Preschool Days

What I hope is a highly humorous account of 1980's Preschool life from memory.

Preschool Days

A long time ago ... back when we were a still a great country .. It was 1987. Ronaldus Magnus was our president. I was four years old. Preschool was in the basement of a little gray, non-descript church in the upstate New York countryside .. that we didn't attend .. since we were still heathens then. The Pre School morning began in an interior room on the bottom floor of this multi-story foundation under the church. The little room was four walls, two of which were fake/divider style walls, covered or made of that fake wood paneling that was once popular throughout the north and northeast in the 60's and 70's. I couldn't tell time yet, but I would often check a ridiculous little black Mickey Mouse watch I had been given by my step-grandfather Lou, in order to look as important as a chubby little white four-year-old could look. The room itself had no other furniture except a little 2-foot faux wood plyboard cabinet, with swing out little doors in front, whose contents would forever remain a mystery, a midsized portrait of Ronald Reagan in front of an American flag with blue sky and puffy white clouded backdrop from his younger days as governor of California was on the back wall, and a little fake American flag, (Dollar Tree) sat on the cabinet. There were no windows in this room. We sat on the floor in non-politically correct "Indian style" fashion.

A teacher would arrive, usually a young woman in her late twenties or early thirties. In Pre School I recall we were all semi-dressed up. This may have just been some of the days we went, but I specifically recall a particular outfit that I definitely attended in: little corduroy pants, (in "husky") red suspenders with silver clasps (fake), and a little light colored, probably white collared button up shirt with a red clip-on bow tie with white polka dots. This bow tie occupied a great deal of my attention and vigilance in fact. I had been fastidiously warned in no uncertain terms that if I lost, damaged, or otherwise ruined this little clip-on bow tie .. I was .. "dead meat." This was a form of real parenting back in those days. Long before reasoning with a four-year-old would replace good ol' fashioned common sense, a vague threat of violence, which used to solve many of our problems, along with the time-honored tradition of corporal punishment, usually but very rarely carried out with a wooden spoon that normally was used to scrape batter out of a mixing bowl.

The very first thing we did with our nameless teacher lady each day was ... our "Singing." First, we were taught where to stand, at dis-attention, in little lines, taller kids in back and shrimp kids in front, the kind that back then were "allergic to peanut butter." Now you're allowed to be allergic to everything and anything, including a mysterious element known as gluten which didn't exist back then. I think there were maybe about dozen or so kids there besides myself. There was always someone out sick so it made no sense to actually get to know any of your fellow weirdo Pre-Schoolers other than their name, which was forgotten immediately and none of which I even now recall. After rounding us up into our lines we were taught two or three songs, all patriotic, which we sang over and over again to the teacher lady's satisfaction. The song that I recall most was "My Country Tis of Thee" We would sing this pretty much every day of Pre School as we jostled and jovially pushed and shoved the kid to either side of us in our little dupe lines. Even though we sang this every day, we never actually learned all of the lyrics to the song, with the exception of the end of each verse. To this very day "of thee I SING!," "my fathers DIED," "pilgrims' PRIDE!," "every mountain SIDE!," and "let freedom RING!" are all I can remember of how the song goes. Then we did "Pledge of Allegiance" to Ronald and the little flag. This all felt like it took a long time but was probably not much more than 15 minutes or so to get us warmed up.

After "Singing" we formed into a pre-determined line and were marched from the mysterious little room with the wood paneling and Ronald up a half flight of stairs to a grey, cinder block decorated hall, with a rather low ceiling, and two little rectangle slit windows that looked at ground level in the upper portion of the back wall close to the ceiling, which would open up to our left as we took our seats at a collection of little round wood tables with little wood chairs. The tables were adorned with little plastic tubs of plastic encased safety scissors with dull metal blades (the useless kind that couldn't cut anything) and Crayola crayons. Crayola was our first food for the time we were incarcerated in Pre School each day. My particular favorite crayons were pink, gray, or white crayons. They were seldom used like the other colors because they didn't show up well on construction paper, so they were often still very fresh unlike blue, red, or orange. You peeled back the paper, broke off a little hunk and sucked on it while you scribbled your "Coloring." We colored an inordinate number of Noahs, Jesuses, Abrahams, Isaccs, and Jacobs marrying his two wives and such. (No Adams and Eves though)

