Sans Fig Leaf

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"Out of line"

1 December, 2002

We find rituals in the oddest places. For many years I have waited on Thanksgiving morning to hear the "Fantasy Thanksgiving Potluck" on Nation Public Radio's Morning Edition show. It doesn't matter how many times I've heard it, when Julia Child's voice comes on the air to talk about mashed potatos, it warms the cockles of my heart.

The day after Thanksgiving I noticed a couple of the families on our street were out hanging their Christmas lights. I thought about how many families all over the U.S. start excavating boxes of ornaments and lights from attics, basements, or closets all during the same weekend. If aliens are watching us right now, what do they think this ritual means?

Most of the people engaging in it don't think of it as a ritual at all. Christmas is just around the corner, and lots of people have a four-day weekend right now, so it's just a convenient time to get started. For families with school-aged children it's something to keep the kids busy. I know that's the main reason my Mom did it when I was a kid.

Mom would get out some of the decorations and we would begin making plans about which lights would go in which windows of the house. Us kids would start pestering dad about buying the Christmas tree. He'd want to wait so it wouldn't get all wilted and bare in the living room.

One year, I think I was in the second grade, Mom bought an artificial tree. It was about three and a half-feet tall, green, and fairly well made. That little artificial tree was our Christmas tree every year until I was in my twenties. Even though I love decorating a big six or seven foot tree now, those small artificial trees still have a special magic for me.

The next year we moved in November. We were always moving. Dad worked in the petroleum industry, and he and his crew were transferred around a lot. So there it was, nearly Christmas, and we had moved further away from my grandparents than we had ever been, and a lot of our stuff was still packed up in boxes.

And I was starting at a new school, yet again. Most of my grade school memories are of the painful days shortly after we had moved when I tried to make friends and fit in. Every school and every classroom had its own arcane set of customs, many of which no one thought to explain to the new kid.

My first day at that school was one of the worst. When it was time for reading we were instructed to get out our reading text books and pull our chairs into a circle. The teacher told us which page to turn to, then she said we were all going to take a turn reading. Each person was to read two sentences. She started.

She read a sentence and a half, and abruptly stopping. After a second, the first kid to her left started reading at the word where she left off. I couldn't figure out why the teacher had stopped, there was still more of the sentence to go.

I figured the first kid must be the dimmest one in the class, because he was having troubles with really easy words. It was painful to hear him read. And he stopped in mid sentence.

Then the second kid started, and she was a worse reader the first. They all just kept stopping at strange places and somehow the next kid knew where to start, which had me worried, because it was going to be my turn, soon. But I was also starting to think that they had put me in the special class by mistake. The story didn't have any big words in it, the whole book reminded me of a reading book from second grade (and this was third grade), and every single kid who had read, thus far, was far worse than the dumbest kid in my class at my old school.

The kid sitting next to me stopped reading. I glanced at him. He had stopped several words before the period. Was he finished? Should I start?

The teacher said my name. So I started reading where the last kid left off. I read the rest of his sentence, then I read the next sentence and was well into the second full sentence when the teacher told me to stop.

She walked over and said, "Here, let me show you how to count sentences," she said.

"But I know how," I said. "There's more words to go until I get to the next period."

"Oh, no, dear," she told me. "We haven't learned our punctuation, yet. See, we don't use those kinds of sentences. We use beginner's sentences. See. When you get to the end of a line, and you have to look down at the next line of words? That's a beginner's sentence."

Two months into the third grade, and these kids didn't know punctuation. Not only that, but I had a teacher who thought that a line of type was a "beginner's sentence."

I was very confused.

Then lunch time arrived. The teacher lined us up and led us to the cafeteria... and then left us to our own devices. The serving line worked pretty much as it had at my two previous schools, and when I had my tray full, one of the other kids from my class said, "We have to sit with our class." So I followed him and sat at the table next to him.

I ate my food and listened to the other kids and wondered what else would go wrong.

By the time I finished my lunch, I had seen other kids carry their trays up to the front and do the usual scrape and separate routine, so I went and did so myself. Then I headed toward the door. At my previous two schools when we finished eating, we all went out to the playground until the bell rang.

There were a bunch of kids lined up at the door, and one of them stopped me before I walked out, telling me it wasn't time to go, yet. So I got into the end of the line and waited.

A woman I didn't know (I have since decided that she was the assistant principal) appeared and started to talk to the other kids in line, then she saw me. She bore down on me like a very hungry vulture at a ripe carcass. "What are you doing in this line?" she demanded.

"He said we couldn't leave, yet," I replied.

"But what are you doing in this line?"

"Waiting my turn?"

"Are you one of my first-graders?"

By this point, as I perceived it, she was hunched over me like some sort of monster that was trying to decide whether to eat me alive or tear my bones out to play with first. I was beginning to cry and I was very confused and tried to say I didn't know who she was and I wasn't in her class and I didn't know what I had done wrong.

She seemed to get even bigger and shrieked at me, "Are you one of my first-graders?"

I tried to answer that I was a third-grader and wasn't in her class and I couldn't even remember my teacher's name now, and please stop yelling at me, I didn't mean to do it, whatever it was. I have no idea what actually came out, of course. I was probably crying too hard for anyone to understand me. She kept asking the same question, over and over, "Are you one of my first-graders?"

Finally, she seemed to decode some of my blubbering, and she grabbed me and pointed me toward the table where the other kids from my class were all sitting and watching. "You sit at the table with your home room until I call your grade to line up! Do you think you can do that?"

I ran to the table.

Where I got to endure the taunting and derision of the other kids for what seemed like an eternity until we were finally taken back to our classroom.

It had occured to no one to explain how the lunch ritual worked. It had not occured to me to ask anyone what I was supposed to do when I finished eating. Just as it had never occured to me that a teacher would use the word "sentence" when she meant "line of type."

I hadn't thought of that incident in years. Something about watching the neighbors putting up their Christmas lights started a pinball effect in my brain, and minutes later I was reliving that moment with the assitant principal looming over me and screaming the same slightly non-sensical question at me no matter what reply I gave.

It didn't scar me for life. I survived. I learned to be a lot more careful whenever we did something new.

I didn't really have time to learn all the customs and rituals of that school. Third grade was one of the years that we moved twice in a single school year. And if I thought that I had been put into a whole school of embiciles then, I was to learn a new and more terrifying definition at the next school.

I would like to be able to close this by saying that I never acted on assumptions again, that I am always alert to subtle cultural differences when I'm in a new group or place. But the truth is that I'm a creature of habit, as all people are to varying degrees.

But I do try hard to remember what it felt like that day when I had done the wrong thing and the person who ought to have been showing me the right thing to do was too busy shouting at me for doing the wrong thing to notice anything else. I try, really, really hard, never to act like that assistant principal.