The Dark and the Light at Oxford School, Part Four

I can't say that my first grade experience was a total wreck. There was that one time Mrs. Helman taught me something. She was talking about weather and evaporation and made this crazy claim that water was always somehow invisibly floating up into the air. Well, it just sounded incredible to me, until she proved it by setting a glass of water on the window sill for a few days. I watched each day in amazement as the water floated invisibly up into the air.

I also learned things on the playground. One day I found an envelope full of Savings Stamps, about $2.50 worth. For you younger folks, Savings Stamps were cool little US government issues that we bought each week. Once you filled up a little book with stamps, you could trade it in for a $25 US Savings Bond. Anyhow, I thought I hit the jackpot on the basis of "finder's keepers, loser's weepers," a phrase heard commonly on kid street back then.

Johnny Kotlarczyk disagreed. A good Catholic boy, he chided me on the way home from school, telling me that I needed to turn them in to the teacher. Ha, I thought. Does he not know the "finder's keepers" rule? How pleased my mom would be, I thought, to learn of my fortune!


Mom was not pleased. She wasn't angry, she wasn't irritated, she just wasn't pleased. "Roger," she asked, "if you lost these, wouldn't you want someone to return them to you?" How can anyone argue with that? I turned them in the next day. Mrs. Helman went on about what an honest boy I was. I felt kinda crummy. Ever see Theodore Cleaver when he's feeling a little guilty crummy? That was me.


But one of the worst and most negative playground lessons I ever got was delivered like a lead pipe massage by Mrs. Helman. You won't believe it. You'll think to yourself, "stuff like that only happens in old Mickey Rooney movies."

It had been a rainy morning. But the rain had stopped and Mrs. Helman figured she could take us outside for afternoon recess. I swear I never heard her give the usual admontition about staying on the blacktop. I guess my buddy Mike didn't either because the two of us wandered off onto the somewhat muddy playground toward the swings. I mean, there was like "nuthin happnin" on the blacktop, and we both had boots on, so like what's the problem?

We found out 15 minutes later when Mrs. Helman called us all in. Mike and I got to the door and she howled out about the mud on our boots!

"Don't you dare come inside! You two stay out here and scrape the mud off your boots! You should be ashamed to disobey me like that!"

I don't know how long it took Mike and me to scrape off the mud. But apparently it was enough time for Mrs. Helman to figure out and carry out a really devious awful plan.

Mike and I put our boots in our lockers and headed toward the classroom door. I remember walking in, seeing grins on everyone's face, except for Mrs. Helman, who was seated at the piano. She began playing, the class began singing, and Mike and I suddenly heard and read the words written on the chalkboard.

"Two little pigs named Michael and Roger went to play in the mud."

There were several more lines to the song, one with the words "oink, oink, oink." I don't remember them all clearly. But I remember Mike's face, full of hurt and shame. I don't know if Mike was alright before that, but I know that he was never alright again during the next five years I knew him at Oxford Avenue Elementary School.

Next time: First grade wrap up and my first encounter with a sociopath.