Just so

Just so proud of my Dad for memorizing all those poems and remembering most of them for, oh, like maybe 60 years. That was back in the day when teachers expected kids to memorize...and when kids did what they were told. The first one is "Nobility" by Alice Cary, and the second one, of course, is "O Captain! My Captain" by Walt Whitman.

Dad went to a one-room school for all his elementary years. He walked up a small hill, then down, then up a BIG hill to get to the schoolhouse on the top. What a view they had! It looked out over the 9-Mile Swamp and was gorgeous in the fall. Of course, in the winter, it was a bit more of a problem getting there. But...they took their sleds.....so the ride home was stupendous!

The schoolhouse was abandoned before I started school, but I had trespassed inside it. Nothing exciting. A blackboard on the wall. The desks had been pillaged. I don't remember if the wood-burning stove was there or not, but it surely was in the days of the school's use.

This is one of the benefits of growing up across the road from where my Dad grew up. We had a lot of similar memories. Of course, his were much earlier than mine, but the geography didn't change. And I did attend the same school building that he did when he was in high school.

By the time I came along, it was a two-room elementary school. So I had "Miss Oaks" for first and second grade, and Miss Oaks taught grades one through three. So I learned some things from the students in the grades above me; and I think I may have taught a few things to the students in the grade below me.