September 7, 1969

This is 1969 my seventh-grade year

Stage left the windows glaze from Tappan register to acoustic tile ceiling. Venetian blinds truncate halfway to the register. The lower course of windows vent October morning up your rolled sleeve when you turn to the window automatically. Two tracks of florescence cede this bright morning. Our desks are modern aluminum frame sliding on squat conical feet that make a hollow hiss when they skate. We stow our extra books in the basket under our seats, and we lay our pencils in the shallow groove carved on the inclined writing tablet surface. The lower grades still use the heavy hardwood desks with cutouts for inkwells. The clever children sink Dixie cups in the inkwells as pencil holders.

Miss Olive, our English student-teacher, in cursive, writes Tom Sawyer pages 187-197 discussion across the blackboard.  

She turns to face us. If you were a seventh grader, and you could wish true a student teacher, she would have Ms. Olive’s peroxide hair and patient smile.

“This is your responsibility for today.” She reaches her arm behind to tap the chalk to the third “s” in “discussion” “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.” 

In her other hand, she carries a folded note passed to her by Mr. Connelly, our assistant principal, who I had seen courante in and out of the classroom while we were arriving. 

“Everyone should have his Tom Sawyer copy on his desk and a blank piece of paper and something to write with.” 

To simplify, she held up the three items identified from a supply sitting on top of her desk. When she was satisfied that all were prepared, after all the stretching and twisting and leaning under our seats, she reached the chalk to the tray and withdrew as promised, leaving ajar the door to the corridor. 

As an open seventh grade door exposes class noise, designated student monitors enforce the quiet ruling the corridor. Our books splayed and pages are turned intermittently. No unruly sound disturbed the eardrum. 

“She’s got a date with Connelly. You see her run?” Sandy Bacon opined for the sake of the class.

We were taught the privacy you did not intrude. In silent prayer God listened to each in turn. Good behavior was reward in a movie-theater with respect to the other patrons. Fire-drills dare not disintegrate into mayhem. Vocabulary, spelling, and math installed the utility of repetition. In assembly the state trooper spoke about the death of our classmate, and of looking both ways, and of bicycle safety, and of the mortal failures to do so. We survived paralyzing self-consciousness and stupefying infatuation brain-death. Today, before dawn, sound supplanted sight and the natural world spoke in bird song and cricket crick and through barnyard dogs and the wind through branches and rushing through your screen, that is not really a quiet, but has a penitence, we hope the quiet we make might have. 

Sandy Bacon sat in the row closest to the windows with his hardback Tom Sawyer and unopened notebook. He nudged his stogie against his Tom Sawyer cantilevering the edge of his desk.

Sniggers and titters deflected around the room. Sandy Bacon produced chaos with far greater ease than completed sentences. It was an outcome, collectively logged, for which he least likely failed. 

All the while, we connected the dots laid out generously and tenderly by Ms. Olive and all devoted staff of Project Seven, hopeful to mine an irrefutable truth or any correct answer chosen from a corpus of five. The Charles Brown Middle School, what infinitesimal speck of it we had ordered, had no place for Harlequins. 

Harlequins served only at the pleasure of kings, and the king in our world was Mr. Connelly. The terror, lest anyone forget. A lesser offense than yawning, some say, had beckoned Mr. Connelly to a classroom left on its honor to follow a chalkboard assignment. They got detention for a week. Student monitors honor-bound to retain order could not coexist in a world with clowns.

I intuited a breach of protocol in the room. Mid-West gravitas giving way to a faction devoted to whimsy in place of standing.

“Can’t you sit fifteen minutes without your Mommies?” I was the default monitor in our room. “We don’t we need Connelly down here?”

Low hum from the conservative cadre, the old reliable, parents still shopped Higbee’s. Other low-key entourage hopefuls whispered behind clenched fists. An episode might be uncorked any minute. Their cherished liberty to partake was their freshly minted expression of freedom. Events on the Kent State common, only minutes by car, had gutted prevailing mores, leaving a meek inheritance to collateral.

“Cram it, Bozo!”

