Fifth Grade in Raleigh, N.C.

A brief history of the years before fifth grade will explain my innocence when entering fifth grade in Raleigh.

For the sake of brevity:

School history consisted of the first grade in rural Virginia in the late 1950's. Our school was a two or three room whitewashed wooden building with outhouses. The playground was dirt with all the customary play equipment. By today's standards they were death traps yet I do not remember anyone being killed or injured in any remarkable way. I could walk to the school from our house. I remember spring with the dogwood tree in our front yard and learning the story of the dogwood and the blood of Jesus. I remember winter with snow knee deep and school held as usual.

Second, third and fourth grade I was home schooled by my mother. My parents were missionaries to Ghana, West Africa. We lived
in the country outside of Kumasi, Ghana at a Baptist boarding school for local African teenagers. Our school materials were shipped to us by the Calvert Home School program out of the University of Maryland. The shipments included everything we would need including pens, pencils, paper, crayons, textbooks, teacher's manuals, etc. That program is in existence current day. We could have attended a local British school but my mother did not want us to get confused by the metric system nor to be subjected to the rigidity of the British way of doing things at that time in history. My brother started first grade and I went into the second grade. The Calvert School education was first class. I excelled in everything except math which was, coincidentally, my mother's weak subject. Our tests were sent on schedule to the United States to be graded and approved by a stateside Calvert School teacher. When we returned to the U.S. we were a grade ahead in every subject except math. The concentration on history, geography and reading put both my brother and myself ahead of the schools at home. ( Re-reading this and I decided to add a couple of things  I remembered about my time in Africa while watching a documentary recently.) My reading and comprehension were excellent. I read everything I could get my hands on and I listened to adults talk. No credit to me, that I listened, in those years children did not normally join in or interrupt adult conversations. I remember when Adolf Eichmann was captured. I remember the front page of the newspaper. I knew he was a bad man and I had a feeling of relief and happiness that he had been captured. I sensed that his crimes were heinous. I remember hearing that missionaries were being murdered in neighboring African countries and that the weapon of choice was hacking them to death with a machete. I had a low level of fear and apprehension with that knowledge in my head. It has stuck with me throughout my life. Death by machete? It sounded horrible. If any of the adult missionaries were concerned about safety I did not hear it discussed. Daily life was not impacted.

It is with this background that I entered Fred A Olds elementary school in Raleigh, N.C. There were several hundred students in grades one through six, I believe. It was a two story brick building with children everywhere. I am sure my mother took us to sign up and to an orientation. My class had at least twenty students of whom. all but one other student, had ben raised in the city of Raleigh. The other student was a girl who had lived in Alaska all of her life. She and I spent a long time adapting to our new world a school. I was innocent and she was more innocent than I, if such a thing was possible. It did not take long for the boys in the class to pick upon that tidbit. One boy in particular took great pleasure in writing words in the sand that I did not understand. My confusion threw him into spasms of laughter ending with him repeating the written words out loud. My mother explained each word to me. She remembers that I was bewildered and wondered aloud why anyone would use those words. With no reference of vulgarity at that point in my life those words were simply dictionary words plain and simple. We walked to school. There were crossing guards at the intersections. I loved having crossing guards. They added another layer of mystery to my growing collection of mysteries.
I have snippets of memory from that school year. Our classroom was on the second floor. The floors were wooden, the windows were tall and wide paned. We could look out to the front of the school and onto the street in front. I remember this because soon after I arrived I noticed that one of the girls in my classroom stood apart. Not comfortably so but more as a curiosity. I thought she would have given anything to be part of the crowd. I learned that her mother was famous and left her daughter with the grandmother who lived in Raleigh. Once in awhile her mother would come to the school to pick her up during the school day. I believe her mother was the famous, at that time, singer named Anita Bryant. You know how children whisper and gossip. It must have been awful for this girl. I did not get to know her and she remained aloof. She was a bit heavy-set. I learned years later that Anita Bryant did not approve of being overweight. There have been many times when I have see Anita Bryant's daughter sitting in our classroom knowing when she left to meet her mother in the car parked along the road that she had at least twenty pairs of eyes following her every move. Everyone wanted Mrs. Bryant to get out of the car. During my year at Fred A Olds that did not happen. Indeed, if I remember correctly, her daughter was taken out of class by her mom and moved away with her mother or a nanny or something. Sad story and my first lesson in the myth of money buying happiness.


My fifth grade year was the only year we were to live in Raleigh. Writing about it brings back more memories than I knew were knocking around in my head. One of them is impacted my life until this date and time in my life. I will save it for later.  Enough for now.


Raleigh - we lived in a campground, an elderly couple's home and two houses that we rented. By the beginning of the sixth grade we moved again.

Contemplative Innonence



The wisest choice I have made in many a year came on the heels of quiet contemplation innocent of manipulations or contrived efforts on my part to impact the outcome.



