Jiminy Cricket! First-Graders Can Be Tough Audience

Idon’t know what made me do it. A sense of duty, perhaps. My niece, a Bakersfield schoolteacher, had asked me to go to her school and talk to her first-grade class.

I hadn’t the slightest idea what one says to first-graders. Surely they wouldn’t be in the least interested in anything I might say. It would probably be a standoff.

Jeanne O’Neill, my wife’s sister’s son’s wife to get that straight, teaches at the handsome new Leo B. Hart Elementary School in an up-scale suburb southwest of town. Her class was waiting for me--28 of them; bright, clean, adorable--with a subdued sense of mischief.

The classroom was cluttered with colored learning tools. Posters promoted the rewards of reading. There was a rocking chair in one corner. The pupils indicated I was to sit in that. They gathered in front of me in a semi-circle. Twenty-eight pairs of eyes looked into mine--serious, alert, expectant.

I introduced myself and made a few feeble remarks about the joys of reading. Then my niece rescued me by giving me a book to read.

It was called “The Very Quiet Cricket”--about a cricket that couldn’t make a sound. It was a test. The children had already read the story. Probably more than once. If I goofed, they’d know it.

All eyes were on me as I began. I read with zest. It was a pretty good story. It had a spittle bug in it, a cicada, a dragonfly, mosquitoes and a luna moth. I did all right until I came to cicada . I wasn’t sure whether the first “ c” was hard or soft.

“Si-kay-da,” my wife prompted.

The story had a happy ending. I asked if there were any questions. Every hand went up. “You,” I said, pointing to one, like President Kennedy designating a reporter at one of his press conferences.

“Do you think reading’s important?” she asked.

I suspected she had been put up to that. I assured them that reading was not only important--it was the key to joy and success. They didn’t look convinced.

“What’s your favorite dessert?” I rarely eat dessert, but I said frozen yogurt. I eat some (chocolate) almost every night before bedtime.

“What do you like to do in your spare time?” That was tougher. I might reveal myself in some unfavorable way. I decided to be honest. “I read. Watch TV. Swim.” I couldn’t think of anything else.

“What’s your favorite food?” That was easy. “Bacon and eggs.” I was finding out some things about myself.

“Who’s your favorite author?”

“When I was a boy,” I said, “my favorite authors were Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle. You know--Stevenson wrote ‘Kidnapped’ and ‘Treasure Island’ and Doyle wrote “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.’ ”

If I were to do it over again I’d want to read those books. Of course these children weren’t old enough yet, but it would give them something to shoot at.

“How’d you get to be a writer?”

“I read a lot,” I said, plugging the approved theme.

“Where do you get your ideas?”

I knew someone would ask that. I have no idea where I get my ideas. Usually I don’t have any. I just write what isn’t there. I don’t know that they understood me, but it was the truth.

“What’s on the end of your nose?”

I knew one would ask that. I explained simply that I had fallen down and my steel-rimmed glasses had scraped the bridge of my nose. The simple truth, I found, worked wonders.

My niece gave me another book to read. It was “A Rabbit’s Story,” about this mother rabbit that has a litter of baby rabbits and they go out into the meadow and survive the perils of predators and go back to the burrow to have their own babies. I read it without mishap.

“You see,” I said, “I’ve never seen this book before but I can read it--because I can read. When you learn to read you can read everything.”

That wasn’t quite true. I’d never been able to fathom the deconstructionists. But I suspected the movement would be dead by the time they’d grown up.

Class ended. I had survived. The children had been delightful. They clapped politely and filed out of the room for lunch.

It rained heavily on the Ridge Route. We pulled off the highway at a truck stop on the Grapevine and took shelter in a little place called EAT. It smelled heavily of tobacco. Enormous men with huge red hands kept coming in, wrapped in orange and yellow rain gear. They looked like roughnecks from “The Road Warriors.”

We got home just ahead of the snowstorm.