Green

(I wrote this on St. Patrick's Day, then set it aside for a while, intending to look at it again before posting it, and the time got away from me. So now, nearly a month later, here is my less-than-timely post.)

When my husband got dressed this morning, he put on a green sweatshirt in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, and seeing that green shirt triggered a childhood memory I hadn’t thought about it in years.

In early 1966, when I was in second grade, my family moved an hour away from the small rural town where my siblings and I were born to a “big town”—a town with three elementary schools, not one; a town with four lanes of traffic down the main drag, not two; a town with a Woolworth’s and an art museum and a thriving tourist trade; a town where my brothers and I struggled to fit in.

We thought we were smart kids until we moved. We all got good grades, we all did better in school than most of our peers. But we quickly found out that our new school was much more advanced, curriculum-wise, than our previous school. We lagged behind our classmates by at least a couple months; we hadn’t acquired some necessary chunks of knowledge they already had, and so we were treated like we were stupid and didn’t belong. The playground was an extremely lonely place at recess.

I came home one day, feeling low, and told my mom, “The teacher asked what certain letters were but not others, and I don’t know what she means.” (Given the vague explanation I’d given my mom, she didn’t know what the teacher meant, either. Eventually I realized the teacher was talking about consonants and vowels (completely foreign terms to me), but it took a while to figure that out.) Back in our old elementary school, music class consisted of a pretty, smiling female teacher who wheeled a piano from classroom to classroom once or twice a month and taught us to sing “Smokey the Bear.” That was it. At our new, big school, we had music class every single day, taught by a crabby, impatient man who scared the daylights out of me with his hot temper. I approached the blackboard with utter dread one day when he called several of us forward to draw treble clefs on the board. Prior knowledge of what a treble clef even was would certainly have helped me perform this task, but I was clueless. Instead of telling him I didn’t know what I was doing (because I was afraid of him), I darted secretive glances toward the kids on the right and left of me and managed to acquit myself with a very sloppy yet recognizable treble clef. WHEW!

Then came St. Patrick’s Day. On St. Patrick’s Day eve, my mom returned home from a week-long visit to her father in Iowa, bringing presents for all of us with her. My present was a blue and white striped sailor dress with a big white collar that came down in a deep vee in front and hung in a square over my back. I thought it was the most beautiful piece of clothing I had ever seen, and of course, I wanted to wear it the next morning. Realizing what day it was, my mom cut out a pale green construction paper shamrock and pinned it to my collar and off I went to school. Did anybody notice my pretty new dress? Did anybody think I looked like a million bucks in it? The answer is NO, they did not. As soon as my feet touched school property, this is what I heard, over and over and over again: “You’re not wearing green.” Always with snotty contempt, like I was dumb as a box of rocks. How could I not know that I was supposed to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day, for heaven’s sake? Duh. Time after time, I shyly protested that I actually was wearing something green, pointing futilely to my increasingly crumpled-looking shamrock, but no one was impressed. It was an awful, awful day in an awful, awful week in what was shaping up to be a royally awful month.

Eventually, things got better. The following school year, my next-oldest brother and I were transferred to a smaller elementary school where we fit in and made friends and we didn’t dread getting on the school bus every morning.

So why am I writing this? What does St. Patrick’s Day have to do with being an author? Well, after I wrote the first part of this blog, I spent some time thinking about that experience. I keenly remember the feeling of being an outsider, that heart-wrenching sense of not belonging, not fitting in. And then I realized that many of the protagonists in the novels I write are outsiders, either by choice or circumstance. They are alone in their battles for acceptance or survival, and that isolation makes them suffer at times. While I would never want to repeat my second-grade experience, I am glad for the insights into loneliness it has given me. I think it makes me a better, more compassionate writer. Or at least I hope so.