Snow in the Trees

I was ten the year we returned from a three year mission trip to Ghana, West Africa. It must have been in late summer. We arrived in New York City. I have a vague memory of my father toying with the idea of living in New York and going to school. I have one of those memories that are old enough to have lost their color. The memory is in black and white. We were with my mother and father looking at an apartment. The next memory I have is our drive down the country two lane road that led to my paternal grandparent's home. They were tobacco and cotton farmers. My father thought it would be fun to surprise them. We were the ones surprised. Both of my grandparents had gone to South Carolina and had their teeth pulled and been fitted with dentures. They were not home when we arrived. My father did not enjoy losing the surprise factor and my grandparents arrived back home with mouths throbbing with the intrusion of new teeth. In retrospect my father's failed surprise and my grandparent's surprise of new teeth in tender mouths plus the appearance of the five of us fresh from Africa must have made for, in the adult world, an awkward day.


My father helped my grandfather with the farm for a short while. They became tired of each other and my father decided we would move to Raleigh. No jobs, no place to live except for the kindness of at least one family that took us in for a short time. I remember doing homework in their home.


My dad bought camping equipment and we moved to Umstead Park just outside of Raleigh. I cannot say how long we camped out, went to school, did our homework by lantern light and slept in tents. I know we ended up in a small, white house for a brief period of time and moved from there to a larger brick home near the N.C. State University campus. The weather was getting cooler as fall and winter took the place of summer. There are so many memories from that period of time but the best memory of all was a winter surprise of momentous proportion.


Darkness fell one evening without a hint in my ten year old mind of what might be happening outside the back door. I remember my mother calling us to go outside. I remember she was excited. I remember stepping outside. A porch light was on and probably a streetlight was nearby. After a brief adjustment to the darkness I remember noticing that the air was filled with flakes falling one after the other to the ground. I was taken off guard. My mother was laughing in her own excitement of watching each of her children respond to her one word, "SNOW"! Snow? A thrill swept through me. I tilted my head toward the sky, stuck my tongue out and let the flakes fall onto it as amazement flooded me. The snow deepened. My mother made snow cream and let us dress for further adventures in that wondrous, silent downpour of big, fluffy snowflakes. I remember looking up into the falling snow as the streetlights and the light from the windows of our home cast patterns of shadow and light across the yard. I remember feeling happy in a deep, personal way. We were home!

A Ramble

Many times in the past couple of weeks I have sat here trying to put something in writing. Each time I lost my way. If this were paper I would have a trashcan full of crumpled pages. Tonight is a ramble night. I'm gonna ramble.


Leaving a friend's at night I often am drawn into reverie of one kind or the other. The apartment buildings, full of families going about their business, and the streetlights casting shadows on the pavement draw me towards a place of melancholy. The moon shows herself as I pull out of the parking lot. It hangs a little over the skyline. If there has been rain the sounds of hundreds of small frogs hidden in the marshy woods behind the apartments combine in a rhythmic, loud, incessant croaking. I am tempted to chunk a rock over into the nearby woods. I know the sounds will go silent the moment the rock lands. Time will pass. At some point a brave few will begin their croaking again. Within seconds of the clarion call the cacophony of croaking will return.


 I once spent an entire night beside a beautiful shoreline south of St. Pete, Florida on an island of great beauty and solitude. We had no tent and had packed very little for the week-end. My daughter was two years old and sleeping in the car. The night seemed quiet and calm.  Gentle waves slapped up onto the shore. As they pulled back into the bay I heard a delightful tinkling. As they came in from the  bay I heard a delightful tinkling.


The evening began to lose it's charm. Where was the anticipated breeze blowing in from the bay? I was exhausted. The  air was warm and humid. Mosquitoes flew in targeting my sleeping daughter. I fought a battle with them for most of the night. The tinkling sound created by small waves as they hit the shoreline began to annoy me.The predictability of wave in, wave out annoyed me. I began waiting for the waves, listening for the tinkling, obsessively marking the time between the coming in and going out. What could be tinkling with every wave for an entire night? At long last the sun came up shining on the blue water of the bay, palm trees lined the shore, the mosquitoes disappeared and a soft breeze began to blow. The gentle waves and tinkling continued. I walked towards the water, looked down and saw the source of the tinkling. There were hundreds of cochina on the sandy shoreline. They were alive, tiny, pushed up and out of the sand when the waves flowed in and covered with the sand as the waves pulled away. They tumbled over each other sending out a light tinkling sound with each wave.


Morning revealed a breathtaking world. Warm bay water, shallow for a long way out, gentle waves and a welcoming sun drew my daughter and I into the water where we remained for several hours. The torturous evening was forgotten. At that time in my life and in my daughter's life we lived in bikinis, our tans became deep, her hair faded from blonde to white. For a moment, a precious moment, life was sweet. The restless, self-destructive part of me held back allowing a reprieve before the coming storm.


Tinkle! Tinkle! Tinkle!