Filed under: A
Kindergarten hadn’t been much of a challenge. I had learned the alphabet long before classes even started, and had already started to read small words. But in class, we were still focusing on the alphabet. I told my dad once, and said it didn’t make any sense. He just said that some of the other kids might still not know it and that if it was easy for me that was all right. I didn’t like reciting “A a ant, B b bird…” the same way everyday. There were more words that started with those letters, not just ant and bird. It especially bothered me when it got to the letters like c, u, or y, that made more sounds than just the cah- in cat or the uh- in umbrella, or the yuh- in yo-yo. And I didn’t like using “xylophone” or “x-ray” when it came to x because x made a z sound in xylophone, and I couldn’t think of a single other word where x made a z sound. And who really knew or cared what a xylophone was in kindergarten anyway? And saying x-ray seemed like cheating since the x wasn’t really part of the word, but using fox instead was not better, because it broke the pattern. X was at the end.
So I stumbled over these frustrations in my head everyday in class as we recited out monotone alphabet. And I was almost content to put myself on my high horse and recite, “A a ant” and then think, “or apple, or ankle, or Ashley,” “B b bird,” “or boat, or bear, or bucket,” “C c cat,” “or Chloe, or…” But that was about the extent of my reading lesson in Kindergarten on most days. We may have eventually read a few short books, but I remember most of the year, we stuck to the alphabet. My parents would help teach me a little more at home, but I don’t think they wanted to teach me too much, for fear I’d grow too bored at school. I already was.
With her new class coming into the first grade, my teacher, Ms. Visyak, had a challenge. She had to assign everyone to a reading group determined by level of experience. And she had never met any of us before. I imagine I was particularly tricky, because I remember her first guess. She handed me a short chapter book. I remember it had been about a dog that solved mysteries, but I think the only way I found that out was from her telling me so later. I stumbled over every other word. The next book she gave me was something much simpler, a short book with small pages that were more picture than words. I was assigned to the corresponding reading group. I don’t know exactly how it compared to the others, because as a six year old, I didn’t really care, but I knew it wasn’t nearly the highest. I remember a story about farm animals on the back of a truck. It was the first book I finished in that class and I have to admit, I was very proud of myself. A lot of the other students had stumbled over some of the harder words, but I was already coming up with my own context clues. And thankfully, Ms. Visyak noticed.
I spent the next month or so hopping reading groups. As soon as I understood the next level well enough, Ms. Visyak would bump me up to the next group. She gave me books to borrow so that I could catch up. I remember finding one in a pile of old school papers about the transformation from a tadpole to a frog a couple years after first grade had ended. I tried to return it to her, but she didn’t even remember the book. It took me ten minutes to explain to her why I was giving it to her. She only laughed.
She wouldn’t take no for an answer. She once asked the class to try to divide a circle into three equal parts. I thought I understood how to do it, so I raised my hand. I then realized my idea wouldn’t work, and tried to take back my offer to try. She wouldn’t stand for it. She told me to get up and try, even if I wasn’t sure. I was wrong, but no one ever felt too ashamed for being wrong in her class. But I was curious. The first thing I did when I got home was asked my dad how to divide a circle into three equal parts.
Another time, I spilt blue paint on the floor during art class. She told me I needed to clean it all out. I wiped it up lazily, and there was still a little blue spot that I didn’t think I was going to be able to get out. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me. It wasn’t very noticeable. But for her that was unacceptable. I spent the rest of the art period scrubbing. My best friend talked to me while I scrubbed and we whispered angrily to each other about how it was unfair that I had to scrub for so long. I had hated her in that one moment, but now I laugh at the memory. I must have been so spoiled. When I was finished, there was no trace of the blue paint.