Sniggers and titters summersaulted into whoops and guffaws. Sandy Bacon had applied the minimum stogie nudges required to drop the spine of American classicism to the tile floor – whack!

“Up your nose with a rubber hose!”

Bacon leapt; arms extended in victory, bowed deep sacred reverence to his inconsequential conquest. He then turned to accept accolades from his mobile public with shallow and more frequent bows.

“Mucho Gratitud. Mucho Gratitud. Not worthy of your evening’s pleasure. Right on. If, you please?”

“Up your mouth with a rubber hose.” I lobbed a salient catchphrase in humble defense, variation on a theme.

“That’s how you feed yourself, spent vomit. Ugh!” Bacon knelt, wagging his barehand to douse the wanning embers of his Tom Sawyer. “Except when you wanna’ take a tinkle.” He then picked up the book, feigning shock to have found it there.

There was not going to be an anatomical challenge. The absurdity of hose-in-ear hollowed out the pith of it anyway.

“You screw the class when Connelly walks in barking at us. Pretending you didn’t do anything. So stupid.”

“Vinnie! Vinnie! Vinnie! Rub your toes with a rubber hose! Pick your nose with a rubber hose.” Bacon clapped his hands above his head. “Everybody!”

The sentry left his post. Could not carry his weight. Things happened too fast. 

“Probably on his way because you didn’t know, you had to open a book to read it.”

“You’re making me cry. I want my mommy.” Bacon facepalmed and flatlined for effect.

I had reached this passage from our assignment, which I was tempted to read aloud:

He was far from hating Tom the less when this thought occurred to him. He wished there was some way to get that boy into trouble without much risk to himself. Tom’s spelling-book fell under his eye. Here was his opportunity. He gratefully opened to the lesson for the afternoon and poured ink upon the page. Becky, glancing in at a window behind him at the moment, saw the act, and moved on, without discovering herself. She started homeward, now, intending to find Tom and tell him; Tom would be thankful, and their troubles would be healed. Before she was halfway home, however, she had changed her mind. The thought of Tom’s treatment of her when she was talking about her picnic came scorching back and filled her with shame. She resolved to let him get whipped on the damaged spelling-book’s account, and to hate him forever, into the bargain.

“In the old days you got whipped for messing with your books. Connelly’ll probably kiss your ass, knowing all about your special case.”

“Heh, my mommy’s going to kick your butt. It’ll be righteous. All hail the righteous!”

“Becky agrees with you. Try reading sometime.” I marked the page with my pencil. 

Staccato heels approached from the direction they had retreated earlier.

“I’ll ask Miss Olive to call your mommy when she gets back.” I reopened my copy to the last passage. 

For a student teacher, Ms. Olive had mastered control of gravity. She beautified the doorway and paused an instant to listen for anything that might have wanted to escape. 

“There was a clamor a moment ago. Does anyone recall permission to clamor?”

“Tommy V. was having control problems.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, bladder control. You can check his pants.”

Ms. Olive placed a filled cup of coffee on the desk. “That won’t be necessary.” She picked up and then reached the chalk to her cursive meme on the board. “Mr. Bacon, since you’re in the mood to talk, why don’t you describe what Tom Sawyer is feeling.”

“About what, ma’am?”

“Any passage. You pick from what you just read.”

“He’s angry, ma’am.”

“What makes you say that?’

“All the crap that’s happening.”

“How does the writer make this clear to you?”

“Just the stuff happening. Anybody’d be mad about the stuff happening.”

“What makes you mad Mr. Bacon?”

“Aww, stupid stuff. People ratting on you for stuff you didn’t do.”

“Mr. V. Do you think Tom Sawyer is angry?”

“I think he’s irritated with Becky. He keeps trying, but he can’t figure out how to kiss her. That’s all he wants to do.”

The burst of laughter would have earned reprimand, had not Ms. Olive raised her open palm. “There, class.”

“He can handle anything, except that. Grabbed one brush and had his whole gang whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence.”

“Ms. Olive, do you think Tom and Becky had consensual sex, reading between the lines? Tommy V. was talking about that a minute ago.”

“This is the 19^th century. And I am not Curious Yellow. What clues does Twain give us about how Tom Sawyer feels?”

