The Kindergarten Gulag

This photo speaks of the future, a future of twenty-five years of academic indentured servitude. I didn't know it when Mom snapped this picture of me and my Miss Piggy bag from G.B.'s. I ended up barfing all over this bag on the bus ride home.

Life before school, for me at least, was fun, filled with lots of things to do, and quite imaginative. I didn't have to deal with other kids except Crystal the biter and my cousins, and I got to read stories and make up stories, and play pretend, and have imaginary friends, and my whole world essentially revolved around that tiny farm on the side of the mountain.
School pretty much killed that little world for me in one fell swoop.

This photo is from the first day of Kindergarten. I had Mrs. Reish, a woman with a screechy voice and glasses and brown hair. She was a total throwback from the 1950s. We sat around the piano and sang songs from a 1950s song book, we had to sit "indian style" and walk "single file Indian style," and we sang "Ten Little Indians" and "Where Is Thumbkin?" and "I Know A Little Pussy" (which mysteriously cracked up my parents every time I sang it). We had to make our letters the right way and draw the right way and OPEN OUR CRACKER PACKETS THE RIGHT WAY AND PAINT THE RIGHT WAY AND PUT THINGS AWAY THE RIGHT WAY AAAAAND....

I never did things the right way, nor do I now. I am left-handed, and she'd give me scissors, those horrible lefty scissors with the green rubber coatings that never cut correctly. I'd never follow directions so my ditto projects never looked right - I remember cutting what was supposed to be a spiral ghost into complete ribbons. I got yelled at for not drawing a house "the right way." The purple dittoes we got, like word finds, never interested me. I could already read and count, so there wasn't much more for me to learn...except how to be social. Which I didn't want. Mrs Reish sent home a lot of report cards that said I was immature and socially backward. It didn't help matters much that the previous 5 years of isolation resulted in me catching every illness coming down the pike in 1984-1985. I spent a lot of time with bronchitis, earaches, headcolds, you name it. On top of that, that year we had a brutal winter and we were stranded by snow quite a bit. I think my parents got truancy warnings. (On top of that, my mom was pregnant with my little sister.)

We had to do a painting project for fall trees: paint the leaves by dabbing the already-painted-for-us trunk with sponges in different tempera paints. I apparently missed the "dabbing" part and ended up making my tree crazy psychedelic swirls. Because I "diiiidn't follow directionnnnns!!!!", my picture didn't end up in the hallway with the rest of the pictures, it ended up inside the room, unappreciated. This hurt me a lot as a little kid.

I had food allergies as a little kid. Anything containing red dye made me act like a complete animal. Mom and Dad always knew if my kindergarten snack involved Red Dye #2 because I'd bounce off the walls like a freak. They asked Mrs Reish to stop giving me crappy stuff like Hi-C and red Jell-o, and she couldn't understand why I wasn't allowed to eat that stuff.

Three things happened in Kindergarten that stuck out. The first was the day some kid in my class was acting up and then peed his pants, and Mrs Reish threatened that Mr. Zeek (the principal) would spank him and make him wear a diaper. We lived in terror of Mister Zeek. The second was, the gingerbread man hunt. There were laminated gingerbread men all over the school, and we had to find them, and we walked around in a large group, and then we walked past the furnace room, which was REALLY SCARY. Then - in April, we had the tornado drill, where we were given terrifying stories of potential tornadoes that would rip through and collapse the ceiling in the gym, which is why we had to sit in the hallway next to the gym for what seemed like an eternity, holding our arms over our heads, as if that would protect us from flying pieces of concrete.

At Christmas, we had to do a little performance of Jolly Old Saint Nicholas for the parents. I remember standing up there in front of everyone, singing this stupid song and wishing it was over. It was also probably the first instance of my long-standing love affair with "upstaging by making faces," something I got in trouble for a lot over the years.

I do remember at some point, things got really weird. I had to take a test with a lot of fill-in bubbles, and the other kids weren't taking the test. Mrs Reish made me sit in the play area to take it. It was boring, and I drew pictures in the booklet and on the scantron sheet, for which I got yelled at. I'm not sure what this test was, but it definitely changed the course of my elementary school life. I placed in the 98th percentile of some crap, which meant I had to sit in a room with a tall lady who looked like a bird and made me play with blocks for an hour while some older people asked me questions. The table I sat at was shaped like a trapezoid, and the chairs were plastic and bumpy.

