Never the Same IC#4 Early School Daze

Easing back into Kirk’s history a bit, we now explore the influences he encountered while at school.

 

Cue: “School” https://youtu.be/SUPJJqGRiK4

 

Kirk’s lack of associations with other kids and the strange relationships with family members drove how he acted in school. It seemed that in Kirk’s younger school days, he got little nuts around other kids. Like at church for example, where he attended Sunday School because his parents were pretty religious at the time. Going to and from these classes, he’d be the loud, over-active ringleader that ran around like crazy with the other kids in tow. He didn’t really interact with the other kids he just acted crazy and the other kids followed suit. The stampeding children on the elevated hallway would echo throughout the open hall area disturbing the solemn adult classes below.  Not being around kids his age caused Kirk to not know how to act and behave. Because he was so unruly and wild away from his family he was put in his place several times by his instructors and other adults, though it didn’t really seem to soak in.

Going to kindergarten began a whole new experience for Kirk. He found it felt like he had a large, captive audience that he could interact with if he had any real act. Getting on the bus on the first day and several subsequent days later with his ‘luggage tag’ pinned to his shirt made sure Kirk’d get delivered to right place. Kindergarten turned out to be an ideal place to be a hellion as well. Kirk also had that debilitating poor hand/eye coordination and coupled with too much energy Kirk, on a regular basis, smacked the other kids with toys whether he planned to or not.  With an audience, Kirk could run and yell a lot, speed around on shiny new tricycles, throw those substantial brown building blocks around, and have a jolly good time that is, until he was put into a proper frame of mind by sitting alone at a table or put in a corner to cool down. In theory, more time at the table should’ve helped him with the rowdy behavior and maybe it did because Kirk was never the same after kindergarten.  Kirk did though, in recollection, enjoy the snacks though usually had a tough time settling down for group nap time.

During kindergarten there arose a concern about Kirk’s mental condition. His uneven emotional moods and his speech impediment instilled a bit of worry in the teachers not to mention when that pesky trigger word came into play. Something else bothered his teachers. Even though a kindergartener wasn’t expected to be an artist on a level of Da Vinci or Van Goh, Kirk’s colored pictures proved to be a bit�"off, no, a lot off adding to his many other troubles. His colored people were green, lawns, and trees were orange, and houses were all sorts of strange colors they weren’t supposed to be. Perhaps he was indeed an extraterrestrial. Keep that in mind, readers. After some trials of trying to teach him the use of correct colors his teacher decided to get him tested. Yep, sure enough, that condition of deuteranopia was added to Kirk’s myriad of problems. So, he was never the same after kindergarten either.  Sometimes just knowing…

First grade proved a rude awakening for the shy introverted and over-active Kirk. There were things actually being taught after attending the pretty much free-for-all kindergarten. That meant he was expected to learn things. How dare they? The social problems weren’t as bad as kindergarten where Kirk had been thrust into a setting with unfamiliar faces all around and so now he was among kids he had seen before in kindergarten. In fact, attending a smaller school assured many of the same children from kindergarten went through all thirteen grades with him as long a student was not held back a grade or more.

Going to school all day in the first grade was a bit tough on a kid who liked to wander the countryside such as he did after kindergarten’s half-day classes. Apparently, most of the kids had the same problem about settling down with too much keyed-up energy, and so the teachers had at least one way to combat the fidgets. There was the chase and catch sessions where one kid would chase the other around the classroom. Well, except with the lack of space the kids had to skip. The problem revealed itself rather quickly that Kirk had no idea how to skip and apparently the only child with this dilemma.  No one ever showed him how to skip.

The teacher tried to demonstrate using one of the other kids, but when Kirk tried it he ended up looking like a Igor character dragging one leg but only a little faster. Not a pretty sight and rather embarrassing. Kirk just couldn’t get it, skipping. Finally, his teacher showed him how to gallop which with a little practice Kirk mastered well enough. He did tend to be faster than the skippers, so that caused a few annoyed speedy unfair catches in the class. Eventually, Kirk learned to skip and could then compete fairly on the same level with the other kids, in fact pretty much below the level of the other kids. 

