“So what do you know about this guy, Jackie Robinson?” I said.
“Well, he was a great man and stuff,” Jeremy said. “Because he was going to change the world. So like people could be black and play with like white teams and stuff?”
“Mm-hm,” I said. “Excellent.” He had a worksheet with four boxes to fill out. The first one was about Jackie Robinson’s childhood. He’d written: HEWSBRNINGORGA. He was born in Georgia. I couldn’t understand the rest, but Jeremy read that Robinson had moved to California. He started to write, He wanted to change the world. I said it would be great if he left a little space between words. “And just stick an r in world.”
I could hear one of the better writers reading his long biography of Jackie Robinson aloud to Mrs. Wells.
“Are you going to be here for lunch?” Jeremy asked.
I said I was.
“My mom is coming for lunch,” he said.
“Good. Just remember to leave some space between each word, so you can read it later.”
Jeremy wrote about Jackie Robinson’s mother as an influence: SHEWSAGODMOM. I got him to put another o in god, figuring that good was a useful word to know. Then he had to list two character traits “as evidence.” He wrote, HE HADTO RUNFAST. Then he wrote, YOU HAV TO FOCS ON THE BALL. While he was working on He was brave, Mrs. Wells asked me to go over to a girl, Bonnie, sitting in an armchair. Soft study-time music played in the background. Bonnie was working on a biography of Betsy Ross. I asked her why Betsy Ross wanted to sew a flag. Bonnie said, “Because George Washington wanted a flag, because a war was going on. I think it was World War II, or World War I.” She read me what she’d written. “Betsy loved to sew and she had sixteen brothers and sisters. That’s a lot.” She continued: “Betsy went to work in an apostrophe shop.”
I asked, “Do you know what an upholsterer’s shop is?”
Bonnie said, “It’s a place where they sew furniture and stuff.”
“You are good. What else have you got?”
“George Washington wanted a flag,” said Bonnie.
I asked her what she liked about the flag.
“I like the stars.”
“I like the stars, too. Thank you so much, Bonnie.”
Mrs. Wells sent me to visit Gerry, in a camo sweatshirt.
“Hey, Gerry, what’s up, man?”
“Hm?”
“What’s up?”
“Nothing,” Gerry said. He’d been writing about Daniel Boone. “He used to not like raccoon caps, but he wears one.”
“It’s sort of a strange idea to wear a raccoon’s skin on your head,” I said.
“I wanted to buy one for five bucks at Cabela’s,” said Gerry. “But my mom wouldn’t let me, because she didn’t like raccoons.” He read from his biography: “Daniel loved the outdoors. He loved to trap and hunt. He has a grenade. Right there!” He pointed at a pouch hanging from Boone’s belt. I said I guessed that the pouch held gunpowder. (Actually it probably held shot.)
“Like black powder?” Gerry said. “My dad has a black-powder gun,” he said. He read some more of his biography. “Daniel built a road to Kentucky.” Gerry said he’d driven up a mountain with a four-wheeler. “When we went, there was a lot of car pieces up there. Pieces of a broken car.”
Gerry still lacked two “pieces of evidence” for his worksheet page on influences. Maybe Daniel’s wife was an influence, I suggested. “Doesn’t your dad help your mom and your mom help your dad?”
“A little bit,” Gerry said. “My mom never helps cut wood. It’s always me and my dad that cuts the wood.”
“And what does she do that your dad doesn’t do?”
“Cook.”
Laundry?
“He don’t do that,” said Gerry. “He don’t like being inside. He likes being outside.” He put hard working for Daniel’s character trait.
“Gerry, you’re on it, man,” I said. “Excellent.”
“Thank you.” He looked at my feet. “My dad has the same shoes, just lighter. My dad’s boots he got at Cabela’s.”
“Does he have a coonskin hat?”
“No,” Gerry said. “I have a rabbit hat. It’s the two back legs. And it has the fur.”
Mrs. Wells sent me over to Edgar, in a blue-striped shirt, who was writing about Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president. Lincoln liked the outdoors, Edgar said. Lincoln was honest and trustworthy. He’d taught himself how to read.