Anyway, Kindergarten sucked.

Lee N' Ethel

Lee and Ethel were staples in the Woodward landscape for many years. I never knew their last name, but they were both kind of slow and shared a love for junk food.
Lee was elderly, rather slight, had white hair and also a whopping case of diabetes, which caused him to shake uncontrollably. This didn't stop him from eating a lot of candy and soda. Ethel was a very zaftig woman, with stringy hair pulled back, and she usually perched right next to Lee on the steps in front of Motz's Store (long since closed, in fact I never remembered it even open), wolfing down barrels of Middleswarth Potato Chips and swigging down liters of soda. I don't remember either of them ever talking, but I'm sure they did.
The only other place I ever saw Lee n' Ethel (try as I might, I can't separate their names) was at the Woodward Festival, where they would eat massive amounts of French fries. I never saw them without massive amounts of food.
I did hear one story where Ethel kept calling someone to fix her TV, and when he went out there to help he'd discover, on multiple occasions, that she had put all her houseplants on the TV and shorted out the set when she watered them.
Lee N' Ethel are no longer with us (it was a miracle that Lee lasted as long as he did with his diet and condition), but their ghosts still haunt the steps of Motz's Store...and if you listen in the wind, you can probably hear crunching.

Animal Farm

My parents rented an old farmhouse from a man named Mister Gilmore. I never finalized the spelling of his last name, but I knew he was about a thousand years old and people referred to him as "Gilly." Gilly had throat cancer or something and talked through a voicebox that sounded like a vocoder. Gilly's voice scared me.

Although my parents were avid gardeners, they sure weren't farmers. The cows and other animals that lived in our barn belonged to other people. I don't know who. I think it rotated. Sometimes the Amish guy would block off the road with barbed wire for the cows, but forget to take it back in, so we'd be stuck until someone got a hold of the damn cows. At one point, when I was a toddler, I wandered into the cow pasture saying "Hi cows! Hi cows!" and to this day my parents can't figure out how I got in there. Indeed, one of my first phrases was "Big Cow," which I embarrassingly said to some heavyset woman in the Weis store at some point.

We still had a bunch of animals around, though. Chickens and rabbits were frequently bought for butchering purposes, but I was such a bleeding heart kid that it only happened with chickens. Bunnies, forget it! They stayed. Retarded distemper Amish kittens, they stayed. I almost drowned an Amish kitten once by dunking it in a bucket of rainwater. I explained to my parents that I was "trying to give Kitty a bath." We saved a dog, Max, from being shot by the Amish guy who lived in the house below us. We'd come home from shopping to find him at the barn with a shotgun to the dog's head, and it was so horrifying that my parents ended up taking him. I vividly remember the Rabid Raccoon Incident, which was the first time I ever saw an animal killed by a gun. There were snakes galore up there on that mountain; I remember my mom always warning me about garter snakes. Once there was a whopping rattler on our patio with a beautiful diamond pattern. Mom was terrified of it. One time a bear came onto our porch, after the giblets my parents had given the dogs...and it got stuck. My dad had to push the poor bear out of the porch. When Mom was pregnant with me and my dad worked night shift, she heard a bloodcurdling scream out in the woods, that sounded like a woman, but was really either a mountain lion or a bobcat. Despite the huge number of cats in the area, there were still tons of rats and mice in the barn. And of course, during hunting season, it wasn't unusual to come home to dead, gutted deer strung up between the trees by the Amish people at the end of the yard.
My parents had bad luck with chickens for a while. We bought a crate of baby chicks at one point; I can't remember how many, but I remember we had them in our kitchen overnight, and when we came down the next morning the only thing that remained of them was a drop of blood and a single feather. (A weasel had gotten in and devoured the lot.) Dad accidentally fried another batch of peeps with a grow light. Mom accidentally killed a whole fleet of chickens by mistakenly feeding them rhubarb leaves. We had a couple of Araucana chickens, which are known for laying colored eggs, but we mostly had your classic barred rock chickens. There was a rooster at one point named "Rover" who took a liking to my mom and followed her around a lot.

At one point, Dad bought some meat chickens. I won't forget my first chicken butchering - Dad had a stump in the backyard and chopped their heads off with a great big WHUMMMP, then they'd flop around a bit. The first time I witnessed this, it was a bit traumatizing, but then Dad showed me how cool it was to see the chicken's throat and how they continue moving, and by the sixth chicken I was like a bloodthirsty little Caligula.

