Adams School

I was seven years old.
The first day of first grade.
My never worn before clothes hung
starch, crisp and stiff.
New shoes pinching, hair slicked,
I sat ramrod,
eager, attentive
in wondrous, almost giddy anticipation.

Twenty-five children, in five rows of five,
each behind a wooden, ink-welled, flip top desk,
sat blank, open and receptive as the blackboard before us.

Our teacher, Miss Wilson,
the tallest man or woman I had ever seen,
towered like a giant sequoia
amongst the low, yearning, green-fern undergrowth.
Her voice radiated a miraculous confluence of gentleness, humor and wisdom
such that,
never once was it raised higher than quiet encouragement.

Effortlessly she glided from the top of one row to the next,
handing out little powder blue paper notebooks,
which we angelically passed behind and
piously opened.
In the beginning there was the letter Aa,
written now large, resolute and precise on the blackboard by Miss Wilson.
We had just diligently begun the Herculean task of imitation
when I felt a heavy, fitful kicking on my chair,
accompanied by
a low muffled gurgling,
like a small animal drowning.

I turned and saw
a young boy,
- chunky, blonde, crew cut -
glassy-eyed, convulsing,
with white foam oozing from his gaping, gagging mouth.

For a suspended, lingering, imperishable moment,
we gazed in eerie, spectral silence
as the unimaginable
irrevocably pierced
the fragile spell of order.

Spewed forth
- raw, unleashed, orgasmic -
the child's primordial grunts and contorted spasms
made us feel naked
- exposed -
at once,
superficially horrified and deeply jubilant.

As abruptly as it began, the eruption ceased.
Miss Wilson flew to the limp, lifeless boy,
cradled him in her immense arms
and carried him out of the classroom.

The only sound was a soft, snuffled whimpering
from,
I don't remember,
a boy or girl.
It seemed appropriate,
for all remained silent,
not out of good behavior,
but more,
from a stupefied awe.

The grand apparition Miss Wilson reappeared,
white, chastened, struggling to smile.
Words,
like a distant wind,
echoed and floated
without settling anywhere in particular.
Epilepsy...boy OK...nothing...to worry...about...
everything will be...all right...let's...try...to resume...
Mechanically we took our pencils,
looked up at the big Aa,
and obediently began to scrawl in our powder blue notebooks.

We never saw the chunky, blonde, crew cut boy again.