Fatale Abstraction

ABJECT LESSONS



When I was in first grade, my fingertip was smushed in the hinge of a big heavy bathroom door here. They need to put a little effort into that website, by the way. I wonder if they have a plaque up immortalizing that moment? No? This'll have to do, I spose.



I blame any subsequent bad behaviour in my life on that moment, if, in fact, I've ever actually done anything remotely naughty. Which, of course, I haven't. I'm just misunderstood.

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There was a girl in my class who wore froufy dresses to class with lots of ruffles, and she won some beauty pageant and got to ride on the steamboat down the river with all the beauty queens during the New Year's Eve fireworks. I was really jealous-- how could she get to be the cutest girl in Memphis when they must have been aware I was there?



Nap time came daily after lunch. Nap time was difficult for me. Golly, it was the most tedious, boring 30 minutes of my entire life repeated daily. It took becoming (at least age-wise) an adult and having to earn a living to make me crave naps. Sitting still was torture. We sat in our seats, heads down on desks. Other kids seemed to nap, but I'd look around the room sending eye-daggers at the kid who always got the best crayons and then broke them, or wondering if I'd get a chance to play with the clay that day. Would I make it through the day without being sent out into the hallway or to the principal's office? Luckily for me, the principal seemed to be the one woman in the world who didn't think I was the spawn of Lucifer, so she never paddled me. Yeah, I'd sit there and wonder what I was about to do wrong, next. Then, every so often, something would happen that would remind me that for all my flaws, there were some humiliations in life I would be spared. Every so often, I'd look ahead and to the right and would marvel at the little puddle splattering to life below flounce-beswagged seat of Little Miss Memphis, and I would think "at least I don't pee in my chair."
*Shirley Temple in Baby Take A Bow

Of course, that was a very immature inclination, but I was only 6. I forgive myself.

***Upon its 1934 release, this Shirley Temple film was banned in Nazi Germany for its depiction of gangsterism and gun play.