Kindergarten Day

A rite of passage today; I took Phoebe to register for kindergarten. Before we left, she hand-lettered a note to our babysitter, Leslie. "GONE TO SEE MY KINDERGARTEN. BACK AT 2:30. PHOEBE."

Lower Salem Elementary sits on the cheek of a high hill, overlooking the tiny hamlet of Lower Salem, and, more importantly, the creek that occasionally inundates the bottomland. In 1998, it took the town. Water sluiced through the valley, studded with houses, bits of fencing, barns, cars, dressers, clothing; as high as the tops of the telephone poles. The school was safe, though, or we’d probably be registering somewhere else.

We filled out forms, then wandered the hallways, hung with construction-paper collages and photos of graduating classes back into the 1930’s, redolent of bleach and cafeteria food and something indefinable that all schools seem to possess. Barney and Baby Bop danced on a mural as we approached the kindergarten classroom. Phoebe hung her head, moaned, and covered her face. Good girl. But she positively scintillated as we entered the classroom, deserted, we supposed, for just such an unannounced inspection by registrants. She walked carefully from desk to table to bookshelf, touching nothing, noting all. "So, what do you think, Phoebs?"

"I LOVE it!" she replied, carefully replacing her usual Elmer Fudd W with an L. There was no turning back. She was going to fly like an arrow.

We checked out the restroom, the gym, the cafeteria, the library. Mrs. Booth the librarian was there, and she knew where we lived the moment I said my name. She’d met Bill at the Sewer and Water Authority meeting about a year back. I wish I had a memory like that. "I’m four," Phoebe announced, and they compared notes on favorite book illustrators. She would be fine.

The playground beckoned, and we crunched across the pea gravel to the assortment of slides, ladders, gyms, and swings. The merry-go-round, another piece of equipment virtually unchanged since my childhood, was the first one we hit. Nothing but a big pan of riveted steel with U-shaped bars to hang onto. I took baby Liam on my lap and we revolved gently, the panorama of Lower Salem whirling around us.

Behind and above us, sheep grazed the ridgetop, new black lambs fumbling by their sides. "That must be the petting zoo!" Phoebe observed. (Sure, why not? Every kindergarten must have a petting zoo.) A meadowlark sent its sweet, slurred song into the cool, gray sky. Across the county road, an old dairy farm with two midnight-blue silos squatted in the stream valley, piebald cows squelching through black muck on their way to the barn. Red-winged blackbirds conked and whirred joyfully from the willows along the stream. What I wouldn’t have given to attend a school like this one, I mused. And at that moment, Phoebe closed her eyes, threw back her head, and sighed, "Oh, to be on a merry-go-round in the middle of the beautiful land!"

Yes, indeed. Phoebe and I adjourned to the swings, while Liam made himself an agenda, putting pea gravel on the edge of the huge steel merry-go-round, pushing it as hard as he could, then putting more gravel on the uncovered edge. After about twenty minutes, he had pebbled the entire perimeter, turned the merry-go-round several revolutions, and seemed very pleased with himself. Not bad for a 16-month-old, I thought, as a weak ray of sun backlit a tuft of his white hair. I showed Phoebe how to pump her legs to swing higher, and we soared, side by side, into the pearly sky.