“How’d they made little Tommy’s and Becky’s?”

“Restraint, Mr. Bacon. The Sisters of the Revolution taught them to practice restraint. They learned to think things without saying them, except in private. Focus please.”

“What the heck? I just tell it like it is.”

“It’s the art form. Using grammar to draw pictures. To experience beyond experience.” Ms. Olive straightened her nyloned legs before the teacher’s desk and laid her copy of Tom Sawyer on her lap. “Get your brains in -- and your hormones out -- of this discussion.”

“Hard to say it any other way.”

A collective gasp chastened the room.

“Mr. Bacon, I assume you know the way to the office?”

Bacon groaned. The aluminum desk unexpectedly knelled against the sudden shift and release of weight. He wore white flared jeans with a bulky pinstripe. His thick leather belt would have suspended chainmail. He stopped at the door. “You aren’t going to see these groovy slacks after today. Connelly suspended them this morning.”

How’re those pants hurting anybody? Except maybe getting caught in your chain and knocking you over.

“Now.” Ms. Olive faced the door. “Go.” 

She faced our room again. “Class I want to examine the passage for “word clues” that trigger emotion Tom is having. That create mood.”

I grabbed my pencil from the spine crevice and held it to the printed page. Felt for the symbiotic attraction between the leaded pencil and the “word clues.” Let me find Becky because the clues would lurk in the paragraph ensconced in current, as river oysters, portending gemstones with profound singularity. Conrad piped in.

“Who will get us started?”

“Speaking of Becky, I think the clues are mixed up. They start one way with ‘thankful’ and ‘healed,’ but they twist in the next sentence to ‘scorching’ and ‘shame.’” Anna Carrie scooted up on her seat and leaned her chin on her open hand. “I don’t think she knows how she feels about Tom Sawyer.” She settled back in her chair, contented Anna, having consorted with, and championed, discussion runner Anna. 

She jogged onto unmapped territory. Tom Sawyer, scoundrel, not frontier explorer? Who needs this bullshit, or anything like it? The truth, or some version of truth, about Tom’s fate with Becky, abraded my hackles. Don’t you get it?

“No wonder she won’t kiss him. What’s the clue for interloper?”

“Now, class.” Ms. Olive returned Tom Sawyer to her lap. “We’re looking for certain words that help you, not only hear the story, but feel the story.”

Hopeless. The patience-of-Job is not matriculated in home room.

“Find a word that annoys you. Something said in dialog. Preferably a verb.”

“Why not an adjective or adverb? Aren’t they more descriptive?” Anna Carri piped-in a plucky challenge to lesson plans.

“The right verb without embellishment gives the stronger message. You’ll see.”

“Hating, scorching, whipped. Transitive and intransitives.” I presented my case. “What does that say to you?”

“A certain point-of-view, but we’re entertaining all points-of-view. Even if it isn’t yours.”

“Twain was a man. He told the man’s point-of-view. Read Alcott for the girl point-of-view.”

“That’s next assignment. The emergence of 19^th century women writers who gave us the female perspective, from females, finally.”

“The Bible didn’t need female writers. Is there a better book than that?”

“The Bible is filled with women taking very important roles. It quotes Sarah and Mary. Uses their words. That’s what writing is.”

“It is the record men kept of the truth, as they lived it.”

There you have it. Case made. Only male writers need apply. When we want them to speak, we’ll call them, and put it in quotes. After James, Melville, and Howell no library is truer let alone deserves space for wordy tropes, no matter how much Dickinson’s hair caught in your whiskers, or arrested by the breeze, feathered, above the Tappan register, and below the collective blinds, stacked intimately, four inches high. She would stand by the window, mid-afternoon, teaching us the love of transparency and translucence. So, do not worry how that transmitted to Anna Carrie, I want to know, but I’m rather taken by how it transcribed permanently, with exquisite allusion, to Eve. Not transformed was the gaping chasm, precipitous death, of original sin between seventh grade and Heaven. Becky knew what Anna knows what Twain invented. What you garner yourself, looking back 50 years, why waste salvage labor on anything other than Christ.