The Coonridge Digest: One party or the other

Greetings from the Ridge.

I attribute my creeping dementia to my abusive upbringing. I attended elementary school back in those tribal days when the rules of education were peppered with "Don’t!" and spanking was as common as nap time.

The concept of pre-school was a far-distant notion. In fact, we were deprived of that gentle break-in to the world education that was later called kindergarten. Once you turned five you entered first grade and were expected to hit the ground running. Maybe that’s why Mrs. Walker, my first grade teacher, was forced to become a combination of God Almighty and Pricilla the Hun. Towering over us at seven feel tall (probably not), and at the age of perhaps 104 (I was prone to exaggeration), she was alternately our healer, our friend, and God’s Enforcer of All Things Moral, Proper, and Hygienic.

The walls of our classroom were ringed with charts depicting the Palmer Method of handwriting which God himself could not accurately duplicate, and then Mrs. Walker’s rules with which the Almighty might also have to struggle.

"Do not fight!"

"Do not call names!"

"Respect others!"

"Do not lie!"

The litany of pre-adolescent commandments circled the windows, ran around the chipped blackboard, and ended with "Keep your hands to yourselves!" somewhere near the old yellow bookshelf.

I’ll admit that I had a complete first grade education in that I managed to completely break every rule on Mrs. Walker’s wall before the year was out. Most of these infractions, of course, were not my fault. Gary Hannant deserved to be called a "stupid poop" when he tripped me as I rounded second base, and Darold Turner needed hitting on a regular basis. As for showing respect, Roberta Reeves beat me in every spelling contest. Now how was I supposed to respect a smart-aleck who was that much sharper than me?

Name-calling was my specialty. There’s an entire early elementary school sub-culture of character assassination that’s been finely honed over the centuries and now has a lexicon of its own that only first-graders know. We even had our own code. "D-B" was short for "dumb butt," and "H-A" alluded to the trailing end of horse. We could get away with using this code around Mrs. Walker – for about two days.

The woman must have worked in the cryptographic corps during the war, because we’d no sooner come up with a nastily disguised word for the class nerd than Mrs. Walker would first break the code then her yardstick on our tails. Harry Potter had nothing on Mrs. Walker. The woman was a true wizard.

The beauty of Mrs. Walker’s system was its speed and efficiency. If you lied or called someone a name, there was no "time out" corner to think things over. Your parents were not called in two weeks later for a conference, and psychological evaluations were something only given to strange uncles in the state mental hospital. Under the Walker règime, the punishment was swift and sure. I can remember times when I hadn’t even finished uttering a carefully chosen epithet before her swat found my sitting spot.

Bottom line: by the time I waddled into Mrs. Brim’s second-grade classroom, I not only knew the rules but I was pretty good at obeying them. Our town was small enough that your teacher not only knew your parents, they were probably related and sat together in church. There was no need for an Internet service to check grades when your entire week at school was discussed in the Sunshine Seniors Sunday school class.

It’s funny how acts of violence stick with you. Even in recent years my hand has hovered over the IRS signature line asking me to avow that all these statements are true and I’ve had a first-grade flashback of Mrs. Walker’s all-knowing face and even felt a slight breeze as her hand approached my bottom.

Even though I’m a political junkie and believe that an uninformed electorate is the root cause of so many of our nation’s woes, there have been times when I’ve simply turned off the news in disgust. The parade of half-truths, innuendo, "talking points" blown out of all proportion to reality, and outright lies have been more than I could take, and I have to resort to a good sit on the porch to simply cool down.

One party or the other is going to win the Presidency in November.

Although they’ll no doubt serve at least four years in the White House, neither party would have lasted a day in Mrs. Walker’s classroom.

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door, but you’ll enjoy the trip.