3-C (1st Grade to 5th Grade) My Mother’s Poem. Song: “1814 BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS”. Photo: My 1st Grade School’s Exit Door to the Car Pool Lot & Playground.

The picture above shows the hill just outside my elementary school’s rear exit. We had our daily recesses on that hill, which was just across the one way carpool lane, where there was a playground. One day, at the end of our recess, while our class was lining up on the hill to go inside, the really good brand new rubber medicine ball which we had to play with had broken loose from the spot where my teacher had put it down. As she turned around to address the class in order to get them all organized in line, the ball started rolling down the slightly angled hill, and since I was last in line, I instinctively bolted, and as quickly as humanly possible I retrieved it, and brought it back, lightning fast to the spot where my teacher had put it down. I was thinking that I had done her a big favor that she would thank me for because had I not stopped it, it could have rolled clear down across the entire length of the playground into the shrubbery against the fence, and may not have ever been found. My teacher looked behind her as I placed the ball down, and when she realized that I had left the line to retrieve it, she squatted down in front of me, and grasped the huge rubber ball between her elbows, and me. Then, she grabbed me by both of my ears, and squeezed them with her fingers like a vise grip while watching me face to face as she turned my ears upward. Since she had wedged herself against the medicine ball while holding me by my ears, it made standing up with me and the ball possible to do less effortlessly. She picked me up this fashion completely off of my feet by my ears! She angrily let the ball fall, and lowered me only to my tiptoes, keeping me both suspended and controlled in pain and agony.

Keeping her vise lock grip on my ears, she “steered” me with my ears, and whenever I resisted, she picked me up completely off of the ground again. She made me accept walking on my tip toes while she paraded me clear up to the very top of the hill (in the above photo), and planted me down in front of the first child in line, making me the example of – “This is what will happen to anyone that leaves the line”. In my opinion, my 1st grade teacher taught for nothing but a paycheck. And, she didn’t enjoy teaching, and she hated children. I had to go to a Ears/Nose/& Throat doctor to have my ears popped in order to clear them of fluid which started accumulating. When that didn’t fix the problem, I had to have them drained by puncturing my ear drums (which, doctors have informed me, is something that isn’t done anymore). My teacher’s name was Ms Mayrose, and she hated me so much that she tried to have me removed, and placed, unsuccessfully, in a special needs program. I figured this out on my own while having to answer questions asked by a visiting specialist done in an adjacent hallway space behind my teachers desk done during the class day where my teacher was able to listen to every question that I answered, and hear every word that I said. They were trying to determine if there was, or wasn’t, something wrong with ME!

Toward the end of the school day once a week I went to have music lessons in the school auditorium with a man behind the stage in the theatre green room. He started out teaching me drum lessons, and letting me leave when the end of the school day bell rang, but soon started keeping me after the final bell rang, and after everyone else in the whole school left. And, he abused me (explained in the story on page 3A).

I think that my coping mechanism dealing with trying to attempt to turn my negative experiences into something positive became becoming the class clown, which was unfortunate because all through my school-aged years and beyond, many of the times when I said or did something during some of my classes in the attempt to be funny, I would be overly, and/or severely punished for being humorous. I was never trying to be devious about anything… I did things in the open. For example, I wouldn’t point at somebody else and say, “He did it”. It was almost like I wanted to take the blame in order be able to speak to someone in a higher authority, but only in order to get to have the chance to talk about what had happened to be able to have the situation dealt with, but I never got the chance to discuss any of it with anybody.

On my very last day in that school, my 5th grade teacher moved me from the very back of the class where he had me sit all year long (even though he must have known that I had a hearing problem). He moved me to the very front of his class, and he sat me right next to him because he said that he wanted to be sure that I remembered him. I didn’t remember him until my late fifties after my father died, and I probably wouldn’t have remembered him at all, had he not gone to such an extreme, for some ungodly reason, WANTING ME TO BE SURE TO REMEMBER HIM. It was on my last day of school in my 5th grade that my teacher told my 5th grade class another one of his ghost stories. He had told us another ghost story during that same school year called “The Golden Arm”. Then, on that final school day, he told us “The Twenty Pints of Blood”.

Just seconds before the end of that very last day of my fifth grade, Doctor Shotland was at the end of telling his ghost story called “The twenty Pints of Blood”. He was explaining that the footsteps he was hearing in the dark had reached the bottom of a long set of stairs. Then, he described the candles, again, which had lit up mysteriously one at a time, each year that he had gone back for the last 20 years to find his lost classmates. All of the other 19 classmates had disappeared, and now it was down to the LAST ONE. He described the 19 candles stuck in wine bottles all lighting up one by one, and this time, he got so close that he could see that they were all filled with blood, and what he realized was that he was going to become the 20th pint of blood. And, he heard footsteps coming toward him getting closer, and closer, and closer. He was whispering, “closer, and closer…” until his voice was barely audible, and while the whole class was all wide-eyed, and all his students were leaning in closer trying to strain in order to hear him better, he interrupted his own whispering story by SCREAMING directly into MY face. His scream was so loud, that it nearly shook the desks in the room, and shocked the whole class in the instance that all the new school bells all rang loudly all at once in the three story new wing. And, we all jumped up, and hurriedly scurried out. The school year was over, and I never had to see that teacher, or that whole school ever again because our whole family, luckily, moved. I always remembered that as a good ending, but after my dad died, I remembered all of the things that happened to me between my 1st and the 5th grade while living in that neighborhood, and attending that school. I look back now with this thought: Even though there were teachers, police, and others who were in positions of authority involved, everything that happened to me was kept quiet as if they all worked together in camaraderie to cover it all up. I realize that even today there are still the same kinds of people who will do these kinds of things to victims like myself because they can. I only hope that others can forgive me for my own transgressions. I do believe that I finally managed to wrestle away that “chip on my shoulder” attitude (the one in which was so obvious to everyone else most of my life, except me).

Through realizing WHY I had a persistent “chip on my shoulder”, I’ve figured out why I became the victim, and why I had been beating myself up all of my life trying to get answers. I was very fortunate to have a “selfless” and supportive mother who never stopped teaching me to do the right things. The way I feel about it now, is that the traumatic circumstances, and injuries I experienced may have actually made me a better person In the long run, and I’m sorry for the way in which both my attitude, as well as actions, as a result of being victimized, may have affected others.

My mom was so glad for me, when we moved from NY to Grosse Pointe, MI, where I had such a good 6th grade teacher, named Ms. Mones, that my mother wrote the poem below, and gave it to my teacher…

To Miss Mones

There is so much we want to say

to you on Recognition Day

Our son, we feel, has now begun

to know that learning can be fun.

His attitudes are changing too —

There's much improvement,

Thanks to you.

A long way yet he has to go

before your magic touch will show.

Your vitality and firm-fun teaching

obviously are slowly reaching

Right into the heart of things

A complex of causes at which you have guessed

had prevented our son from doing his best.

We’ve helped and encouraged,

often we've prayed --

But ’till you came along,

the boy simply played.

You can be certain and proudly know,

You have helped him immensely.

Some day it will show!