My first grade teacher was named Mrs. Schuester.  She was a Yankee from Boston.  She pronounced fine with a long “i”. So I did too.  My mother thought that was funny.  She was older than my mother, so she seemed old to me.  

A hot lunch cost 25 cents back then.  A quarter.  We had fish sticks on Fridays to accommodate the Catholic kids, even though it was a public school.  The Jewish kids got to take their own holidays in addition to the Christian ones. It’s funny how we all used to get along that way.  

One day we were standing in line waiting to march to the cafeteria like a little miniature army battalion.  As an aside, I don’t like putting kids in lines.  They still do that.  I guess it is better that a stampede or a melee, but there is something very prison-like to me about putting little kids in line.

Anyway, we were standing in line waiting to go to the cafeteria. Mrs. Schuester had put two book cases back to back to make sort of an entry way into her class room. They were stuck together somehow, maybe nailed.  I was standing there in that darn line waiting for the rest of the little soldiers to fall into place.  While I was waiting for the others, I rolled my quarter around on the top of the bookshelves.  Oops.  That dang quarter slipped in between those two stuck together bookshelves.  I should have kept my mouth shut and either gone hungry or eaten off of someone else’s plate.  What happened next changed my life forever. For it labeled me.  I am a nuisance.  That is what Mrs. Schuester said when she called the custodian, who had to stop throwing that pink stuff on kids’ vomit long enough to come to our class room to unstick those book cases to get my quarter out.  Why didn’t she just give me a quarter and ask me to bring two the next day?

The first boy who ever tried to kiss me was named Billy Reuben. Who names their kid after a liver enzyme?  He sat in front of me in third grade.  Third grade was a traumatic year for all of us.  Our sweet, young, beautiful Miss Carmichael did the unthinkable.  She got married over Christmas vacation and did not come back.  Mrs. Wilson never had a chance.  I almost feel sorry for her now.

Any way, Billy Reuben tried to kiss me and being totally repulsed at the prospect, I resorted to name calling.   In an effort to save face, Billy replied, “You mean, I am mud spelled backwards?”  That’s what he said, mud spelled backwards.  I didn’t have a come back for that one.  All these years later, I can still see him slowing turning around and uttering some of the stupidest words ever said in the history of the English language, you mean I am mud spelled backwards.  He had no game.  He wouldn’t have lasted 5 minutes in my house. That’s all I remember about Billy Reuben, other than his liver enzyme name, which didn’t even mean anything to me at the time.  That was way before I started preparing for my liver function test more than I did for my college entrance exams.

Then one day I go to take the GMAT. This is during the days when you dragged your sorry butt up from a late Friday night, made sure you had a number two pencil and you showed up. That’s all you did.  You showed up. It’s a competency test.  I casually looked over at the paper of the guy sitting next to me and whose name do you think I saw on top of that test?  You got it, Mr. liver enzyme himself, Billy Reuben.

ps.  all you literal types, I know Biliruben is not an enzyme.  It’s just fun to call it one.

Before Pearline, there was Lilly.  She was Pearline’s sister and she used to wash my hair in the kitchen sink.  We took her to Pensacola, Florida the year David almost drowned. Some man on the beach saved him. You’d think with three adults to watch him he wouldn’t have almost drowned. Lilly was afraid to go over the bridge into Pensacola, so she hid herself on the floor board of the car.  Lilly had diabetes and couldn’t take care of us anymore, so her sister Pearline started working for my family.  I was five.  

Pearline knows our secrets.  When I left home, I also left Pearline.  She was collateral damage.  Not to say I never saw her again.  It’s just that we were not close the way most people are with their primary caregiver.

Pearline worked at the county hospital when she wasn’t with us.  She came to our house every weekday from 2 o’clock in the afternoon until 10 o’clock at night.  She was there when we got home from school, she did our laundry, made our dinner, did the dishes.  She also drove us around. Then she went home and got five hours of sleep before getting up for her job at the county hospital. She didn’t have any children of her own, but she took care of her nephew.  She used to be married. We were told that she had killed her husband.  If she did kill her husband, he needed killing.  Pearline continued to work for my family until about eight years ago, way beyond the time she could actually clean the house. She used to go upstairs, leave the vacuum running and take a nap on the floor.  Mom and Dad hired younger maids to come clean the house when Pearline wasn’t there, but they didn’t let her know that. Before my mom died, I asked her if Pearline had really killed her husband. She said, “that’s what they say.”   I think she made it up so that we would mind her.

I was a math whiz in high school.  Mrs. Beaumont was our high school math teacher and she is my inspiration.  I can still see her nicotine stained fingers busily writing algebraic equations across the blackboard, chalk in hand.  I wasn’t paying all that much attention to the formulas.  I have the Sloas math gene.  The solutions and the logic were as clear to me as a  hidden picture in a Highlights magazine.  It was almost like cheating.  But I was mesmerized.  Those arms. Those wobbly, saggy, undulating arms.  I can still see them.

We were active kids from the get go. We would go outside to play after breakfast, stop for lunch at whose ever house we happened to be near and come home at the sound of the dinner bell.  Pearline would ring this big ole cow bell and shout “Shahhhh  nahhhhh, Mahhh leeeee ahhhhh” (thats how she said Melisse). We climbed trees, made forts, played tag, jumped rope, rode bikes.  Then we started swimming on a competitive team and we did that five or six times a week.  I wasn’t all that good, but I was right there in the thick of it.

Me at Swim Meet