So I’m packing up for my move from Asheville to Front Royal, Virginia, and I’m labeling and taping up three boxes of photo albums from the closet. On top of these albums is a scrapbook recording certain events from my birth through age seventeen: special birthday cards, school report cards, and certificates of various kinds.
My mother compiled this scrapbook, and as I gingerly turn the pages—the edges of some of he browning page crumble like dried leaves at the touch—I am impressed by her diligence. In addition to raising five other children, Mom kept a clean house and her children washed and decently clothed, took time for friends, and cooked three meals a day. (We were still a few years away from frozen TV dinners and pizzas. Nor were there fast food restaurants —at least, not in Boonville. Once or twice a year, our parents drove us into Winston-Salem, where we dined at the K&W Cafeteria across the street from the Robert E. Lee Hotel. Otherwise, Mom cooked).
My mother compiled this scrapbook, and as I gingerly turn the pages—the edges of some of he browning page crumble like dried leaves at the touch—I am impressed by her diligence. In addition to raising five other children, Mom kept a clean house and her children washed and decently clothed, took time for friends, and cooked three meals a day. (We were still a few years away from frozen TV dinners and pizzas. Nor were there fast food restaurants —at least, not in Boonville. Once or twice a year, our parents drove us into Winston-Salem, where we dined at the K&W Cafeteria across the street from the Robert E. Lee Hotel. Otherwise, Mom cooked).
Though in a hurry to keep up the push on my packing, I spend a few moments looking at the scrapbook, which hasn’t seen the light of day since my last move ten years. Here are Sunday School certificates; cards from different birthdays (Mom adds a note on the occasion of my seventh birthday: “Had eight boys for dinner, then went to the movie in Elkin”), leaving me to wonder what movie we saw and whether we ate the boys fricasseed or parboiled); the program from my first piano recital, where I played the enduring classic “Porky Pig at the Ice Show”; and school report cards.
It is my fifth grade report card that grabs my attention.
Throughout my schooling I was an above average student—a nerd in today’s lingo—and the card is studded with good marks for each grading period: As in reading, math, social studies, and music, a mixture of Bs and As in art, and the usual B in handwriting.
But then I notice my grades for citizenship: a string of Bs and B-s.
What the hell?
Citizenship refers to personal comportment in the classroom. The grade testifies to the student’s behavior. Whatever the criteria for this grade, receiving a B in citizenship is, to my way of thinking, like flunking gym class, an ambition, in other words, nearly impossible to achieve except by the most fiercely determined of recalcitrant students.
So how in the name of heaven did I rate a B in citizenship? Where had I gone wrong? Did I slouch at my desk? Was there dirt encrusted under my fingernails? Was I impertinent, a smart aleck? Was I always whispering or passing notes around the classroom? Was I pulling some poor girl’s pigtails or doodling in my notebook? Was I snide or arrogant, snotty to my classmates? Did Mrs. Jessup, a teacher whom I remember fondly, look into my soul and see some sort of future slacker, a guy who might not vote regularly (I do, by the way), a draft-dodger, a couch-potato citizen who preferred whining to action? Or was it worse? Did she see me as some sort of budding hoodlum, destined for black leather jackets and chains, a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the sleeve of my t-shirt, mounted on a Harley with “Born To Raise Hell” tattooed on one bicep?
I have no idea.
One incident from that year did leave Mrs. Jessup unhappy with me. One morning she was on her feet beside her big desk at the front of the classroom, explaining to us the function of white corpuscles in the blood stream. In the event of an infection or a wound, Mrs. Jessup told us, these corpuscles would race to the infected area and repel the attackers.
Now this image fascinated and puzzled me. I imagined the white corpuscles looking something like the Blob in Steve McQueen’s first movie. But how did they attack those pesky invaders? And right here is when I made my mistake. I raised my hand.
“Yes, Jeff,” Mrs. Jessup said.
“So what weapons do these white corpuscles fight with? Are they like soldiers with machine guns?”
Around me the class burst into laughter. Mrs. Jessup drew herself erect—she always had good posture anyway, and so she now appeared taller than ever—and stretched out her arm and pointed at the door. “To the hallway, young man.”
This punishment was the ultimate humiliation in her classroom. For a moment I just sat still, stunned by my sudden banishment. Then, with every eye on me, I pushed myself from my desk, stood, and blushing with embarrassment, walked across the front of the classroom. I fumbled with the doorknob, opened the door, closed it behind me, stood against the wall, and prayed that Mr. Martin, the principal who ruled our school with the iron fist of a Roman imperator, would remain in his office instead of roaming the hallways seeking out evil-doers like me. Once I peeked around the corner to look down the other corridor and saw that Dickie Shore, a sixth-grader and a good friend, had also gotten the boot and was standing in exile outside the door of his classroom. We waggled our eyebrows at each other and then shrugged.
Principal Martin never appeared, and whether Mrs. Jessup had further words with me I do not recollect. I am certain she thought I was being a comedian, a wise-ass, but in reality I was fumbling around for some comparison to understand how white corpuscles battled foreign invaders. I was employing, awkwardly I admit, a simile—a word not yet a part of my vocabulary.
As I am writing here, the thought also occurs that an embarrassed Mrs. Jessup herself may not have known by what means white corpuscles repelled these attackers. (Now, of course, I do understand these little warriors: the white corpuscles have tiny, sharp teeth, which the red corpuscles must occasionally floss, wash, and file).
That string of B marks sent me to my other report cards. My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. York, who once paddled my hand with a ruler, gave me straight As in citizenship. My sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Speer, a stern but fine instructor, gave me an overall mark of A for comportment.
So why the B and B- marks from Mrs. Jessup?
As a young woman Tennessee once remarked to me when she couldn’t get her cash register to work properly, “I am flat-out bumfuzzled.”