Beginning

Fifty years ago today, I started first grade. I think. The year—1965—is easy to determine with a little math that even I can manage.  The actual date—September 2—is trickier, but I’m pretty sure it’s accurate. For the first quite-a-few years of my school career, HISD reliably commenced with a shortened registration day on the Thursday before Labor Day, held a full day of class on the Friday, and began in earnest on the following Tuesday. A google of the 1965 calendar shows that Labor Day that year was on September 6, so the Thursday before would have been the second.  Voila.

I probably wasn’t non-cool enough to admit out loud that I was excited about being a first grader, but I was privately beside myself with anticipation. I remember well. Reading was my Holy Grail. The desire to decipher those letters was tastable. I couldn’t wait. I wanted to read.

That short-day registration on Thursday was a frustration. I was ready to get started.  I wanted to read.

Friday finally dawned, and I was totally stoked as I strolled through the arched entrance of the old building at Central, armed with fat first-grade pencils and fat first-grade crayons and one of those tablets with solid and dotted lines. The Great Day had arrived.  I was ready to read.

I didn’t learn to read that day. What I did encounter was the opening salvo of a lesson I still haven’t mastered: beginning is hard. And slow. And requires patience.

We spent a good chunk of that first morning learning the sound that the letter O makes. I already knew that. I was, after all, a fortunate graduate of Mrs. Wright’s kindergarten. Days later we moved on to when two vowels go walking, the first one says his name and the next one stays quiet. Progress, but the trip through phonics land was tedious and never really hooked me.

True, before my five years at Central were done I could rip through the weighty works of Laura Ingalls Wilder with fair confidence. The old red brick school did me proud. I just didn’t realize on that first day how long it would take those two walking vowels to reach the log cabin on the prairie. Beginnings are slow.

Time circles. This year, I spend my afternoons on, once again, the Central School campus. Several of the buildings have been refurbished as a higher education center; my dual credit history classes meet there. There’s something nice and altogether fitting about starting a new school year in the place I began.

My classroom is in a building that didn’t exist when I was a lad. It’s carpeted and air conditioned (remember when schools were not?) and equipped with technology beyond any reach of the 1965 imagination. The other day, while waxing eloquent on 16^th century European exploration, I glanced out the window and realized I was standing on the site of an old kickball field, probably near what was once third base. I hope I’m more effective in the classroom now than I was on that field then. Those never my finest hours. It has taken me all of a half-century to reach the neighborhood of third base without being conked by a kickball en route—talk about your slow beginnings and long trips—but patience pays off and I’m beginning again. At home.