About this time, Kirk had a friend from his class who lived down the road just a little ways, and Kirk would get dropped off for an afternoon of directionless childhood fun after school. The friend probably just did the same thing Kirk would at home alone except now could do it with a partner in crime. No they never got into trouble. Wink, wink. No, really. To tell the truth, the only thing he remembers doing at this other kid’s house was eating chicken noodle soup, a young boy staple, for sure. Kirk also recalls lunches of bologna sandwiches and snacks of fresh baked cookies and milk when the friend came to his house. Those times were good and the days felt seemingly endless. After Kirk grew a little, he’d make the short trip on his trusty bicycle, actually a well-used rusty model, but it got him there�"with usually a fateful stop along the way. Dun-dun-daa! Bailey’s spotted German Shorthair Pointer dog didn’t like bicycles.

  Every time Kirk headed that way, which was the only way he could go, the dog would run out a hundred miles an hour while barking up a storm. Twice, Kirk got bit in the butt and pulled off his bike. After a barking fit with the bike between child and dog, the dog usually trotted home happily proud of himself for stopping the overly offensive child on his bike. It didn’t take long for said child to be more prepared when he rode the route. He’d be ready for the dog and when it came running the boy would jump off opposite the dog’s approach. As the dog got close, Kirk would tip the bike over on the dog. After a few times of that procedure, the dog didn’t bother him anymore.

Kirk doesn’t remember for this author the actual problem with his speech but apparently he, unknown to himself, had a speech impediment to add to his growing list of personal problems. Maybe it was because no one spoke to Kirk on a normal level or at all in his baby years. Who’s to say? Anyway, in the third grade Kirk had to go and interact with a ‘special’ teacher for an hour each week. Kirk now thinks that a ‘special’ teacher would mean that he was ‘special’ a “retard” as they called autistic children back then. He shivers with the thought. Anyway, Kirk didn’t know what the rest of his class was doing at those times he was gone, but he didn’t seem to care nor never seemed to miss anything important as he recalls. However, he does recall doing a lot of sounding out words in those special classes, doing tongue twisters and so on.  On a strangely positive note in this, Kirk’s chronicle, he was never the same.

Well, he seemed to move on to fourth grade without any major problems and better speech patterns though his coloring only improved when he read the colors on crayons and knew what color his pictures were supposed to be.  Nonetheless, Kirk began to ease into a more level stride.

Back to a little home life we inform you here that Kirk descended from a long line of firebugs, and he remembers witnessing his first instance of fire danger. Back at his grandparents’ farm, working out in the garden when the mosquitos were swarming his Grandfather R. started a small ‘smudge pot’ fire to deter the insects with loads of heavy smoke. Kirk watched, luckily not too closely, as his Grandpa R. poured gasoline from a sprinkling can unto the stubborn, smoldering fire to help it along. SWOSH! The fire raced up the stream and ignited the puddle of gas in the can. POOF! Suddenly, Grandpa dropped the can because he was engulfed in a ball of fire!  And just like that, other than his sleeve, the fire was out. Kirk’s father beat the fire out in no time and that was that. Business continued on the farm as usual.

Then again, Kirk’s father always burned something. Piles of trash. Old hay and straw. Brush from trimming apple trees, and spring cleanup. Impressionable Kirk saw the fun in fire. Experimenting with sticks in fires, he studied how different kinds of things would burn. Knowing better after Grandpa’s explosion, he even tried gasoline. He could have burned the barn down, but he didn’t and learned the lesson. As he grew, Kirk tried different modes of fire fun. One great idea was the accumulation of gunpowder from rolls of bang caps for toy pistols. He also made little flash bombs with tinfoil and matchsticks, until it wasn’t so much fun. Not enough flame and flash, you know?

In one instance, Kirk collected the little bits of gunpowder from the caps and matchsticks in a plastic bowl and just when he had almost enough, he made a spark. POOF! The whole bowl flashed in a near silent flash explosion into his face that was like a foot away. Temporarily blinded and wearing burned-off eyebrows and lashes proved a good lesson in gunpowder safety, but the incident didn’t stop him, oh no.