“Friends,” said Mrs. Wells, “I have Tamara, Theo, Adam, and Ryan not in their seat. Will you please walk to your seats?”
I asked Edgar how he’d learned to read.
“My mom taught me,” he said.
Mrs. Wells thanked me for helping, and I went to the tiny teachers’ break room to have lunch, sitting next to a blue, bulbous Dasani vending machine that hummed and heated up the room. I wrote an email, and when some teachers assembled to have their appreciation party, I went off to the cafeteria to stand guard. The noise wasn’t nearly as loud here as at Lasswell Elementary; there were maybe half as many children. Jeremy’s mother was overseeing a section of tables. I shouted that I’d learned all about Jackie Robinson from Jeremy—that he was doing good work. She said she’d gone to Buckland herself.
“You’re the president,” said the kindergarten girl from before school.
“No, you’re the president,” I said.
Another girl showed me her container of kettle corn. I admired Jasper’s sandwich. Mitchell flapped a piece of ham in the air and said his friend was a liar. Joanna needed a plastic knife and I got one for her. I made a peanut butter cracker disappear by palming it. “How did you do that?” said Jasper. I showed him how to hold up the cracker, following it with your eyes, and then when you pretended to pass it to your other hand, you secretly palmed it, while continuing to follow the now empty hand with your eyes. Three children began practicing with broken pieces of carrots and celery. Then it was time to be quiet.
“I SEE A LOT OF TALKING AND NOT A LOT OF EATING,” said one of the parents who were volunteering for Teacher Appreciation Week. “You took a lot of food from the salad bar, especially the cantaloupe. Try and eat the cantaloupe, and some of your veggies, and then go to your main dish, okay? Thank you.”
I taught several more kids how to do the magic trick, after making sure they’d eaten their cantaloupe. “It’s called the Chinese egg drop,” I said. Tina explained to me how to do a complicated card trick. A crowd of kids gathered around me, showing me their egg drop techniques. “Guys, you’ve got to sit down and finish eating,” I said.
The bell rang. I clapped. “Time to get back to class! Pack it up! Pack it up and go!”
Mrs. Wells stood by the door with her hands up. Lining up began, table by table. Mrs. Vaughn, the ed tech, said, “Alex, go back and walk. Alex! Walk over and walk back. Shhh.”
I led a line of students out the door to the playground for little-kids recess. A boy pushed a cart filled with balls along the sidewalk.
“Can I take off my coat?” asked a girl.
“Sure, take off your coat, by all means,” I said.
There was a large wooden play structure with two upper rooms.
“Can I take this off?” said a boy, shucking off his sweatshirt.
“Can I take this off?” said another boy.
A kid named Wally was playing with a truck in the sand, right in the path of a girl who was swinging on a swing. I got him to move so he wouldn’t be kicked.
“Mr. Baker,” said Edgar. “I found a sticky note, and I don’t know what it says. I just looked down, and I’m like, hm.” He led me over to the Post-it note, lying in the grass. It said, WECAN FRD 10 CRPS. I couldn’t make it out. I asked Edgar what he thought it said. “It says, We can afford ten crops,” said Edgar. It was from a kindergarten project, he explained.
“You decoded it,
” I said. “You’re a sleuth!”
A bright-eyed second-grader named Beth came up to tell me that she’d gotten her arm caught in the chain of the swings, and also she’d tried to kick the ball and she’d kicked the ground instead.
“Sounds like multiple injuries. Shall we bring in a helicopter and medevac you out?”
Beth shook her head.
Her friend said, “The chains really hurt on your arms when you get pulled back.”
I said that they’d had a rough recess. “What are you going to do now?”
“Shake it off?” said Beth. “Do the hokey pokey?” The two of them danced around and ran off.
Harrison, a first-grader in a blue jacket, came up sniffing and frowning. “No one wants to play with me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I really need to play with someone,” said Harrison.
A girl ran up and pointed at someone in the distance.
