with someone else. Rebecca went with Zoe and Alyssa went with me in boat number 11. She said it was fun being with me and boring being with Zoe. We chatted and sailed the boat right in the boring weather, which was easy, until Alyssa’s finger got jammed in the rudder. Ow! It hurt like hell, she couldn’t steer, we were always in the harbor and the wind picked up so it didn’t take long to drift back into the weeds! So again, we pulled the boat out of the weeds and by then it was time to leave. Actually, I think the instructors just towed us in because it took a long time to get out of the weeds and it was time for fall-in.


Fall-in was something we had started the day before, making attendance-taking more manageable, but it was more of a tradition than a security measure. There were three groups, Cook, Nelson and Drake. I was in Cook; so was Karl. It had the least people in it; it was weird how it was divided unevenly. Zoe, Fraser, and one or two of my other friends were in Nelson, as was Adrien and I think his friend Kevan.


I was worried everyone would see me with one sandal at fall-in, and how would I stand and walk on the gravel barefoot? Should I keep the other sandal on or take it off? So I stood on the gravel with one sandal and we did fall-in and nobody really noticed or cared, and after that it was time to go home and I went into the office asking if I could call my dad asking him to pick me up because I had only one sandal. The instructors seemed amused. I didn’t know how unacceptable or okay it was to be seen walking down the street wearing one shoe. My dad hadn’t fixed his car so he said just walk home barefoot. So I did, trailing my life jacket (which didn’t fit in my bag) in front of my feet on the sidewalk slightly so that it wouldn’t be so noticeable.


I think it was on the fourth day that Michayel was my partner in the afternoon. I thought I was doing well until Michayel started frying noisily as well while in the boat with me. He asked if I was in White Sail 1 or White Sail 2. I said one, probably, since this was my first time sailing.


One day we had a regatta with the Learn to Race students in their nicer Optimists and Bronze students in their Laser IIs. Nothing big, just a practice sort of thing, competing against each other. We all screwed up bigtime; it was fun. Victoria didn’t even want to steer at the end of it, she paddled her boat back to the dock, making little “Ugh—ugh” noises. Some people spent more time in the water than in their boats. I started off in the motor boat with Alyssa, Rebecca and Teresa the counselor and someone else, I think the other instructor, Christian. By then there weren’t enough boats to go around because we had wrecked them trying to learn how to sail. Christian said we were the worst sailors he had ever seen. I was in a Laser II with one or two or three Bronze students for a while, then I think we capsized and I was on another motor boat for a while. I forget what happened now; I used to remember. There were at least two boats that got holes in them from ramming into each other.


From then on, for example, boat number 1 would be called boat number 1 because the sail had a big 1 on it, even if the person in the boat had to use the number 5 rudder, the number 7 daggerboard, the number 13 sprit pole, all different numbers of everything, because the number 1 rudder would be broken, the number 1 daggerboard would be cracked down the middle, the sprit pole would be missing. Or something like that. I think someone sunk a sprit pole once; it was the only one that didn’t float. Kevan’s rudder came off in the water once, at the same time I got in my boat with no rudder and then realized I had no rudder but by then was in the weeds, but we were able to fish it out with a sprit pole.




Another funny thing that might have happened during the regatta, I'm not sure, is Stephanie asking if she could take off her pants to lighten the load, and everyone is like "What?" as she takes off her pants, but of course she was wearing her bathing suit.


We also did a capsizing practise, showing how we righted a capsized boat, on the edge of the dock and they took us two by two and I sunk the boat being init with the other person I was supposed to capsize it with.

Wonderful idea!

I'm happy because it's spring here in Tennessee...and the weather is beautiful! Not too hot yet, not cold at all...

On parents' day at sailing camp that year I went in the weeds and got stuck and they never did see me sail. I got my White Sail 1 though so they know I passed, at least. I didn't have other clothes to change into either so I was full of swamp water. I went into the bathroom, wrung out my clothes, rinsed them in water, wrung them out again and put them back on. It was time for the awards ceremony and we were having it inside since it was going to rain. So we had fall-in and then we went to the main clubhouse at the yacht club and sat in a room with chairs and tables, on the carpet. Eddie was next to me. He asked if I was still wearing my wet clothes because I had no others with me. He told me to think of something happy. The parents sat on the chairs. People got awards for serious and funny things; one guy who had this bottle he named Bob and pulled around on string like a pet and put food and water in got a leash for Bob. One guy who had his wallet stolen got the ugliest, kitchiest wallet they could find. I got my White Sail 1 certificate and either Eddie or Francois, I forget whic, got the best sailor award, and either Eddie or Francois got th emost improved award, and Victoria got the solutions award, or whatever it was.