At the end of the year she suggested me for the gifted and talented, or GT, program, probably to try to ensure I’d still be challenged. In fifth grade while I worked on creative writing pieces for the student made magazine in my GT class, my sister was in Ms. Visyak’s kindergarten class. Judging by the way my sister has turned out, she must have received the same treatment. We chat in our free time about books we’ve both read, like Bloomability, and Esperanza Rising. When Ms. Visyak retired the year before my second sister would be in her class, she gave a basket full of her first level reading books to my second sister. We still have them in the children’s book case in the playroom. Some of them had been some of my favorites in that class. My third sister’s kindergarten teacher needed a substitute for the first couple of months of school on maternity leave. Ms. Visyak was also that substitute. My third sister is still in kindergarten and has fulfilled all of the requirements for the school year and has started writing what she thinks will be a chapter book about an adventurous mouse. I now have little fear that all of my sisters will understand the importance and joy of reading, but what’s more, the importance of challenging oneself. We all had the influence of Ms. Visyak.
Filed under: A
This is a character sketch written in the style of Annie Dillard.
At a good bye party for one of my friends, Jacob and I stood at the buffet table. He was complaining about how he couldn’t stop eating the meatballs while I dipped a piece of broccoli in some ranch dip. Somehow it sparked a conversation about how I had been considering becoming vegetarian.
“No,” he said, “you can’t be a vegetarian.”
“Why not?” I asked, surprised he was so opinionated on the matter.
“’Cause no one will ask you on dates! Think about it. ‘Hmm… I wanna go get some ribs. Maybe I’ll see if Chloe wants to come. Oh wait, she’s a vegetarian. I guess I’ll just go by myself.’”
I laughed. I knew he wasn’t serious, but it was true. I told him I wasn’t too serious about the idea of being vegetarian, but I didn’t like red meat very much.
“Oh, yeah, well if you just don’t like it I guess that makes sense,” he said. “Well, if you’re ever on a date with some guy, and you don’t like the meat, just let me know and I’ll come hide under the table or something and eat it for you.” He then persuaded me to try a meatball.
Just knowing Jacob was a privilege. Watching him was like watching a sitcom. He could start the randomest conversations. A friend of mine once told me about how he liked to talk about The Swan Princess in class. I had to laugh at that. I had a video from my sixteenth birthday party in which, if you listened carefully, you could hear Jacob in the background asking someone, “Have you ever seen The Swan Princess?”
He was so outspoken that if you weren’t used to his style of conversation you could easily feel offended or simply awkward. He liked to think about the future. I once told him I didn’t want to buy a lot of food for snacks because I knew I had plenty of food at home.
“That’s a good wife trait,” he said. “Yeah, ‘cause if my wife always wanted to go out and eat when we had food at home I’d be like, ‘I don’t work so you can waste all our money at some restaurant every night. Money don’t grow on trees, woman! Why don’t you make us somethin’ to eat?’”
He loved to talk and he wasn’t picky about whom with. He didn’t judge. A few friends and I sat in one of our cars one evening while it rained just talking since none of us were in the mood to go home yet. The car was getting steamy, so Jacob rolled down the window. A man wearing all black and chains was wandering around outside. We ignored him until he approached us.
“Hey, do any of you smoke?” he asked.
“No, sorry. We don’t.” Jacob replied casually.
“No really, if you have a cigarette, I’ll buy one off of you.”
“No, sorry, we don’t,” Jacob said, not phased, “but if you’re really desperate, you could look in that playground over there. Some kid’s probably got a secret stash in there somewhere.”
“Yeah,” The man faked a laugh. He looked at Jacob a little confused.
Jacob laughed. “Or you could just break into someone’s house and hold ‘em up for cigarettes. Run into their bedroom and yell, ‘Hey! Do any of you smoke?’” Jacob was cracking up. He continued listing all the possible ridiculous ways the man could get a cigarette. The man kept faking laughs and looking more and more confused.
Eventually, the man said, “Yeah, well, thanks.” And walked away.
“Yeah, no problem!” Jacob called out the window still laughing. “It’s a little cold in here now, huh?” he said to us. He rolled up the window. My other friend looked dumbstruck. I nearly doubled over laughing. Jacob was oblivious.
