I was five years old and, as was normal, started kindergarten.<\/p>\n
I don’t remember much about that kindergarten but I remember with glaring clarity the end of my first day there.<\/p>\n
We lived in the Bronx then. My parents — both of whom were or had been public school teachers — enrolled me in a private school kindergarten not within walking distance of our apartment on the Grand Concourse.<\/p>\n
Thus, the yellow school bus. Which took me to school and at the end of the first short day loaded us up again for the trip home.<\/p>\n
I am tempted to say, “I was a shy child,” but won’t because I think most children are shy, especially on the first day of school. In any case, this shy child sat at the back of the bus, I don’t remember why.<\/p>\n
We traveled, we stopped, children got off, we started up again, traveled on.<\/p>\n
I knew enough about the topography of my neighborhood to know that when the bus turned onto a street near Yankee Stadium, it was not my street. It was parallel to my street. So I sat there, at the back of the bus, realizing I was being carried away from my home, away in the wrong direction. And very soon I was the only child left on that bus.<\/p>\n
Suddenly it came upon me that I was not going home again, probably never. And that I was the only child who would not be seeing her parents again. I was terrified.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, I went up to a big medical center to see my dermatologist. I checked in and sat in the large waiting area. Time passed. I read the New Yorker. Eventually, although I don’t wear a watch or carry a cell phone, I knew an hour had elapsed past my appointment time. So I walked over to my doctor’s check-in desk and asked, pleasantly, “Did you forget about me?” Of course they hadn’t; my doctor had simply been delayed by procedures taking longer than expected.<\/p>\n
“Did you forget about me?” At five years old, I did not have the capacity, the strength of character to walk up to the bus driver and ask that question. And so I sat there, alone in the back of the bus, frozen in fear, disappearing from my immediate little world.<\/p>\n
At the end of that block, though, the bus driver turned onto my street, the Grand Concourse, stopped in front of our complex, opened the doors and I walked out. Home, into the arms of family.<\/p>\n
From first grade through high school, I attended public schools.<\/p>\n
The children imprisoned at the border know how to cry in protest.<\/p>\n
This is correctly called trauma. But if I remember how terrified I was during a period of only ten minutes…<\/p>\n
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I was five years old and, as was normal, started kindergarten. I don’t remember much about that kindergarten but I remember with glaring clarity the end of my first day there. We lived in the Bronx then. My parents — … Continue reading