Day 95

Day 95: Tuesday I mentioned the merits of saltines and frosting. Yesterday was my daughter’s birthday, and the salted caramel frosting I made for her cake would have been awesome on saltines! But I felt a tiny bit bad about discounting the graham cracker, because graham crackers, for me, are part of the utopia that existed in Mrs. Barrie’s basement kindergarten.

Back in the Stone Age, when I was a pre-schooler, kindergarten was not included in the elementary education system. It was optional. Fortunately for me, an excellent kindergarten teacher lived in the farming community adjoining ours, and she taught kindergarten in her basement.

I call it a utopia because everything was perfect and fun at Mrs. Barrie’s. I wouldn’t know just how perfect until I advanced to first grade, where a wooden paddle hung on the principal’s wall, but that’s a tale for another day.

At Mrs. Barrie’s, we ate snacks. Graham crackers dipped in a Dixie cup of milk or Kool-Aid. We weren’t picky about the liquid. The point was to get the graham cracker soft, but not so soft that it soggily sunk to the bottom of the Dixie cup. I’m not sure why we liked almost-soggy graham crackers, but it seemed the thing to do.

At Mrs. Barrie’s, we took naps. We each brought a rolled up bath towel at the beginning of the school year, and at the appointed time we would ceremoniously unroll our towels, arrange them on the floor, lie down, and take a nap while we listened to music, or listened to Mrs. Barrie read aloud. What I wouldn’t give for a mandatory nap time now!

At Mrs. Barrie’s, we learned about paste. Why not glue? I’m guessing paste was easier for our little hands to control, as well as the jumbo crayons and humongous pencils. But by the end of the year, we were all skillfully using Elmer’s glue and regular crayons and 2B pencils because Mrs. Barrie was good at preparing us for the real world.

We marched into first grade with the alphabet and numbers and colors and shapes in our tool belts of learning. We impressed our first grade teachers with our ability to read “See Jane Run” and enter a spinning jump rope without messing up the rhythm. But I was unimpressed with first grade, because there were no graham crackers to dunk in milk, and nap time had completely disappeared from the agenda. You know the book by Robert Fulghum, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” — the one with the apple poster that hangs in virtually every classroom in America? Well, he didn’t write that until 1986, the year I got married. My first grade teacher needed that poster. The absence of nap time and graham crackers was a travesty I carried with me for several grades.

The world was never as bright and shiny as it was in Mrs. Barrie’s basement kindergarten, so I silently thank the Lord for her splendid teaching every time I dunk a graham cracker in milk. Thank you, Mrs. Barrie. You really did teach me everything I needed to know. #MomsCompanyTowels#MrsBarriesBasementKindergarten #GrahamCrackersAndMilk#EverythingINeededToKnowILearnedAtMrsBarries @janetbarriebingham