Res Ipsa Loquitur

My mother enrolled me thinking it would be a good idea to be around other kids my age, and it was. I enjoyed the hell out of it. But one week, we were told to bring one of our dad's old shirt to wear on a certain day because we were going to be....da da da dum....fingerpainting! Now I was pretty excited about this, I'd never actually seen fingerpaints but I'd read about them and couldn't wait to try them.

The much anticipated day finally arrived and we all donned our old shirts. The teacher and the aides distributed a sheet of crisp, shiny, new white paper to us all. All a-quiver, I eagerly awaited the distribution of the actual fingerpaint....until I noticed that we were getting only one container each. Yep, for some reason, they only had enough money to buy one color of fingerpaint...and it was green. A hideously bright mocking green....that seemed to sneer "Ha! And just what do you think you'll paint with me little girl....some nice boring grass? Bwahahahaha!"

Dull with disappointment, I stared at the green fingerpaint. Now what? My mind raced as I tried desperately to think of some interesting that was green....and came up with nothing but grass. Sighing, I started painting grass along the bottom of my paper. When I finished, I was stumped. One of the aides came along and suggested I paint some trees, the sun, a house, whatever. I looked up at her and thought the sun isn't green you stupid bitch. And you need brown to do the tree trunk, but we don't have any brown do we. (I was resistant to a post-modernist reconstruction of the world even at that early age) But l had been taught not to say such things to grow-ups and so kept my thoughts to myself.

Fairly pissed off by this time, I absently doodled my fingers in the wet paint of my grass....and discovered that my fingers left trails in the paint. Hmmm, I thought, what if.....and I rapidly covered the entire page with green paint, then used just my fingers to draw abstract designs in the wet paint. For some reason that I still don't get, this freaked the teaching staff entirely out. I tried to explain that there really wasn't much else one could do with only green paint with which to work, but they didn't understand. I think I scared them.

Anyhow and anyway, I learned an important lesson that day. Not that when you're poor, you have to make the best of what you have. I already knew that lesson all too well. No, I learned that sometimes, teachers were idiots and there would be days that school sucked, but that I could find creative ways to make it more....interesting. A fairly dangerous lesson to learn that early, you might say.

Just one of several important things that I learned in kindergarten that long hot summer. Another was that most kids my age couldn't read. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around that one. "What do you mean you can't read? Are you one of those retarded kids that I've heard about?" My socialization and peer interaction skills were somewhat lacking, I fear.

Another lesson I learned is that if you sneak into the classroom during recess with one of your little buddies to conduct an experiment about what happens if you drop toy cars from the second story window into the sandbox full of kids below, you get into Really Big Trouble. My creativity and scientific exploration of the world was stifled in a big way.

But that's another story.