Today, I have two pet bunnies, no chickens, no cats, no dogs, no mice, no rats, no snakes, and certainly no bobcats.

Co-Ops and Parties

My parents, at some point, got involved in a co-op with a bunch of fellow back-to-the-land hippies nestled out there in Penns Valley. I must have been around 3 or 4 when they started getting that together. From what I remember, there was a lot of bulk wheat germ involved, and we met at the old church in Coburn because I remember it smelled kind of musty in there, and there was a very out-of-tune upright piano. I believe at one point we were there for a Christmas party, because I remember playing that piano and in my head thinking it sounded like a real song. To this day, I still am proud of accompanying "Jingle Bells."
When I was little, we ended up in lots of hippie houses for either co-op stuff, or I believe Tupperware parties, or maybe just to hang out, and I have fuzzy memories of playing with other kids' toys who were a lot older than me. I remember the toys distinctly because my own toys were pretty sparse. Someone in the Yanak house had a Fisher-Price school bus. We were at a party at the Buttorfs' once and I remember riding a tricycle around...because at some point I had ridden it onto the back deck, beeped the horn, and, coincidentally about 10 people fell to the yard at that exact moment because the railing collapsed. (I thought I had caused it.) I bit Abby Gaffron at some point, which her father gleefully told my 11th grade English class. I think we were at Dixie's place once and I almost fell off a porch, which I remember because I got yelled at. I remember Tupperware toys, especially that crazy shapes ball. I remember Karen's crazy old Volkswagen van with the stove in it, too.
It seems to me that the co-op came out of a group desire for everyone to find good, healthy organic food during a time when it was hard to find, and not trendy like it is today. My parents got Organic Gardening magazines and kept a huge garden; the word "organic" probably entered my vocabulary around the time "mom" and "dad" did, and we frequented the first organic store in the country, Walnut Acres. Those who remember Walnut Acres will remember the bags and bags of granola, and peanut butter that came in a tin and was simply mashed up peanuts and salt. They'll probably also remember the plates of sesame crackers on the counter that you could spread with that peanut butter...and honey. God, I miss that stuff.
It's funny how none of my parents' obsession with gardening really rubbed off on me, though I can explain the logistics of diatomaceous earth pretty well. I, on the other hand, can barely keep air ferns alive. (I've been trying to baby this cilantro plant, but it's not working out very well between us.) My parents, meanwhile, are in their mid-50s and still keep what can only be described as half a truck garden. During the summer, my sister and I are bombarded with tons of zucchinis, tomatoes, potatoes, and canned jams, and it's glorious.

Vacation Bible School

I didn't know much about Jesus in the early years. The only pictures I'd ever seen of him were a little plaque my mom had gotten in grade school, and a giant painting replica of Jesus in Gethsemane in the Aaronsburg Library, which had originally been a church. I insisted Gethsemane Jesus was actually named "Harry," and in a small way, still do. Although my mom had given me a vague rundown on religion from an Anglican viewpoint, we never went to church until years later. In the Valley, the primary denominations were Methodist, Lutheran, and Reformed (with a smattering of Jesus Jumpers scattered about here and there).

At some point, because I was so isolated as a kid, one of the villagers suggested to my mom that maybe a good way for me to learn how to socialize with the other kids was to attend Vacation Bible School. I suspect this might have had conversion undertones, as my parents' religious beliefs went suspiciously undefined, and the lady who told her about VBS probably had lofty dreams of moulding me into a wholesome Methodist.

Vacation Bible School was held as a day camp of sorts in Coburn. The 'classes' were in the old Coburn School, an amazing remnant of the 1920s that has since been razed for an ugly post office. Kids got to hang out, make crafts, do stuff with glitter, and learn about Jesus. The highlight of the day, other than getting glasses of Kool-Aid (no joke), was assembling in the church across the parking lot and watching a film. For the most part, we watched wholesome Lollipop Dragon movies.

I merrily took part in the craft making, which was probably making glitter crosses or god's eyes or some crap - I do remember a lot of coloring and I do remember scratch-and-sniff stickers, two things a five year old loves. But two incidents happened that ended my religious education at Bible School forever.