Kirk went into manufacturing his own gunpowder with the basic ingredients from the local pharmacy and grocery store. In fact, he could make bigger, better flash bombs with those simple ingredients. In a natural progression, he began blowing things up. Like his plastic models, rockets and best of all an aircraft carrier.

 Set up with a paper roll (like a small stick of dynamite) full of gunpowder and a good long fuse, he lit it up and gave the ship a push out onto the pond. KAPOW! The ship didn’t just sink because there was nothing left! Kirk had a jolly good time with gunpowder, but he grew out of that just like his fascination with fire. Kirk moved on, though he was never the same after his gunpowder stage though his eyebrows and lashes eventually grew back.    

So back to school, fifth grade could’ve led Kirk down a whole vastly different life path. Back then, he became pretty serious about school time. After all, he was a chubby boy with not many distractions. Kirk eagerly studied and absorbed all issued school materials. His favorite thing, believe it or not, was pop quizzes. Almost everyone in class groaned when the teacher unleashed pop quizzes on the unsuspecting class first thing in the morning, but Kirk relished them.

In one case, the teacher dropped a surprise quiz on the unsuspecting students, but she suddenly had to postpone the quiz from starting a few minutes due to the sound of dripping, gushing water�"pee�"actually. One of the girls just couldn’t handle the stress. After the girl was kindly helped from the room and the teacher sternly snuffed out the snickers, the class went ahead with the dreaded quiz. Kirk dove in with gusto. Especially detested by everyone but Kirk were the timed math quizzes, but man oh man, Kirk loved them and buzzed through them with ease while receiving high marks. He’d whiz through it and proudly get up to turn his in before the time was up! Big man on campus! Fifth grade proved a step up for Kirk and he could have been on his way to a promising junior high if it weren’t for that dang dreaded “burro” in the sixth grade. 

So, in their infinite wisdom, the school faculty put Kirk in the “fast” sixth grade class populated with overachievers and wannabe geniuses. The youngster had no idea what he was in for in a class that went from standard math straight to pre-algebra and from English to Spanish. Well, not just Spanish, but it was part of the curriculum. Like a fish out of water, Kirk floundered�"just plain overwhelmed. 

He just couldn’t comprehend the algebra concepts which he suspected the other preteens had been exposed to before in the previous fast fifth grade. Kirk had the same problem with Spanish classes. The Spanish started easy enough though escalated into these complicated Spanish grammar sentences they had to translate aloud in class. Adding insult, and I mean real emotional insult to injury, the class recited a demeaning phase if you screwed up the translation. It went like this: Un burro res mas listo que tu. Meaning the burro (a*s) is smarter than you. Kirk heard it a lot.

Now, as a chubby preteen with low esteem in the first place, Kirk sure didn’t need that! Struggling through the sixth grade with so much difficulty he ended up passing the sixth grade by the “skin of the teeth.” The burro saying resulted in him to never be the same though he could of later in life used a good grasp on the Spanish language. As a result, Kirk ended up with a placement in a slower, seventh grade junior high class.

Going on to junior high meant being just like the big kids�"teenagers! Such as going to classes in the high school building which was a whole different experience with things like bells ringing, changing classes, and being above all�"teenagers! An intense Interest in cars, hot rods and racing became a central focus in Kirk’s realm in this era.

About this time, he discovered that his penis was for something other than peeing. Overnight, it seemed, to the boy, girls in general went from benign creatures to make fun of to gradually become very intimidating�"scary beings for some mystifying reason yet to be determined by the growing boy. His love of girls blossomed in a rather unorthodox manner that will be discussed in a later chapter.    

The bad old school days

Cue:  “Wouldn’t it be Good” https://youtu.be/AYMAtbq0bjY

As Kirk grew, sports and gym became more prevalent in daily school days. Being chubby didn’t help him in organized school athletic endeavors. During gym class, it didn’t take long for Kirk’s classmates to realize that he didn’t have any hand and eye coordination nor was very strong or fast on his feet. He couldn’t climb a single foot on the ropes. He couldn’t swing on the parallel bars or pivot on the horse. Kirk never shot a basketball towards a hoop before school, so it followed that Kirk would always be the last pick for team competition. Standing out there waiting to be called on to join a team was embarrassing especially with the added comment by the team captain along the lines of “I guess we get Kirk.”

