OCTOBER 26, 2019 – Sixty years ago I entered kindergarten. My older sisters had blazed the trail, and I remember their enthusiastic anticipation of my first day of school. They told me about all the fun that was in store.
“Oh, and you’ll get to ride in the boat, too!” said sister Elsa.
“The boat?” I said.
“Yeah,” said big sis Nina. “It’s in the play area. You can ride it at the same time with two or three other kids. It rocks back and forth and is really, really fun!”
I pictured a children’s scale tugboat like one I’d seen in a storybook; a vessel brightly painted, bearing a big smile and two large eyes on its prow. I imagined a foredeck, a back deck with railings, smokestack, and a wheelhouse at which kids could take turns. And based on what Nina had said, I figured the boat had a curved hull for rocking as if at sea.
When the big day arrived, my sisters dropped me off at the kindergarten room of Franklin School. Standing at the doorway was Miss Squires, who, with her white hair, bright red lipstick, and formal bearing, seemed of an age somewhere between my parents and my grandparents.
As I engaged in the brief niceties of our initial encounter, I looked furtively behind Miss Squires in search of “the boat.” Seeing nothing of the sort, I grew concerned that perhaps my sisters’ representations about a nautical fixture were pure fiction.
“Where’s the boat?” I asked straight out.
“The what?” Miss Squires asked.
“The boat. Where’s the boat?”
Before Miss Squires could respond, Elsa took charge. “It’s over there!” she said, pointing at the corner of the room. But resting there was no brightly painted tugboat. All I saw was a wooden object the size of a chair, with curved sides and two little bench seats.
Miss Squires turned. “Oh, yes, the boat. Your sister’s right. It’s over there. You’ll get to play on it later, but first you need to join the other boys and girls sitting down inside the circle. After class starts, I’ll take you on a tour of the room. How does that sound?” . . . or something to that effect.
I was crestfallen. If that was the boat, what were my sisters thinking? In my storybook world, that was no boat. I wondered—did they and Miss Squires even know what a boat was? In the wake of that thought, I harbored another: what if the rest of kindergarten was going to be as dull and diminished as “the boat”?
It took a while, but one day Miss Squires redeemed herself. President Eisenhower was traveling abroad. Miss Squires pulled out a world map to show us where. “Here’s Turkey,” she said, pointing, “. . . the country, not the bird we eat at Thanksgiving.” If her “boat” was no boat, her map of the world was a beautiful thing. I was hooked. I knew then that I wanted to travel . . . the world.
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
