Everything begins unblemished. The sweeping sum of our experiences begins unstained and unhurt. Time after time beginning somewhere between an illusive ivory tower and hopeful perfection.

All Eyes

Everything begins unblemished. The sweeping sum of our experiences begins unstained and unhurt. Time after time beginning somewhere between an illusive ivory tower and hopeful perfection.

5th grade

Mrs. Charlotte Weiner loved me. I don’t really know why. I was smart, but not the smartest pupil. I was attentive, but not prissy. And I was eager but not solicitous. She was my fifth grade teacher, and I was teacher’s pet. Everybody knew it, but nobody knew why. Fred Waleger was a grade school genius; he should have been teacher’s pet. Jesse Smith was an incredible artist and could have easily won her affection. Lucas Maheya was so painfully shy he certainly could have benefitted from the extra attention, but miraculously Mrs. Charlotte Weiner chose me to adore.

Me?

Adoration was foreign to me, and almost every day I stopped myself from asking her if she truly liked me as much as she seemed to, despite my inability to master long division. The voice of my mother still echoes in the memory parceled out as the portion of my brain that exists as an eleven year old girl. I can hear her say, “it’s like this, if this number goes into this and you carry the…but I couldn’t do it. No matter how many times my mother explained the concept, I couldn’t get it, and Mrs. Weiner knew that, but she didn’t withdraw her affection, or think any less of me. I was untouchable in that classroom.

Homework

The rest of the curriculum was a cake walk. I loved English, and memorized textbook pages so efficiently that regurgitating facts earned me high marks in history, and I could draw. I was athletic, and I mastered her avant-garde school yard Caribbean dual bamboo pole dance that she made the class practice endlessly. She loved me.

My best friend and I walked home with our report cards from the final marking period anticipating seeing our perfect grades. My sisters, one two years older, one thirteen months younger were probably walking either in front or behind me, but I never talked to them. I eagerly opened the gold-colored clasp of the 6”x9” manila envelope that had my name written by hand in the upper right hand corner and shrieked. I had never made that kind of sound before. In a column on the right-hand side, written in red pencil was a “U”. I had never seen this before and had no idea what a “U” signified. The pencil she used had been thick and waxy. I could see exactly where Mrs. Weiner’s mark began and the motion that carried her hand from the top left to the roundness of the curve at the bottom of the letter and the upward stroke of the final line that formed that “U”. The category was map reading, and I was distraught. We had never read a map.

Walking to School

As much as I had not known adoration when the school year began I had gotten used to it. Now it was June and I was swimming in the ecstasy of having been special for an entire school year. As foreign as that feeling of recognition and excellence had been, up to that point I also hadn’t had any experience with failure. I didn’t know how to tell my parents that I failed, and I don’t remember how I told them.

A smoke before class

More than forty years later I still tremble at the thought of reading a map. I don’t even ever want to turn on a GPS system, thinking that the voice may be that of my much beloved fifth grade teacher softly prompting me when to turn.

That unsatisfactory grade was my first failure. It was the first experience I had wherein I went to sleep teary eyed thinking about something, and woke up wishing in that first instant of daylight that it hadn’t happened. I am never sure how to handle failure still.

Perfect Bed

The decorative pillows on my bed are arranged perfectly, until I go to sleep. The covers are pulled back and the symmetry is destroyed, the composition undone, and the aesthetic compromised.

Undone

I am unmarried, don’t have a partner, and nobody regularly shares my bed, so there isn’t anybody to complain if a random crumb from a Lay’s baked potato chip I have eaten collides with their skin. I am aware of the small potentially piercing piece trapped somewhere between the sheets but I don’t stop eating to retrieve it. And then a tissue will appear under my pillow and I’ll leave that there as well. No maid service cleans my apartment, or changes my linens, so when I rush out in the morning I know the bed will still be unmade when I return later that night. I am usually too hungry, or tired, or eager to start writing when I come home to stop and resurrect the sameness of my orchestrated pillow construction.

A small irritation

By the time I go to bed I of course know that both the potato chip and the tissue are still there, but I don’t care. I go to sleep. Somehow I can withstand this imperfection and not see it as failure. I can make my bed on the weekend, or maybe not.

The beginning of the school year coincides with the Jewish New Year called Rosh Hashanah. “The Day of Judgment.” According to Jewish liturgy it is the day God reviews the deeds of humanity, with each person being evaluated for their actions.

My extended family’s way of celebrating this religious holiday was to get dressed up and walk to the park. We congregated as a large group of cousins, aunts, and uncles. The kids would play on the swings and sandbox, and hollow out acorns with ends of bobby pins to make whistles, all the while being admonished not to get dirty. The women sat on well-worn benches gossiping, and the men would walk a few short blocks to temple for afternoon services. We all looked perfect. It was a day when no one spoke of their failures or their disappointments.

We weren’t a religious clan, but it was unspoken that we were not the ultimate judge of our actions anyway. We stayed for hours on end. We all had fun, and when it got to cold we went home and ate cake with our silenced failures and disappointments lingering. As a tight knit family we believed whole heartedly in goodness and new beginnings and wished each other a Happy New Year.

In remembrance

We don’t go to the park anymore, and we aren’t as many as we once were. But we will have fun, and we will eat cake, and we will light candles in memory of the beloved people we’ve lost, and then we will wish each other a Happy New Year, our failures notwithstanding.

Just Smile

We Grew Up to Hate Our Mother – Acrylic on Canvas – Jill Slaughter

Photographs of Jill as teenager – Julio Mitchel