It seems that these athletically inclined genetic specimens would stand front and center above everyone else from grade school to senior high and probably the same beyond that time to college and then to the corporate world. These are the kids who always became the team captains, then class presidents, and leaders in all kinds of clubs in school and then managers and CEOs. Did Kirk want to emulate these trend setters, these so-called born leaders, and brainy people that made it all look damn easy?  No, Kirk didn’t think so back then, he was shooting for plain old average accomplishments at that time if he tried hard enough. Kirk also wholeheartedly believed that those kids whose last names began with an early letter of the alphabet had an unfair advantage because they always got to go first. He thought being average in the middle of the pack he’d perhaps just get lost in the crowd and maybe fit in or at least fade in. But just the same, maybe average would be a stretch for Kirk the way things looked for him at those low times.

So as we saw so far, life wasn’t all that easy on Kirk, but all in all it wasn’t all that totally bad either. (Lots of alls!) One long term issue that he couldn’t change no matter how hard he tried and would affect him for a couple years was the mandatory wearing of teeth braces. Remember the grim lower jaw sticking out bulldog look Kirk had? His father foolishly suggested taking up the trumpet so the constant pressure on his jaw would force his lower jaw into place. (That’s a lot of trumpeting!) As unlikely taking up the trumpet might be for Kirk because he didn’t like trumpet music, he decided to take up the drums, but that’s another story within this story.

Anyway, somehow, his father found out about the State University of New York’s program of student orthodontic interns who practiced on unsuspecting children. It was never discussed if it was free or not. A good aspect of him getting braces was that this ordeal began in his early teens which meant that he’d lose the braces and the bulldog jaw by the mid-teens.  This was a very big deal as you might imagine.

One humorous incident occurred on one of the many trips to the university. His father wasn’t all that fun on a regular basis with few interactions with Kirk such as game playing of any sort, but he made the boy laugh on one trip. New road repaving was taking place on the expressway and so caused traffic to slow with workers, heavy equipment, flagmen and so on. On the skinny lane where they traveled the new pavement was thicker so the shoulder dropped a few inches. To keep drivers from falling off this shoulder the construction crew had placed old steel drums along as markers, maybe every twenty feet or so apart and very close to the narrow lane.

 The boy commented that his father drove very close to the drums. The father scoffed stating that he could get closer. He eased over maybe an inch or more. Kapow! The bumper hit a drum and sent it cartwheeling out into the ditch. A nearby workman yelled out, “FUN?!”  His father steered back and scrunched down in the driver’s seat. When the boy brought it up later at home, the father gave him the evil eye meaning that the incident should never be brought up again! 

Kirk’s assigned orthodontist, Doctor Straker, a student orthodontist, had patience, was very professional, personable, and best of all she was extremely considerate to little grim boys. Early on she let the patient know that it would be a long tedious process with visits every week. It was a tough process for sure. There were whole 360 degree head x-rays, gagging plaster molds, and long tough gum/mouth-jamming brace installations. One aspect that Doctor Straker dwelled on was the fact that he would be so handsome when the process was over. She got the boy’s total attention.  Along with that enticing motivating factor Doctor Straker convinced him that he needed to lose weight to become handsome for those girls in school. Hmmmm, he hadn’t given girls any thought �"yet. 

Loaded down with brochures of healthy eating and vigorous exercise, he started on a new mission and that was to lose weight and become handsome. As a reminder to himself while sitting in school, especially before lunch, he’d squeeze the roll of fat around his middle. Could he, in a matter of the couple years, become slim enough to become handsome? He didn’t know about that far off, high-standard attribute as an attainable and worthy goal to shoot for. Even those years later after he eventually became slim, he’d pinch the skin around his middle to remind himself not to be fat ever again. Gratefully, he was never the same.