Confidence of a Clown

 Confidence of a Clown, by Ricki T Thues

 

I'm seven years old in second grade. I show up to class a week into the semester. There are three books under my arm which I put under my desk. I sit down. Miss Bagley is at her desk and stands up. She says, “OK class, is everyone ready to present the speech that you've prepared?

 

My jaw drops all the way to the floor. I think, “What speech? I don't even remember the assignment. I'm not prepared to speak. 

 

I look around myself and see the books that are under my desk. I notice that there are little differences in the books. I raise my hand to go first. I just want to get this nightmare over.

 

Miss Bagley says, “Okay Ricki, you start.”

 

I pick up the three books and I put them on my desk. Lifting the first book to show the class I say, “Books are put together all kinds of ways. All the pages of this one are glued.” I put it down and I pick up the next book. I say, “Some books are stapled like this one. It has staples that hold the papers on.” I put that one down. Glancing cautiously around I see the class is paying attention. With new confidence I pick up the third, spiral bound book and say, “Some books have these squiggly little things that circle around the edge.” I sit down.

 

The teacher says, “That was very good Ricki. Who is next?” I am sure she let me off easy with this brief speech since I volunteered to go first. I had the sense that if I didn't speak right away I was going to fail. The teacher’s compliment gives me a false sense of competency. The truth is I was just lucky in my first attempt at improvisation.

 

The next year in third grade I have a similar confidence. My parents have taught me how to write in script and that is the main topic of class today. I am already ahead of the rest of the class in reading, plus Miss Bondilee is the most boring teacher. Nobody likes her. She is pedantic and I am bored most of the time.

 

I turn to the girl next to me and stereotypically pull her pigtail. She screeches and the teacher busts me. “Stop that, Ricki. Don’t ever do that again.” Of course, a day or two later I do it again. I am fully into the class clown character.

 

The teacher has had enough of me. She turns a desk in the back of the class to face out the window. She sits me in the desk and says, “Look out the window until you decide to rejoin the class.” I think well, okay, great. There are cars going by and I just entertain myself for the next three months.

 

Miss Bondilee calls my mother and me into the principal's office.

“Ricki is not going to advance to the fourth grade,” the teacher says. ”He has done none of the work for the last three months.”

”How could that have happened?” asks my mother.

Miss Bondilee explains that I was isolated from the class and chose not to rejoin it. “Being a class clown seemed more important to him than doing the work.”

 

My mother looks over at the sheepish principal, then back at my teacher.

“You are going to give Ricki all the assignments that he has missed. I will monitor him to be sure that all the work is done. I assure you that I will not help him. He will learn the material.” Turning to the principal she adds, “If he completes the assignments will he advance to the fourth grade?” The principal glares at my teacher and nods to my mother.

 

I do complete all the work and hand it in with a week to spare. It was the most difficult thing I have ever done. My mother was relentless. I advance to the four grade with a confidence that I stole from my mother.

 

In fourth and fifth grade I discover the library. I read voraciously and become a very good student.

 

I find myself in the sixth grade in a class where the teacher is annoyingly dull. Mr. Wright has this nasty habit of twisting the ears of students who are acting up. It is his way of getting their attention. He is droning on and on about something that I already know. In fact, I have already read the book he is discussing. So, I turn around and I am twisting my ear at my buddy in the desk behind me, making fun of the teacher. My friend is giggling and then, suddenly the kids behind him start giggling. I am still twisting my ear when I feel my other ear getting twisted. I look up in horror to see my teacher with his fingers on my ear. It hurts.

 

Mr. Wright looks me straight in the eyes and says, “Rick, they're not laughing with you. They are laughing at you.”

 

That comment strikes me hard. I realized that being the class clown is not worth the reward. I will never play that role again.