The first was the "I Will Obey" crown. About 15 of us kids were assembled at a large table. I do remember my mom being there. Someone made a paper crown, with the words "I WILL OBEY" scrawled on it in marker. The crown was passed from child to child, and we each dutifully put it on our heads, saying solemnly, "I WILL OBEY." I felt very smug, knowing I'd obey whatever it was I was supposed to obey. I didn't even know what the word "obey" meant.

The ride home that afternoon was weird. Mommy was angry. She said to me something like, "God, I can't believe they made you wear that thing. Look, that's creepy. Would you obey if some bad man told you to get in his van, or if someone tried to hurt you? You'd better not. Don't pay any attention to what happened today. The only people you need to obey right now are Mommy and Daddy."

Sage advice. But the FINAL kicker was the film we watched that WASN'T Lollipop Dragon. I don't remember a whole lot about the movie, because it was boring and probably about 20 years old then, but I do remember it was about the population of Brazil, showed the giant statue of Jesus overlooking Rio, and talked about how only 12% of the people there are true Christians.

Mom realized the creepy religious propaganda they were subjecting me to was anti-Papist, and, horrified, decided it was probably best to just quietly let me forget about my new Methodist brainwashing and focus on something truly wholesome.

Halloween 1984: HOUSE OF HORROR!

Every year, the POS of A in Woodward hosted a Halloween party for all the kids of the village. I only ever remember going to it twice.
This is a picture of my costume. I was a witch this year - not a conventional witch, because I doubt my parents could afford a real witch hat at the Rea & Derrick in Mifflinburg - but a benevolent one that wore a scarf and had a fondness for artificial flowers.

The party was your standard 1950s Halloween hokeyness thrust into the hands of middle-aged Woodwardians trying to entertain a bunch of hick kids. OOOH let's put on a blindfold and feel around in Jean's Tupperware bowls! OOOH peeled grapes - no, EYES! EWW, BRAINS! - no, spaghetti.....bobbing for apples in a galvanized trough! Don't breathe in with your head underwater!

I remember the dank coldness of the old building, the ugly colors inside, the bad linoleum (of which you can see here) - but what I distinctly remember is the terrifying sound effects tape. For some reason, the sound effects had me screaming.

TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFFFF!!!!! and then I burst into tears.

I was one of those bizarre kids who freaked out over sounds. I hated "Romeo & Juliet Suite." I hated "Also Sprach Zarathrustra." and I REALLY hated the moans and creaks of that damn tape. I believe, after my outburst, they turned the tape off to shut me the hell up.

Get Outta My Dark

At the edge of town, next to the POS of A building along the creek, used to sit a tan, tarpaper shack owned by Leah.

Leah wore the same flowered polyester shirt for years, along with some natty polyester trousers. Her white hair was pulled back with metal barrettes, she had large glasses, and she walked hunched over, a permanent scowl and pout on her face. Even when she laughed, she looked angry. She probably WAS angry, because she didn't seem to have any teeth.

Leah was semi-retarded. or maybe just completely retarded. All I know is, she was strange. To support herself, Leah had a tiny business out of her shack - mostly selling newspapers to the Villagers of Woodward, although I vaguely remember tales of 20 year old cigarettes and toilet paper for sale as well. Her nearest paper-peddlin' rivals were the Wee Hoose in Coburn and Greenland's Store in Aaronsburg.

Her prize possession was a Mickey Mouse phone. Lord, that woman loved her phone.

Leah lived a quiet life for the most part, complaining about most things, eating Spaghetti-Os out of a can. Somewhere there exists a strange photograph of me wearing horrible grey moon boots, my mom talking to the guy dressed as Santa who arrived in Woodward on a fire truck, and LEAH chortling in a shabby pea coat. God, I wish I could find that picture...

Anyway, one of the neighbor kids spent a lot of time harassing poor Leah with a tape recorder. With little else to do out in Woodward, I suppose it makes sense. The Leah Recordings are legendary among a select few Woodward Diaspora, mostly because she came out with the weirdest, almost medieval sayings. I'm not sure if this was on a tape or if it was just a story that got repeated, but two phrases I remember best are

GET OUTTA MY DARK!!!

...and the story about the "blow viper in her coal pile."

I'm sure there will be more about Leah later as I remember more stories about her, but I will start off with this:

One evening, Leah came into the store and asked me to count out 200 lottery tickets. She'd just gotten her relief cheque and was in a hurry...to her sister's funeral.