Jacob was the topic of my family’s discussion on a regular basis. Both my grandma and my mom were good friends with his mom, and he was friends with both me and my brother. Between the four of us, we heard a lot of Jacob stories. Every time he got sick, my grandmother told us. Every time he did something stupid around the rest of the guys, my brother told us. I was the one to tell about basically everything else. My mom picked up a few random things like, “He thinks it’s his duty to join the army,” but usually she just liked to listen. I once told my mom about what a bad night Jacob had at homecoming. Unfortunately, my mom told his mom, who confronted him about it. The next day, Jacob came up to me and said, “You told your mom?”
“I told my mom what?” I asked, innocently. He just stared at me and shook his head. Neither of us held up the charade long. I said I told my mom everything. He said he really didn’t care.
Jacob was misunderstood a lot. The first time I saw him after his brother, Robert, came home from college for winter break, Jacob was laughing so hard I thought he was crying. Between breaths he tried to explain to a friend of mine and me that he and Robert had just been walking through the gym in the church building when Jacob made fun of Robert for something and Robert whacked him upside the head with his Bible. He said it was so loud that it echoed in the gym. He kept laughing for over five minutes straight after which he said, “Dang, that was funny. But now my head hurts.”
Another time he and I were at a church party. Robert was sitting across the room talking to some friends with his boxers showing. Jacob started fidgeting and explained to me that he was really tempted to go give Robert a wedgy and asked me if I thought he should. I just laughed and told him to do whatever he wanted. One of the adults came up to me to ask me a question soon afterwards. While I was explaining I had a hard time stifling a giggle as I saw Jacob run past laughing with Robert on his tail. He told me later that when Robert caught him he hit him so hard it bruised, but said it was worth it.
Once I tried to apologize to him after not trusting him. All I could say was that I was probably just insecure. To that he texted me saying, “That’s alright. Everyone’s a little insecure. Even the cocky ones like me.”
It was true. It was no secret that he was the strangest combination of caring and cocky that anyone had ever met. On top of that, he was notorious for being brutally honest.
Once as we were walking back from 7-Eleven, he said, “You know, we really don’t have very much in common.” He proceeded to list all the reasons why he and I could never be together and told me that he thought I was “between cute and sorta cute.” Most of my friends seem appalled at that story. I laugh.
He tried his best. His friendships were important to him, and he was very loyal, regardless of circumstances. He made friends with a kid in his German class named Kevin towards the beginning of the school year. When some of his friends found out they sounded disgusted. Kevin was infamous for disrupting classes with rude jokes and random, annoying attempts at beatboxing. Jacob just shrugged.
“He’s really not that bad,” he’d say.
“A lot of the guys think we like eachother since we hang out so much and everything,” He said once with an amused smile. “But I told them we’re just friends.” We both laughed. Yet, we were dancing together. He had asked me, and in front of all “the guys” he was talking about. I guess he thought I might want to know what they thought of us, but he sure didn’t care. After the song ended we left together so he could tell me about a cute girl he’d met earlier that night. When I came back my friends made the same mistake “the guys” had. I explained.
Jacob loved to try to give advice, especially about relationships. We once spent an entire Saturday afternoon working on a service project. We were tying quilts for the homeless and other people who might need them. Somehow, we got on the topic of my sophomore crush and all the drama he and I had caused. Instantly, Jacob replied, “Him? You can do so much better than him.”
This surprised me. We then argued about whether or not he was good looking or funny or even worth my time. Somehow, Jacob won.
“I have a prospect for you,” He said.
“Okay.” I was defeated.
“You ready for this?” He stood up and walked across the room to throw away a piece of string that had been stuck to his clothes. When he returned he leaned toward me and said quietly, “Those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”
I rolled my eyes. It was a little anticlimactic to say the least. “Yeah. Doctor Seuss.”
“It’s true though,” he said.
