First Day of School Sparks a Trip Down Memory Lane

The Alice-in-Wonderland effect hit me the minute I walked onto the playground.

It was as though I’d walked through a mirror and once again I was a child brimming with the jitters of my first day of school.

I had come to James H. Cox Elementary School in Fountain Valley to write a story about 6-year-old Jessica Brunner starting first grade. As the children assembled on the blacktop all around me, it seemed to prove the adage: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Unexpectedly, I was drawn back into the swirl of feelings that are so universal they have become living cliches: the excitement and fear of that first day at school, the openness and enthusiasm of a child’s approach to the world, the blind trust that so many good things lie ahead.

Even though my first day of kindergarten was 26 years ago and 3,000 miles away on a cool, blustery day in New York, it wasn’t so different from that hot California morning nearly two weeks ago.

As Jessica walked silently up the school driveway holding her mother’s hand, my own school memories of kindergarten and first grade flickered past me, as if through a camera lens.

Click: The autumn wind was so strong on my first day of kindergarten that it swept me along as I walked to school, pushing me into a trot. Brown, red and burnt-orange leaves spiraled down as my mother and I made our way through the narrow streets of our Long Island town to join the other children streaming into the brick elementary school.

I was so excited to be in a classroom that it seemed my mother had disappeared the instant I let go of her hand. I know now that she watched me from the door for a little while before she left, reluctant to let her youngest child go.

In Jessica’s classroom, her teacher showed the children how to push in their chairs before leaving the classroom at recess and how to stack them neatly on their desks at the end of the day.

Click: In my kindergarten classroom 26 years ago, Miss Scanapicco, our teacher, showed us how to spread our towels on the chilly green linoleum floor for nap time. Later, we got to sit at the big table and pry open little cartons of milk to drink with our school-issued graham crackers.

Jessica and her class lined up by the door, anxious for playtime after a morning of patient concentration. Released onto the grass outside, they burst into shouts.

Click: My classmates and I crowded through the coatroom, then filed onto the playground. It seemed impossibly big and adventurous, with a jungle gym, merry-go-round, slides and other things. On a visit years later, I marveled that the crumbling asphalt and battered play equipment had inspired such expansive excitement.

When Jessica’s teacher asked her bright-eyed pupils what they would like to learn this year, their hands shot up into the air with suggestions. They wanted to know all about reading, science, animals, insects, math.

Click: In first grade I learned to tell time, practicing by pushing the arms around and around on the face of a huge cardboard clock. It seemed that in an instant I had learned a long-sought-after secret and gained entree into the grown-ups’ world.

Jessica and her friends practiced writing their names over and over on the black lines of a yellow workbook, and then drew pictures of themselves with brightly colored crayons.

Click: I flashed on another first-grade memory. In this snapshot, I was practicing writing the letters of the alphabet on off-white paper with tiny turquoise flecks. Painstakingly, I squeezed the forms between the solid and dotted blue lines.

These pictures sped through my mind and the characters in them began to move, just as the figures in separate frames of film come to life when fed through a movie projector.

As I sat at the back of Jessica’s classroom, watching her recite the Pledge of Allegiance with her class, I felt the weight of the distance I had traveled since my own first day of school.

It seemed eons ago that I was as cheerful and optimistic as Jessica and her classmates. Somewhere along the way, I learned to guard myself, to hesitate, to calculate.

And as I watched Jessica smiling at her new friends, it seemed that in learning those things, I had learned far too much.