I greatly enjoyed scribbling over Noah every day. My favorite color to scribble Noah and his animals was Cobalt Blue, which had just been released that year by Crayola. We ONLY used and consumed Crayola, the mark of quality and fine taste. After scribbling time, it was time to use useless scissors. We would receive doled out reams upon reams of construction paper. This proved to be mostly inedible due to the taste of the dyes used to color the paper. It would have been an acquired taste to eventually work up to first or second grade. We were taught how to essentially create various objects by cutting out shapes from the construction paper and then assembling these shapes to create something that looked like reality. This of course very seldom occurred since the scissors failed to cut anything except shave slivers of your favorite flavor crayon. The glue was originally little plastic jars of Elmer's with little brushes, but this proved to be an utter disaster! Not only was it also found to be inedible, but it also mostly got on to everyone .. and everything else .. since we were not very good at using brushes. This explains why we were not permitted to use any kind of paint until kindergarten or first grade. These jars were efficiently replaced with Elmer's squeeze bottles, which were impossible to squeeze any liquid of any kind from, but did have a respectable flavor when dry, and then those were replaced with "glue stick," which also proved to be inedible and therefore frowned upon, although it did glue our torn and frayed edges of "shapes" together into piles of gluey mush quite well.

After constructing numerous piles of nothing from construction paper, we would retain the glue, but lose the scissors, and be issued cardboard boxes of popsicle sticks to glue into other objects resembling things we encountered in reality. Since none of us had encountered reality yet, this proved equally fruitless like gluing the construction paper did. We mostly just made piles of glued together popsicle sticks and called them "truck" or "house" or "church" or "school."

Beaver dam .. would have been much more accurate. We built these constructions upon sheets of unused construction paper and usually saved them on a shelf at the front of the room which was really just the flat top of a long, wheeled, plywood cabinet (also gray) where they sat, dried, and twitched from time to time, until our parents arrived close to noon to pick us up.

Next was the long anticipated "snack time," as the crayon, pieces of dried glue, and chewed up construction paper had only served us as mere appetizers up until now. We each received a napkin and then upon the napkin was plopped a full two sheets of ... Graham .. Cracker ... the most notoriously disgusting little kid snack known to man. This violation of the Geneva Convention was apparently designed to choke a little kid at Pre School which we dolefully gagged and choked upon quite frequently as we waited for the very slow distribution of grape or apple juice boxes, which included those little poorly designed and molded plastic flex straws that were impossible to punch through the little foil circle on the top of the box.

There was never enough juice in the juice box to clear your throat, so a trip to the water fountain was often in order, which was also very risky, since the teachers all knew that if a little kid went to the water fountain, then they were guaranteed to have to relieve themselves BEFORE their parents came to pick them up, which would likely have to happen during "Nap Time" which, of course, was the preschool teachers' ONLY smoke break until noon.

"Nap Time" was a pretty interesting experience in that it was relatively unexpected by me. I had anticipated as a kid that Pre School was a place where important things happened and was similar to having a kind of job, like what adults went off to everyday, only preschool is just for kids. So .. a period of time spent laying around .. in semi darkness .. in a place that was NOT my bedroom .. in semi dressy clothes .. on little red orange gym mats .. with zero noise or activity, seemed very odd, but the novelty of it encouraged me to participate in this endeavor as fully as I could.

My recollection is that after "Nap Time" was when I could finally and safely request to go to the restroom, which was my first time speaking for the day as well, which would prove to be not only the culmination of my preschool day, but also the most stressful part of the entire experience. This is because I would be alone in the basement of a strange building in a long room lined with stalls and could potentially lose or incur damage to my polka dot clip on bow tie.

I can vividly recall entering the stall very carefully. Immediately upon closing the little door and wrestling the bolt into the catch I would take off my precious clip-on bow tie and slide it into the right front pocket of my corduroys. Then, instead of unclipping the suspenders, as doing so would make it impossible to clip them back on, I would slide the bands off of my shoulders so my pants would fall down. After completing my business there, I could safely flush the commode, slide the suspenders back into place, exit the stall completely, and then clip on the bow tie from my pocket. My greatest fear was that the clip-on bow tie would somehow miraculously end up in the commode. This way, this was impossible!

After getting lost trying to find my way back the ten whole whopping feet it was between the craft hall where our piles of popsicle sticks had stopped twitching and dried, I would arrive in time to see my mother had arrived with all the other moms to pick up their progeny. I would proudly display Noah in all of his Cobalt Blue scribble glory, my piles of gooey popsicle sticks, and collection of crumpled construction paper shapes and objects. The teacher ladies would pass on whatever they talked about with her while I preened and looked over my glorious Preschool creations and anticipated a glue free lunch.