For Blood or Money
32. My Third Year in Kindergarten, I Learned That All Stories Have a Good Ending
BEFORE YOU GO THINKING I was a really dumb little shit, let me set the record straight about why I was three years in kindergarten.
Back then, in those olden days fifty plus years ago, there wasn’t an organized nursery school or preschool program, and kindergartens were taught mostly by volunteers in church basements. That was what got my mother into the classroom. She had been a campaigner for teaching the children of Swedish immigrants how to speak proper English and putting them on the road to success. When Pastor Olmquist called on her with a proposal to start a kindergarten at the local Swedish Lutheran church, she couldn’t really say no, even though she was nominally Catholic and publicly an atheist. She believed that religion kept the masses down, and she ran her family as a good socialist would.
But she also knew a good thing when she saw it. Having a podium to advance the education of Swedish children in America was all it took to get her to say yes.
I was four years old—too young for regular admittance into kindergarten, but because mother was the teacher, I was permitted to attend.
I learned how to make snakes out of clay and to weave the snakes together to make little clay baskets.
The next year I was five and eligible to attend kindergarten. I had already learned how to make snakes out of clay, so I allowed my curiosity to get the best of me and started looking at books. They were mysterious things, these books. When mother opened them, they had wonderful stories in them. When I opened them, they were filled with secret scribbles that meant nothing. I even attempted to put my own stories in them with scribbles, but mother disapproved and said that my marks made it hard to read the words. So, she began to teach me to read.
By the end of that year, I could read simple books to myself or out loud. It was wonderful.
A silly rule was implemented by the school district that year. The school board decided that they would move the cut-off date for the age of being admitted into school. It went from September 15—my birthday—to September 1. You had to be six by the first of September to be admitted into first grade. Mother protested, and when the school principal learned that I could already read, he was willing to admit me to school.
Then the illness came. According to the doctors, I’d had an untreated strep throat condition during the summer and less than a month later, I contracted Rheumatic Fever. It was pretty severe, and for a while mother thought I was dying. I fought through it, and recovered. But by this time school was six weeks in session and the principal was adamant that he would not allow me to start at such a disadvantage at such a young age. So at six years old, I found myself under my mother’s tutelage again in kindergarten. I spent my days reading. I had little care for anything else that was being taught to the kindergartners because mother had insisted on only English being spoken in our home, and I’d long since mastered the art of making clay snakes. I emerged from my cocoon in the reading area only for arithmetic lessons. I hoarded the books. I drove away smaller children who wanted to read them.
But I couldn’t protect them all, all the time. I sat one day to read a book that had interested me only to find that the last dozen or so pages had been torn out by an enraged five-year-old some weeks before. I was furious. I cried. I stormed. I kicked my feet. I was six and I would never find out the ending of the story.
My mother weathered the storm. She sat down beside me and told me that it was indeed a terrible thing that pages had been torn from a book, but that children who did not know the secrets of books often did not value them as I did. And, she revealed, I had not yet learned all the secrets of books myself.
I was shocked. I read well above my age-level for all that I was stuck back in kindergarten again. My first grade contemporaries were still struggling with “see Spot run” and I was deep in Hardy Boys Mysteries. What did I have to learn about books?
My mother told me that true masters of books often did not need to read the ending. They were quite content to put down a book without finishing it because they could tell the ending themselves. A true master of reading knew that all stories have a good ending. So they could simply close the book before the last chapter and imagine what that ending would be. Often, if they went back to read the ending of a book they had previously skipped, they were disappointed that it did not end as well as they had imagined.
She encouraged me to read the book again and when I reached the torn out pages to close my eyes and imagine the ending of the story. It was liberating for a six-year-old. I often closed books before the ending from that day onward and let my imagination tell me what came next.
Of course, later I learned that my imagined ending might not be the same or anywhere near as good as what the author had written. But I often closed books before the last chapter to let my imagination complete them before I read what the author had written. And I often found that mother was right—my endings were better.
I learned fifty years later what rheumatic fever had done to my heart. It wasn’t until I had a battle with strep throat just a year ago that left me back in the throes of rheumatic fever. It was a short-lived battle. With the help of modern antibiotics, I came through quickly. But after my heart attack eight months ago, I learned that the damage done to my heart by the disease was irreversible. It was weakening daily.
I denied it as much as I could. I continued to walk to work, even when Maizie and I had to stop three or four times in the mile to rest. I suffered increasing chest pains and shortness of breath over the months following the attack. I would have phases when for days everything would seem completely normal, and then weeks at a time when it seemed like I would never draw a deep breath again.
The spreading dark stain on my chest tells me that my heart is leaking. The valves and chamber walls are disintegrating, and I just don’t want to die in a hospital.
So I came home. I thought I’d just rest for a while in my chair, but now I find that with Maizie on my lap, I really don’t want to waste the effort of getting up. Besides, sitting here, I can see the picture that Rhonda painted for me all those years ago. I never noticed how vivid the colors are in a sunset. Do you see the way the reds and oranges blend into each other, and the incredible streaks of pink that radiate out from the center of the yellow-white orb? It captures my senses and transports me to that very beach. I can almost feel myself standing down there watching the sunset with the fresh salt spray in my face. I wonder what it was that I was contemplating, and how Rhonda that knew I was there.
Numbers keep going through my mind. I should have told Riley that the tattoos were hexadecimal codes. Put them together and with twenty-four characters you have a what? 384 bit encryption code. That can’t be right. No one makes 384 bit codes. It would have to just need two of the three to have a 256-bit code. Maybe the secret is to find which of the two codes out of the three go together. There are only six possible combinations.
Riley will figure out that the “S” in Angel’s tattoo is a 5 won’t she?
Dear, sweet Riley. I want so badly to be thirty years younger. Idiots who can’t see what an incredible woman she is! Why would they care if she has hair? She is beautiful inside and out.
I wandered off-subject there for a minute. Sorry. I find that has happened more and more lately. I start thinking about something and my mind just wanders from subject to subject. That is probably how I came up with a missing day Saturday. I hope nothing important happened that day.
I should have stopped at the office and tagged the jump-drive. I’d like to know what is on the backups that Riley picked up from Brenda’s house. If I had this all to do over again, I’d break a few more rules, like she does. I should have disconnected all the disk drives so that they weren’t damaged if someone…
No.
My partner will take care of the office. Riley will be there. Won’t she be surprised when she finds out what I left her? She’ll get her master’s in January. She’s done a good job. I wonder if she’ll get a PhD.
I was telling you a story. I don’t remember where I was. I wanted to finish it for you. And I wanted to tell you the answer to life, the universe, and everything. But I never found the question.
Sorry. I’m wandering again.
I’m so tired now. It must be past midnight. Brahms is still playing on my stereo. I’m feeling awfully sleepy.
I could just walk into that painting; it seems so real to me.
Do me a favor, would you?
Tell Riley I had a good ending.
THE END
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