Zero to 13
Dear Lake,
There’s a tendency to downplay what you were doing as a kid. It’s only as you get older that you start investigating that remotest of pasts, sometimes just to make sure you’re not being stalked by Alzheimer’s, where the past is eaten first and gets hungrier as it goes.
In my First Grade: Randy Lipkin, Julian Jonas, Kersti Yllo, Priscilla Hine (a neighbor), and some others. Tell you when I remember them. We were six years old. Randy was smart, mother beautiful, sister Robin (3rd grade) talented on the piano even then, Julian the son of holocaust survivors, Kersti the daughter of Estonian refugees — another beautiful mother— and a dancer already, tap, and competitively active.
There were 26 of us in the school. Six grades. My sister was in third grade, with Robin Lipkin and Sharon Railing. Also there was David Jonas, brother of Julian and a prince as a boy and a singer. “Five Gooolden Rings.” Can still hear him at the Christmas concert. I was a shepherd in the back of a very small row in St. John’s Church for the pageant.
Two tragedies in our first year. My teacher’s kindergarten daughter, Joanna, got run down and killed by a car. Julian’s mother died, old beyond her years. He watched her cremation. Told me about it. His father was a hundred too. The Jonases weren’t in school the next year. Or the Lipkins.
First Grade. The Year I learned to read. Facebooked it here.
Not even my first year of school. The fourth in fact. I remember some of the ones from Kindergarten. Is that odd?
There’s a tendency to downplay what you were doing as a kid. It’s only as you get older that you start investigating that remotest of pasts, sometimes just to make sure you’re not being stalked by Alzheimer’s, where the past is eaten first and gets hungrier as it goes.
In my First Grade: Randy Lipkin, Julian Jonas, Kersti Yllo, Priscilla Hine (a neighbor), and some others. Tell you when I remember them. We were six years old. Randy was smart, mother beautiful, sister Robin (3rd grade) talented on the piano even then, Julian the son of holocaust survivors, Kersti the daughter of Estonian refugees — another beautiful mother— and a dancer already, tap, and competitively active.
There were 26 of us in the school. Six grades. My sister was in third grade, with Robin Lipkin and Sharon Railing. Also there was David Jonas, brother of Julian and a prince as a boy and a singer. “Five Gooolden Rings.” Can still hear him at the Christmas concert. I was a shepherd in the back of a very small row in St. John’s Church for the pageant.
Two tragedies in our first year. My teacher’s kindergarten daughter, Joanna, got run down and killed by a car. Julian’s mother died, old beyond her years. He watched her cremation. Told me about it. His father was a hundred too. The Jonases weren’t in school the next year. Or the Lipkins.
First Grade. The Year I learned to read. Facebooked it here.
Not even my first year of school. The fourth in fact. I remember some of the ones from Kindergarten. Is that odd?
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