Sticks and Stones by David Molina

 Sticks and Stones

I was thinking back to the earliest memory that I have. I think it was when I was three years old. It was in Ohio, and it is the only memory I have of Ohio. I was with my older brother Tony, who was eighteen months older than me and a head taller for most of my childhood. He marooned me inside a street sewer. Yes, he led me down into the sewer, then left me. And then he sashayed home. I'm in the sewer, and he's toddling back home, probably laughing at having ditched his younger kid brother once and for all, a goal that most older siblings often dream about but rarely succeed in accomplishing. That was my very first memory. I could go on and on about sibling rivalry, and probably could write an 800-page book on the topic. I would boil it down to this: Number Two always has to fight harder than Number One in order to survive.

The next memory is more vivid, the first one that I clearly remember. When our family moved from Ohio to San Bruno, we stayed in a little motel, an old-fashioned one with a bunch of old station wagons, including ours, parked next to the rooms. There were kids playing on the other side of the parking lot, and for whatever reason, Tony says, "Okay, let's get some rocks. We're gonna throw rocks at those kids." Okay, great! We start throwing rocks at them. We don't know these kids, we don't have anything against them, and they didn't have anything against us. Until we start throwing rocks at each other. But we were kids, and it was our guys against their guys. We're throwing rocks at them; they're throwing rocks at us. The parents are completely unaware of the battle raging outdoors. Luckily, no one was hurt.

The whole "Sticks and Stones" thing played a big part in my childhood. We had sticks, and we would fight other kids in the neighborhood with sticks, as well as stones. Every street other than our own was enemy territory.  We lived on Rushford Street, and around the corner was Lashburn Street. When you go around the corner, you are in no man's land, the disputed territory between our homelands. You have to be cautious because there are kids on the other side, and you're from the wrong street. We are like Palestinians and Israelis. We lived in Whittier, an otherwise placid and peaceful suburban area where years later my high school friends would come for poker parties. Fortunately, they got in and out without getting mugged or hit with sticks or stones. 

I remember the disputed no man's land between driveways where there was a big trash can filled to the brim with rocks. I don't know why someone had this big trash can filled with rocks. The adults, clueless as always, should have known better. As we Rushford kids come towards the driveways, we run smack dab into the Lashburn gang. We grab the rocks; they grab the rocks. We commence hurling salvos of rocks at each other. Then it escalates.

We also had a stockpile of sticks and we had a collection of old bicycle tire tubes.  Remember those Western-style fences with posts and rails? We took the inner tube, the big gigantic rubber band, and a gigantic stick, pulled it back, and launched it at the enemy. Someone could have gotten hurt (we were hoping that someone belonged to the Lashburn gang). But they were on their side, and we were defending our side. It was just common knowledge that they were on the other side and that it was standard procedure to throw rocks or hit them with sticks. We were constantly planning and participating in such battles.  It was just the natural thing that you did when you were a six-year-old boy.

This sounds like gangs, but we were only three feet tall and six years old. Children of the 1950s, we were influenced by the steady stream of cowboys and Indians TV shows and World War II combat movies. John Wayne and Gary Cooper were our heroes, our role models. We had a healthy diet of constant shooting, shooting, shooting. I remember we all owned Daisy air rifles--guns that popped loudly. Some would even puff smoke if you added oil. My parents wisely avoided BB guns, because that would have probably led to a generation of one-eyed elementary school kids. 

 None of my parents or relatives owned a gun. I think the only time I picked up a gun and shot a gun was when I was a scoutmaster at 40 years old. There was no gun culture in our lives, yet we had to throw things, and shoot things, and that was part of being a kid, a boy. I think it's because of the cultural influence of the movies.

We also had slingshots and berries. We'd take elastic belts, nail them to a foot-long piece of wood, and shoot each other. I remember my friend Bob Pryor coming towards me, pointing his gun at me. I pulled the elastic back as far as I could and let my stainberry fly. It hit him right on his nose. I laughed so hard because he was startled, looking cross-eyed at his stain-berried nose. 

But this was how it was, and I think it eventually carried on as we grew older. The famous Mater Dei midnight raid was an example of this Commando culture,  There was always the other side, which for no good reason we hate, and we're going to throw sticks and stones. All I can say is thank God that we were small little dweebs and weren't very strong or accurate with the sticks and stones. I'm very grateful - or lucky -  that we survived and didn't kill anybody.