Innocence

The kindergarten teacher looked at me with a slight bit of concern but then her eyes sparkled as she introduced herself to my mother and myself. I didn’t think about it too much at the time as she invited me to go over to the play area in the middle of the room: model houses and kitchen play sets with small metal bowls and plastic foods; the classroom has more fake food in the refrigerator than we ever had in ours at home.

From what I remember about my parents, they were either always at work or or just away from the house. During the summer I would see them in the morning drinking coffee as they walked out the door and to the car. They would be gone until the street lights came on, this time with bottles instead of cups. Sometimes they had a bag or two from McDonald’s or KFC.
A burger or some chicken strips, never anything beyond that. In fact, it wasn’t until I saw in third grade that I knew that McDonad’s actually served French fries.

As I said, I loved the kitchenette set, so much so that the teacher’s assistant tried in vain to get my interests in drawing or in building blocks. It worked, kind of, as I drew some pretty impressive pictures of a toy blender and rolling pin. The blocks? A square cake with rectangle strawberries sprinkled here and there. The girls would laugh with me as we talked about what were going to do with we were older—what kind of families we would have. I would tell them all that I wanted the princess life: Snow White but mixed in a bit with Wonder Woman where we would all meet together and have fun, tea and not let some dumb old boy tell us what we could do.

The boys in the class didn’t really know what to think about me as I acted like a girl until recess when I could clobber any one of them when they pushed me around. There was a first grader named Tony who would point his fingers at me and repeatedly say “Little boy in a dress” or “boy-girl”. He said that for two days before I knocked his front teeth out but he wouldn’t let me take credit for it and instead said he fell off the carousel. Of course, that was how it was remembered on that day and it just became playground folklore.

His tooth is somewhere on that playground, buried in the dirt with a bit of blood.