Last Days of Childhood


Last Days of Childhood
By Martin Franks

 
  Graduating fifth grade was a bigger deal to everyone but the kids that were actually graduating. For us it was just another day we had to go to school[ but didn’t  have to learn anything. Like when you had a substitute teacher or your regular teacher was a few days away from a complete mental breakdown, which happened to both our second and fourth grade teachers. We all had to dress up for this deal, which was easier for the church kids than it was for the non-church kids. At the last-minute Mom remembered we had to dress nice and ran down the block to borrow a dress shirt and a clip-on tie from Billy Peterson’s mom. Billy got run over by and ice cream truck on Bradly Street a year earlier and died. Mom knew that Billy’s mom still had a lot of Billy’s clothes. I should have felt weird in a dead kid's clothes, but all I felt was uncomfortable. Billy was wider and shorter than I was. At school, when Burt asked where I got the tuxedo from, I dumbly spit out that it was dead Billy Perterson’s. Burt was my friend but he couldn’t keep that news to himself, so five seconds later the whole playground was pointing at me and yelling, “Dead kid! Dead Kid!” It wasn’t very original or even all that funny, but I knew I just had to take it. If it looked like it upset me, everyone would just yell it louder and there was a good chance a bigger kid would step up and punch me. I never blamed Burt. I knew, if things were reversed, I would have done the same to him. I might have only been eleven, but I knew how things worked.




During the graduation ceremony, if you could call it that, we sat real quiet in the un-air-conditioned gym, while the principal, Mr. Larkin, read our names. You could tell which kids he hated because he would choke-spit their names as he said them and his left shoulder would raise up. Listening to him, it was obvious he hated just about every kid in the class. There was a rumor that we were the worst class in the history of John Edward Symolyn Grade School. That was really something, considering the school was founded in 1937. After they read all the names, we all got up and tried to sing a song that no one knew the words to. For two months before graduation they tried to drill the words into us. Then, a week before graduation, they just gave up. You’d think one of the teachers would have been smart enough to cancel the singing, but they didn’t. Looking back I think they let us sing that song thinking it would embarrass us. Joke's on them. We didn’t care. 

             The school provided some horrible pineapple punch and stale cookies for our graduation party. They set it all out on a few tables in the back of the gym and the parents and kids drifted towards the snacks as the principal and teachers got the hell out of there as fast as they could. Principal Larkin actually got his tires smoking and laid down some rubber as he peeled out of the parking lot. It was actually pretty cool. Then we found out he hit a telephone post a few blocks away and that cracked us up for weeks. Turns out Todd Donkel slipped away during the ceremony and cut his break lines. Todd knew a lot about cars. The kids all threw the cookies at each other and the parents yelled at us, saying how we wouldn’t get away with this kind of shit in middle school, but we knew we would. 




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