All during my elementary school years, or from third grade through sixth grade, anyway, there were eight boys and twelve girls in my class, all the same kids each year - if pressed I could name them still. It was a small school and new - GO! Brown’s Point Elementary! - with only one room for each grade and with only one teacher. For first and second grades we went somewhere else, while our school was being built.
We were a hermetically sealed bunch, from diverse economic backgrounds, to be sure, but all of us were white, and all were certain that the world we were born into, with its woods and its beach (with decrepit boat ramps and other kids to shoot with BB guns) was the world in a nutshell. Only we didn’t know the “nutshell” part. We just thought it was the world.
We did have our problems… which reading group would we be in every couple of weeks, the first or the second or the third? I seem to remember getting tossed between the first and second groups quite regularly. I was either the worst of the good readers or the best of the poorer ones. And we had our fallings-out, fights on the playground and such. Those “third group” readers often tried to get even once we were outside.
The biggest issue for me during those years, however, was that every time the girl I secretly loved broke up with one or another of her rotating boyfriends (a ‘boyfriend’ designation meant he got to walk her home from school) I prayed she’d choose me next.
But she never did. Not once.
We could be cruel, too. On Valentine’s Day there was no rule that every kid had to give a valentine to every other kid, like there is today… No siree! We just gave them to whoever we wanted to give them to, and that was it, let the store-bought valentines fall where they may!
What made it even worse was that the valentines were placed in these handmade and decorated envelopes fashioned by us the week before, then hung from the chalk tray at the front of the room, so all of us could see whose envelope was fat and whose was thin.
The girl I loved had the fattest envelope, I had one of the thinnest, and with no valentine in it (most years) from her.
Then one day, not long after sixth grade started, the principal showed up at our classroom door with a new kid, a thin and big-eyed, brown-skinned and (I understand now) terrified girl, just arrived from The Philippines because her father was in the US Navy and got himself stationed at the (now long decommissioned) Tacoma Naval Shipyard.
I make it a practice not to mention the names of still-living people in these essays, but this girl’s name has stayed in my head for sixty-five years. Barbara Mendiola. The rest of us had names like Wiley and Johnson and Williams and Holmes, regular American names attached to kids with white American faces, while Barbara’s name was difficult to pronounce and easy for us to make fun of, her face as hard for us to read as Tagalog.
Our teacher surely knew of her pending arrival before her actual one, but on the fateful day she seemed flummoxed, while the rest of us sat at our desks, staring and speechless. And we remained staring and speechless, I am mortified to say, for the entirety of that sixth grade year.
It would give this writing some substantial literary cachet were I able to say now that when Valentine’s Day rolled around that year, Barbara Mendiola’s handmade and decorated envelope was empty, or that it was the only one hanging from that chalk tray that was thinner than my own. And if this were fiction I might be tempted, if only for its Dickensian pathos.
But I have no memory of Barbara’s envelope.
What I do have is a memory of her sitting at her desk, the second in the row of five nearest the classroom door, in one or another of her pretty dresses - rotating like that other girl’s boyfriends - silently doing her schoolwork while the rest of us pretended that she wasn’t there, really just pretended that the second desk in the row of five nearest the classroom door had no one in it at all.
Barbara was only with us for that year, disrupting our world with her graceful and silent presence. But in a way - in a strange and, I think, wonderful way - I believe now that she was my harbinger. For as I broke free of childhood’s idyll, as the years began stacking up and I started to find my place in the world at large, the country she came from - The Philippines! - invade me in the best way possible, through marriage to a beautiful woman who saved me, through the births of a beloved daughter and son, and lately through three budding grandchildren, who teach me the meaning of love every time I see them, Valentine’s Day or not.
Do you remember how Streisand - a Barbra, too, but with a missing vowel - kept singing “Nicky Arnstein, Nicky Arnstein” in the movie Funny Girl, back in 1968? Do you remember how she absolutely would not shut up about him?
Well, if I could make a movie set in 1956, “Barbara Mendiola” would be its musical refrain.
For she brought me all the luck in world, long before I knew the world existed.
My school years were just the opposite of yours. I never went to the same school twice until 11th grade. Showing up at a new school with new kids was the norm. I don’t remember any of them let alone their names. I always moved on the next year. When I was in 6th grade our class had a dance. I was asked to dance by one of my class mates. I don’t remember his name. I do remember that his father owned a shoe store which sold Buster Brown shoes. He, the son, came to school once dressed as Buster Brown, big red beret and short pants. So my best memory of elementary school was that Buster Brown acknowledged that I was there even though I was about to move on.
Dick, thanks for soliciting this memory and thank you for the wonderful tribute to Gigi.
When I transferred from Aliiolani Elementary to Manoa Elementary in the middle of third grade, I was first placed in a mid-level class, where I fell in love with a Portuguese girl named Stephanie Teves. When we took turns reading aloud in class, the other students struggled with each word, and shouted at me to slow down when I read aloud rapidly and fluently.
So, I was moved to the top third grade class, all of whose students knew they were the best, and had been together since kindergarten. The very first thing I was asked to do was give an impromptu address to introduce myself. I mumbled and stared at the floor. Most of the students soon made it clear that they did not like me and I was not welcome. After a week of this, I wrote a note to my new teacher, Miss Mukai, telling her that nobody liked me and I wanted to go back to Mrs. Chuck's class. I handed the folded paper to her after school and ran away.
The next day someone came to the classroom to escort me to the principal's office, where I was told to sit in a chair and wait. After ten or fifteen minutes I was taken back to my new classroom, without ever having seen or spoken to the principal. Although nobody ever told me what happened, I surmise that Miss Mukai told her students to stop being mean to me. It may have helped some. Later that year, Betsy Kortschak, the prettiest girl in the class, passed me a note in which she told me that she loved me. Betsy is now happily retired with her fourth husband. We still talk from time to time.
Five years after this, when I was in eighth grade, I saw Stephanie, wearing the uniform of a Catholic girls' school, at a bus stop. I did not say anything.