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Ghosts of summers past: 1982
Monday, January 10th, 2011 10:23 pmThanks to an IQ test I took at age 6, I was 2 years ahead in school from second grade until college graduation at 20. Many of my more interesting characteristics can be traced back to this unfortunate chronological defect.
When I was 10 years old, my mother went back to full-time work after my father's mounting debts goaded her from part-time kindergarten teaching. (Three years later she would leave him and his debts, but that is a story for another day.) When school ended for the summer of 1982, my parents decided that I would go to a daycare while they were at work.
In the summer of 1982, Rick Springfield and John Cougar (not yet Mellencamp) were on the radio. MTV was a new phenomenon. Home Atari games were giving way to Pacman fever. John Schneider was Bo Duke, not Superman's dad. I had just completed the 6th grade at age 10. My classmates were 12 and in the throes of puberty, and I was precociously right there with them.
It was around this time that I became aware of the power of my intellect. I was already used to the praise of teachers and the resentment of classmates. All former teacher‘s pets remember that mixture of pride and dread. But mine was compounded by the extra offense of being the “baby” in the class as well. “Hey, this little kid is making us look bad.” You can guess how well that went over, even in a gifted program. I compensated by being a quiet little doormat (I didn‘t discover the friend-making power of letting people cheat from my test papers until high school).
What I wasn’t used to before that age was the power I had to confound adults. I discovered this when I began to ask questions that they couldn’t answer, and I intuited that it wasn’t because they didn’t want to tell me, or because they didn’t think I was old enough to understand. It was because they didn’t know the answers. Their flummoxed looks propelled me to my first real comprehension of what it meant to be “advanced”.
So that summer I went from being the youngest kid in the first year of a gifted junior high school program to being the oldest kid at daycare. My school classmates were girls on the verge of teen angst, focused on clothes, makeup, and rock stars, and I was one of them. My daycare companions were children singing nursery rhymes, and I was one of them too. I straddled the border of childhood and adolescence, alternating between playing with Barbies and reading 500 page novels.
I can’t blame my parents for the incongruence. They didn’t know what to do with this bookworm they had spawned, and anyway they were caught up in the last stages of denial before their divorce. I don’t even think they were aware that I was staying up late on weekends watching Emmanuelle and Happy Hooker movies on Cinemax on the black and white TV with cable that they bizarrely allowed in my room. It probably didn’t occur to them that I knew what sex was at that age, or where to find it on television. (Of course, cable TV being a fairly new thing in Alabama in 1982, they may not have known where to find it themselves.) They may have realized the daycare was less than ideal, but felt it was safer than allowing me to be a latchkey kid at 10.
It seems arbitrary what the memory selects for storage and what it deletes. I remember that all the kids in daycare (myself included) loved it when we had chicken & dumplings for lunch. I remember that a couple of the older kids and I played a lot of Uno with one of the staff members, who always had a beautiful manicure. I can’t remember her name or her face, just her hands, holding Uno cards. I can’t remember the name of a single person in that place, but I remember that it was a big old split-level house with pukey green carpet and wood paneling, and a dilapidated playground across the street. Mostly I remember boredom, and indignation, and wishing I was older.
I spent most of my childhood and adolescence waiting for my life to catch up to me.
(Originally posted on LiveJournal 9/13/07. I'll be posting some "greatest hits" from LJ here, just to try to get all my writing in one place.)
When I was 10 years old, my mother went back to full-time work after my father's mounting debts goaded her from part-time kindergarten teaching. (Three years later she would leave him and his debts, but that is a story for another day.) When school ended for the summer of 1982, my parents decided that I would go to a daycare while they were at work.
In the summer of 1982, Rick Springfield and John Cougar (not yet Mellencamp) were on the radio. MTV was a new phenomenon. Home Atari games were giving way to Pacman fever. John Schneider was Bo Duke, not Superman's dad. I had just completed the 6th grade at age 10. My classmates were 12 and in the throes of puberty, and I was precociously right there with them.
It was around this time that I became aware of the power of my intellect. I was already used to the praise of teachers and the resentment of classmates. All former teacher‘s pets remember that mixture of pride and dread. But mine was compounded by the extra offense of being the “baby” in the class as well. “Hey, this little kid is making us look bad.” You can guess how well that went over, even in a gifted program. I compensated by being a quiet little doormat (I didn‘t discover the friend-making power of letting people cheat from my test papers until high school).
What I wasn’t used to before that age was the power I had to confound adults. I discovered this when I began to ask questions that they couldn’t answer, and I intuited that it wasn’t because they didn’t want to tell me, or because they didn’t think I was old enough to understand. It was because they didn’t know the answers. Their flummoxed looks propelled me to my first real comprehension of what it meant to be “advanced”.
So that summer I went from being the youngest kid in the first year of a gifted junior high school program to being the oldest kid at daycare. My school classmates were girls on the verge of teen angst, focused on clothes, makeup, and rock stars, and I was one of them. My daycare companions were children singing nursery rhymes, and I was one of them too. I straddled the border of childhood and adolescence, alternating between playing with Barbies and reading 500 page novels.
I can’t blame my parents for the incongruence. They didn’t know what to do with this bookworm they had spawned, and anyway they were caught up in the last stages of denial before their divorce. I don’t even think they were aware that I was staying up late on weekends watching Emmanuelle and Happy Hooker movies on Cinemax on the black and white TV with cable that they bizarrely allowed in my room. It probably didn’t occur to them that I knew what sex was at that age, or where to find it on television. (Of course, cable TV being a fairly new thing in Alabama in 1982, they may not have known where to find it themselves.) They may have realized the daycare was less than ideal, but felt it was safer than allowing me to be a latchkey kid at 10.
It seems arbitrary what the memory selects for storage and what it deletes. I remember that all the kids in daycare (myself included) loved it when we had chicken & dumplings for lunch. I remember that a couple of the older kids and I played a lot of Uno with one of the staff members, who always had a beautiful manicure. I can’t remember her name or her face, just her hands, holding Uno cards. I can’t remember the name of a single person in that place, but I remember that it was a big old split-level house with pukey green carpet and wood paneling, and a dilapidated playground across the street. Mostly I remember boredom, and indignation, and wishing I was older.
I spent most of my childhood and adolescence waiting for my life to catch up to me.
(Originally posted on LiveJournal 9/13/07. I'll be posting some "greatest hits" from LJ here, just to try to get all my writing in one place.)