This is what I remember about second grade

The thing that I remember most about second grade was my teacher, Mrs. Wallace. She had short black hair, cropped at her shoulders, and I'm fairly certain that she wore lacy shirts with shoulder pads underneath. Such was the style, and not much more need be said. I believe her first name was Barbara, though that was not the sort of thing that kids knew in those days, to us, she was Mrs. Wallace. 

It was, if I recall correctly, her first year of teaching. She had a teaching style that we'd refer to now as authoritarian. The type of teacher who is very strict for seemingly no purpose. Now we often say that it's because those teachers fear losing control of the class that their authoritarian nature is really a sign of weakness. However, I'll submit to you that maybe Barbara just liked her classroom quiet. 

What did I do when I was outside in second grade? I remember it being cold in the mornings, which seems almost implausible given that I grew up in the relatively mild climates of CA. But I remember it being cold and walking across the long grey stretch of cement and over to the tether ball courts. Most of the boys played tether ball, and one girl, who went on to play tennis at the U.S. open a time or two. We weren't quite old enough to be fully chauvinistic, but we were sort of vaguely aware that we were not supposed to lost to her, which we did, with an alarming frequency. I remember the tether ball being hard as a rock, spinning in its ever diminishing circles when you were close to getting tethered, or better yet, when you were smacking it time and again when you were the one doing the tethering and some kid, through the cruelty of genetics or time, was waving his hand in the air as if that could stop the inexorability of your victory. 

I remember the crunch of gravel beneath my feet as I walked on the playground. I wasn't much for swings, and I don't think we were allowed to jump out of them anyway. The yard guards were all women of Asian descent, which was strange to see in our mostly white town, though we thought nothing of it, merely noticed the difference. 

I think we must have played football some mornings. I was, in the small pond of my school a rather amazing football player. I could run really fast in a straight line and catch a football lofted towards me. I've no idea why it never occurred to the other kids to just back up a bit more when I was running at them and wait for the ball to loft down to them. Instead, they always stood a few feet away, waiting to get into a backpedal, or perform an awkward turn, when all that I had to do was run at them like the wind. And it felt like the wind to a second grader. I could feel the blades of grass, still wet with dew, as my feet sailed through them, I could see the slow spin of the football, a blotch against that wide blue sky as it sailed into my arms. I think the only thing I've ever been better at than second grade football is third grade football. 

We played soccer too, another sport at which I excelled. Again, primarily due to the fact that my competitors were somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven people. So I suppose my athletic glories, fond in memory though they are, are not of any particular note. I remember instead, the dark shape of Mrs. Wallace, writing something on the board, and engaging in a pinching contest with the boy next to me. By the end, one or the other of us was crying, and we were asked to step to the front of the room to write our names on the board. That was the one and only time that ever happened to me in school. I remember feeling mortified, naked to the world, on that ten foot walk to the white board. I remember my hand trembling with the chalk, and then I remember something else, a white hot rage at Mrs. Wallace and the boy who had pinched me. I hated them both. And as I walked back to my seat, still feeling mortified, I knew that as long as I lived I'd still hate them both, not forever, but for that moment. Shame.

The last thing I remember is that it's the first time a girl ever said, or rather wrote, I love you. She scrawled it on a white piece of paper, two stick figures holding hands on something approaching a green lawn. The sun, a yellow ball with a few stray dashes that were supposed to be manifestations of light. I did not have the heart to tell her that light comes in waves but not thinly drawn lines, nor that she'd gotten my hair color off. It was, in truth a pretty crudely drawn picture. I don't remember many other specifics except that she'd scrawled in the middle of the picture, the words, I love you, which I remember as being in red, but it may have been a different color. Her penmanship was fine, and it took me only a moment to figure out what the three words in conjunction meant. They meant that she loved me. 

And though I was in second grade at the time, I understood the meaning completely. If I accepted the paper and did anything but throw into my desk and close it, I'd be inviting myself into a life with this girl. Who, to be honest, I hadn't spoken more than four or five words in my whole life. The only thing I knew about her then was that she had impeccable taste in men, and I wouldn't even have made that joke then because I didn't know many jokes then. And yet, I could see, in the one to two seconds that it took for my face to turn bright red, an entire life that we'd spend together, holding hands on green grass underneath a warm autumnal sun. I'm saying we could have been happy. 

Unfortunately, I couldn't see it then, and so I crumpled up the paper and put it in my desk and tried to forget about her. I ran out onto the high stalks of grass and lined up at wide receiver. I could see that the two kids who were covering me were way too shallow. I was going to run past them. I was going to fly past them like the light from the sun's rays. I was going to run across the grass as though I had wings. I was going to be beautiful. I was going to fly.