“He grabbed me by my shirt and ripped my skin,” she said.
I said, “Is it bleeding?” She shook her head and ran away.
“Can you play with me, please?” said Harrison.
I told him I could watch him hang from the pole. Harrison hung from the pole for a moment and then dropped to the ground.
“They don’t want to play with me,” said Harrison. “Everybody don’t wants to play with me. Everybody says, No, no, no.”
“That’s very frustrating,” I said. I suggested he figure out something to do by himself, and then someone else would get interested in what he was doing and join in. I gestured at the trucks in the sand, but he shook his head.
“Nobody wants to play with me,” he said. “That means nothing to do.”
“You can count all the trees,” I said. “You can count the blades of grass.”
Harrison spotted someone he knew and walked away with small, stocky steps.
Three girls had arranged a collection of dandelions on a flat rock in the shade of a tree.
“Nice,” I said.
“Gerry got hurt,” said Tamara, running over. I walked toward Gerry. He was fine.
His friend Sammy asked me for the key to go inside. He needed to go to the bathroom. I told him I didn’t have a key.
“I’ll go in my pants,” Sammy said.
“No, don’t go in your pants,” I said.
“Do it in my shirt,” said Gerry. “It’ll cool me off.”
I told him to go to one of the other teachers who had a key.
“Just go pee in the woods,” said Gerry, and laughed.
“That’s how Daniel Boone would do it,” I said.
“I know,” said Gerry. “I did that at my house. Once I did it here when I was in kindergarten!”
“You just have to sneak behind a bush,” I said. “Otherwise, maybe wait for a teacher.”
Sammy started laughing. “We ain’t supposed to do that out here.”
“Okay, well, don’t.”
Adam said, “We saw somebody peeing in the woods. A little bit ago, we saw somebody doing that.”
“I did that many a time,” said a fourth boy, Neil.
Harrison returned. “No one wants to play with me!”
A parent volunteer came up, escorting a weeping boy named Dallas. “One of the kids jumped off onto his head.”
“Oh, wow,” I said.
“So I was going to go in and get an ice pack for him.”
“That sounds like a great idea,” I said. “And this kid needs to go to the bathroom.”
“Come with me, buddy,” said the parent, taking Sammy’s hand. “We’ll go in the front entrance.”
Dallas said that his ear hurt where the other kid jumped on it. I looked at it. “It’s a little bit red,” I said. “You’re being brave about it.” He started to edge off toward the screamers at the play structure. “You think you can go back in?” I asked. Dallas nodded and ran off.
I retrieved a stray ball and watched a game of tag. A pretty, toothless girl came up holding a small yellow flower. “What kind of flower is this?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “My wife would know. It’s really pretty.” She walked away, disappointed. Darn, I wished I’d known. If I’d known the name of that flower, I would have taught something important that day.
I was asked to adjudicate a complicated dispute involving a piece of orange plastic—not a Frisbee, a sort of light flying ring—that three boys wanted. The discussion went on for several minutes, and it hinged on whether one kid had abandoned it on the grass, or whether he was still playing with it.
In the middle of binding arbitration, a boy came up and said, “That kid over there, Mike, tried to stab me and my friends.”
“Well, try not to be stabbed,” I said, “and try to be safe.”
A girl said, “A hornet’s trying to land on her! A hornet’s trying to catch her!”
The argument over the orange piece of plastic was settled and I walked to a different place in the grass. Theo ran over with two other kids and said, “Mr. Baker, Luke was grabbing me and pushing me around.”
Another boy, Matt, said, “He almost chucked me down to the floor.”
“And he’s breaking the rules right now,” said Mitchell. “No climbing up slides.”
“That’s a rule, is it?” I said. “Okay, let’s do it. Posse time.”
The four of us marched over to Luke. I said, “Are you Luke? How are you doing?” I read his T-shirt, which said KICK ME. “Listen, there’s no grabbing and there’s no climbing up the slide.”
“It was by accident!” Luke said.
I said, “Were you climbing up the slide by accident? You just lost your way, and you said, I’ll climb up the slide?”
