I suppose it's one of the unfortunate attributes of human psychology that we tend to remember best the experiences of our lives that have felt the worst. Shouldn't it be, wouldn't it be nice if it were the best memories that were brightest in our minds? But these seem to become vague and indistinct over time, though we may still recall that something happened to us once that was very nice. The bad experiences, they live on, like ghosts haunting the halls of our waking lives. Who knows how often they form the stuff of our nightmares? And no matter how many years we have behind us, it is especially the negative experiences of our childhoods that continue to live large in our memories.
When I was a third grader, I attended a small elementary school in Louisville, Kentucky. It was a neighborhood school really, and I could walk to it every morning from my home. My family had just moved to the city that summer before, so this was my first year with these students. It was not going well. From the very first day, I was made aware that the other students in my class saw me as different. It was not just that I was new. My family had moved to Louisville from a small town in western Kentucky, and the place of my origin was very apparent in my accent. So, naturally, the other students enjoyed teasing me about that, the flat and distorted sounds of my vowels, so that the 'i' in "finger" sounded more like the 'ai' in "ain't", fainger. I had five faingers and one thumb on each hand. And that's just one example. I quickly began the long work of learning to speak in round vowel sounds. (Today, most people would never guess the rural Kentucky beginnings of my life.) And yes, I would have considered "ain't" a word back then, along with the rest of my family. But this regular teasing about my accent (a brogue, my mother called it, mimicking a more "sophisticated" southern drawl), was minor compared to the trauma of my first picture day.
My mother had a houseful of male children, and for some reason she always wanted her boys to be "mod." That was the term we used back then. "Mod," for modern. It meant you were up to date in terms of style and thinking. This was the early seventies after all. So my mother let her boys wear long hair while some dads were still insisting on a barber's cut. In third grade, my hair nearly came down to my shoulders. The clothing was just as important as the hair, however, and that's where we come back to picture day.In honor of our first school pictures in our new place of residence, my mother not only wanted her boys to have something new, she wanted it made from scratch. We were country boys in a new "city" environment, remember; on the broad spectrum of what was cool and what was not, we had some serious ground to make up. If our clothes were made from scratch, she must have reasoned, then no one else would have anything quite like them. That would be very mod, right? My mother, therefore, purchased a pattern for a very mod, broad-collared, puffy-sleeved shirt. In the heat of inspiration, she purchased a vest pattern as well. Then she hired a professional seamstress to do the work. On picture day I was fully decked out in a new, bright-yellow puffy-sleeved shirt and a blue buttonless vest for accent. I was the epitome of third-grade cool. Or so I thought. I walked to school in style, very proud of my new outfit, trusting that my mother knew what she was doing.
As the new kid, it was my misfortune to have to sit at a desk in the front of the classroom, the seat nobody else would want, and all morning long there was a tittering and whispering behind my back that seemed to grow in intensity and volume as the minutes crept toward our picture time. My confidence in my new attire began to falter, though I could not understand how my clothing could be the problem--maybe it was too mod, maybe these city children were not as sophisticated as we'd assumed. The noise behind me finally grew loud enough that the teacher noticed and demanded to know what all the whispering and giggling was about. "He's wearing a girl shirt!" one boy blurted out, "It buttons down the back like my sister's!" And the whole class erupted into laughter.
If I had had more confidence, I might have stood up from my front-of-the-room seat and taken a grand bow, as if I'd only been waiting for them to get the joke. But I was not a confident child. Instead, I sat there utterly humiliated, unable to think of anything cool to say to defend myself, a daylong spectacle for all the other children to enjoy.
I'll admit I felt betrayed that day, not by the children, but by my mother. In her determination to help me fit in, she had purchased a pattern for a girl's blouse, assuming her aim could be achieved just the same--the sleeves looked the way she wanted them to at any rate--and she had made me into a joke for the rest of the class. Beyond betrayal of trust, however, I also felt a little sorry for my mother, who desperately wanted her small-town boys to "fit in" to our new city suburban life, but didn't know how to make that happen for us. Whether she knew it or not, when it came to being cool, we were on our own.
I refused to wear the shirt for the rest of that year no matter how many times she suggested it. I never told her why, and eventually, she let the subject go. Sometimes, I would be so bold as to wear the blue vest, with a different shirt. I hoped that would be enough to make her happy.
