Before there was school, there were people. My mom and dad, my older brothers and sister (entering their teens by the time I could remember them), my next younger brother, the babies, my grandparents, my aunts and great-aunts. Lots of people. Every one of them had more of an impact on my education as anything I might have studied.
The people in my family did things. They built houses and sheds. They planted gardens. They canned food. They ran a business selling honey and bee supplies out of a converted garage and a ramshackle old chicken house out back, whose air was heavy with the scent of honeycomb and Grandpa's cigarettes. My dad and brothers spent Saturdays laboring over a fleet of dilapidated cars. All the women sewed for one reason or another. Even my chair-bound grandmother knitted and played endless games of Scrabble and cribbage with anyone who would sit down.
We had a TV, but watching it was something you did after dark on a Saturday night. Day was for doing things. Children were by no means excluded. You were expected to be there, helping in whatever capacity someone could figure out for you to do. And when you managed to escape from work, there were bikes to ride and hay forts to explore and mud to dig in, and books . . . but I'll get to those in a minute.
The people in my family talked. They told family stories. They endured the same collection of riddles as each new child discovered it. Every family gathering was an excuse for a heated, though never unfriendly, discussion--usually on one of those two forbidden topics, religion and politics. Children were quite welcome to participate, and their questions were answered--yes, even when my 7-year-old brother asked my maiden great-aunts what "rape" meant. (They tried to distract him, via etymological history, into a discussion of corporate crime.)
Disagreeing with grown-ups was not only permitted, it was deliberately taught. I have seen my dad do it with every new crop of toddlers.
"How old are you?" he asks.
"Three!" says the tot proudly, holding up three fingers.
"Oh, you're three, are you?" says Dad, holding up two fingers.
The child stops, the wheels turning in his mind. Something is wrong here. He reasserts the third finger. "That's not three--this is three!"
Supposing their attention turned to reading a story--something that also happened quite a lot. Dad would pick up the book:
"Read, read, read."
"No, read the story."
"Oh, ok. One day George went out . . . "
"There's no George in this book!"
"No George? Are you sure?"
"No George!"
"What good is a book without George?"
Before there was school, there were books. Shelves upon shelves of books. Books in a little hidey hole behind the couch. Books to the ceiling in the attic, far from Mom's wandering eye should she happen upon a chore that needed to be done. We wore second-hand clothes and owned every piece of good hard-to-find children's fiction Mom could get her hands on.
The library was still quite a distance when I was little. Taking a trip there was the one thing we coveted most. No one needed a trip to the amusement park, when there was a hay swing and a tractor and a swimming pool to enjoy. But more books . . . now there was a trip worth taking.
Before there was school, there was time and space to think and imagine things and run and wrestle. There was a big box of scrap paper and a can of half-broken crayons. There was a pile of games that was always a mess. There were babies to play with and old people who needed errands run. There were the fields and the cows and the woods and the creek always running, running, down to the bay and the Sound and the great ocean beyond.
For the whole series, click on The Things I Remember. | 