“Yeah,” said Luke.
“He forgot,” said Faith.
“He thought it was something else,” said Matt.
“Everybody forgets on occasion,” I said. “But I just want you to know that’s not so good.”
A crowd from Mrs. Wells’s class gathered. “He was trying to stab all of us!” said another kid, Roderick.
“He was trying to kick us!” said Terry.
“I wasn’t going to,” said Luke.
“Yes, you were,” said Terry. “Show him!”
Roderick showed me his shoulder. Luke hotly denied being responsible for the red patch.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” I said. “Let’s have a happy time. Let’s do a little tap dance, come on!”
“I was on top of the monkey bars watching,” said Melody, “and Luke was shoving and hitting.”
The bell rang. All disputes ceased in a race for position in the line-up area. Balls went back into the four-wheeled ball basket.
“Can I hold the door?”
“Can I be a door holder?”
I chose some door holders.
Carla told me to count down from five to get kids to be quiet.
“I can’t find my jacket.”
A parent volunteer came up. “Come get your sweatshirts!”
I asked her if she had a key to get back in. She didn’t. “We’re stuck out here,” she said, laughing.
I took a deep breath. “ALL RIGHT, FIVE! FOUR!” The kids joined in. “THREE! TWO! ONE!”
“Zero,” said Carla.
“NOW WALK!”
We walked around the corner to the back entrance, hoping that a teacher would be there to meet us.
“Mr. Baker, are you going to be here tomorrow?” said Gerry.
“No.”
“Aw.”
The door, as it happened, was unlocked. The kids went in. I checked my schedule. I was on duty for second recess. I spun around and loped back outside, but nobody was on the playground. I heard the tweet of a bird. What the hell? I went back to the doors, which were now lo
cked. I knocked on them but it was so loud inside that nobody heard. I knocked for a while longer and waved. A girl came and pushed open the door for me.
“I like your beard,” she said.
“Thank you.” I waited in the hallway for a while, and then it dawned on me that the second-recess children, the third- and fourth-graders, used a different exit. I went back outside. Innumerable people had already replenished the playground with confusion, screaming and swinging and being ignobly savage.
Two girls, both in white spring dresses, came skipping up and said their names were Valerie and Victoria. I said I was pleased to meet them.
“Hi, Mr. Baker!” said Tina.
“Hi, Mr. Baker!” said Jasper.
I sang some Daft Punk to myself. Then I saw a tough kid scrambling up the wide slide, crashing into people. I strode over and looked up at where he stood on the play structure, shielding my eyes from the sun. “All right, I saw it, you’re busted!” I said. “You just went the wrong direction, man.” He looked sheepish and slid down the slide. “Good, I don’t want to see that going-up business. Follow gravity. Thanks.”
A girl was panting. “Can you unfreeze me?” she asked.
“I don’t think I can,” I said.
She shouted, “Alex! Alex! Alex! No, Alex. Alex!”
A game of Hunger Games tag was in progress, which involved extreme screaming. The girls seemed to call out to the boys more than vice versa. The boys roared and windmilled their arms. At the swingset, a boy batted the girl swingers’ feet as they came into range. “I make them scream and then I hit them in the leg,” he said. I told him to stop.
Two ed techs were talking about buying a used car with eighty thousand miles on it. I kept walking, passing a second, smaller swingset, and there I saw something beautiful. Valerie and Victoria were swaying gently side to side, smiling with expressions of blissful contentment, each holding the chain of her partner’s swing so that they would stay in sync.
“That’s poetry in motion,” I said. “Very graceful!”
“Thank you,” they said.
As I walked away, one of the ed techs saw the girls and called a warning to them. They stopped swinging. When the ed tech went back to talking to her friend, Victoria and Valerie tentatively resumed their movement, making a small oval shape in the air. They were moving no more than an empty swing would move in a spring breeze. A boy who was playing tag said to the girls, “You’re not supposed to be going sideways!” He ran over to the ed techs, who were looking in the other direction, and said, “They’re going sideways.”