Date: Thursday, 10/16/69

Today I skipped classes for the first time in my entire life. I can’t believe all the things that happened during this one day.

I met someone new. I found out things about the Town that I never knew. We, at the College, live comfortably and lack for nothing, while just down the hill from the College, not that far away, live many, many people with much less. Thinking through all that I saw today, I want to become a part of the Town. I’ve been given so much. It hurts to see people who didn’t have this same chance and who live right here.

Charles didn’t wake me this morning. He left and when I heard the sound of his Jeep taking off without me, I decided to skip the day at school and find out where I live. I thought I would spend the entire time thinking about all that happened last night but instead I forgot all about it as I went about the Town investigating.

I stopped at a cafe on the main street and had coffee and lunch. I’d never been in the cafe before. It had high ceilings, it flooded with light, the tables were mostly filled with students drinking coffee and reading. I didn’t read the Woolf book I had with me. I stared around the room like a character in a play who has awakened in a new town. The walls looked covered with large scraps of paper until I realized this wasn’t some odd decorating idea but were notices, filling up much of the available space, even on the walls in the bathroom. I read some of them. The postings were by people looking for part-time work, who were baby sitters, cleaners, or they sold wood, could clean stoves, had hay for sale. None of this was part of my world in Skokie. I made note of it though and wanted to think about it later.

In my pocket, I had the $20 bill Goldie sends me each month. I felt like Virginia Woolf. In her book she describes what it felt like to be able to take herself to lunch after her morning’s work in the British Museum. How she didn’t have to scrimp on herself knowing that the money she had gotten from an aunt would allow her this kind of luxury for the rest of her life. I, too, had some of that richness in my life, not quite to the same extent. Goldie’s $20 bill came each month and that was helpful.

After paying for my lunch, the thought of going back to the College didn’t agree with me. I wanted to wander through the Town, to observe more of this place that exists at the bottom of the hill and that has been here much longer, so I learned, than the College. It isn’t very big, this Town, and as the old joke goes, if you blink, you will miss it.

I turned towards the big white church we always passed as we came into Town from the College. For some reason it always looks blindingly white to me as if they painted it every day in that boldly bright color. Next to the church is a cemetery. I am going to wander through it on a day that is less sunny and colored by the rich harvest of changing leaves.

I walked away from the church and towards the town square. Old people and pigeons sat on the benches. The quiet of the humans was punctuated by the cooing of the pigeons who encouraged the old ones to throw bread crumbs on the ground for their lunch. The cobblestones around the square were littered with pigeon droppings and the uneaten bread crumbs.

There are no traffic lights in the Town. Traffic is sparse. What I saw driving through were mostly pickup trucks, loaded down with supplies or wood or equipment, covered in mud, held together with chewing gum and paper clips as Pops would say.

Not much seemed to be happening. I walked from one end of the Town towards the other end.

As I strolled along the sidewalks got narrower and then disappeared. On each side of the road, small, wooden houses painted in many colors sat very close to the road, too close, in my opinion.

We haven’t had rain in a long time and the sidewalks were covered with dust. The Town had this quiet hush over it as if everyone was either taking a nap or had left Town for good. It was that kind of quiet.

At the furthest end, beyond the sidewalk, I heard much shouting. I picked up my pace and discovered a yard full of children playing, screaming.

The children were streaming out of a solidly built, small house. They came spilling out and spilling out, without end. They made me laugh. Two women, one young and one obviously much older, came towards me along with their charges when I approached the fence holding the children in.

I think the expression might be that they looked like they were trying to herd cats.

The younger woman came right up to the fence to greet me. She held out her hand and said, “I’m Lauren,” she said. “This is the Day Care Center. Would you like to come in?”

If they were casting a movie, Lauren would be the one they cast as “the Hippie.” She wore men’s coveralls. Her long blonde hair was tied into a braid that went all the way down her back right to the bottom of her spine. On her coveralls’ strap a big red button read, “My name is Lauren. What’s yours?” Her full mouth and heavy eyebrows made her look like she lived on a farm that grew children.

I hadn’t intended to go inside the center but it turns out, she mistook me for someone who had an appointment to apply for a job there. I didn’t care what the reasons were, I liked the energy of those kids.

Unlike how I generally feel when I am in a new situation, I didn’t feel self-conscious at all. I didn’t question either Lauren or Elise’s motives in asking me to come inside. I’ve never felt that free anywhere and I really liked it. Of course, I didn’t realize they had been expecting someone else and this was a case of mistaken identity.

While I thought of Lauren as a hippie, my classmates at the College wouldn’t have been so kind. To them, she would be a representative of the People. Meaning she is poor or at least much poorer than they are.

Lauren asked me my name. I said, “I’m called Scags.”

“Interesting name,” Lauren said and opened the gate to let me into the yard. She must have realized at that point that she had made a mistake. But she didn’t seem flustered by it at all.

A large gaggle of little people now gathered around us. I couldn’t get over how they smiled and smiled as if smiling were a constant activity. Not something you put on your face to show your feelings.

I looked down at them and asked this little boy who had been the boldest of them as he stood next to Lauren, “Hi there. How many of you are there?”

He looked at me as if I were speaking Greek. Another little boy came pushing close to me and answered with his fingers splayed in his face, “This many. And I am 3 years old.”

He lowered his hands and waited for me to say something.

The other children waited too.

I answered by saying, “There seem to be a whole lot more of you than this one of me.” I held up one finger. For some reason they found my raised finger funny and then as if a secret whistle had been blown, they ran off yelling and hollering all the way back to the sand box and swing set at the rear of the yard.

Lauren asked me to follow her inside the house.

The little school house had been built by the townspeople. Lauren told me the history of the grant writing and the design and the construction with a great deal of pride. The town needed a day care center and Lauren and Elise, the other woman at the day care, ran it.

The interior was just as I would have wanted it to be. Plants, fish tanks, gerbil cages, turtles in little pools, ant farms and the kids’s artwork all over the walls. In the center of the room, their little desks and chairs sat in rows surrounded by mats on the floor and blankets and pillows that looked used but clean. A small kitchen in one corner of the space emitted baking smells. It looked as if they had just finished their lunches. A stack of dirty dishes sat in the sink.

Behind me, as I turned to take in how all the space was used, was a music corner. All their instruments and a record player sat neatly waiting for the kids to sit down and play a song or listen to a record.

The interior was really one large room broken up into areas that had specific purposes.

Lauren directed me to the “office.” She sat down behind a metal desk that she had covered with huge stickers of flowers in crazy colors that flowers can’t be.

“How did you hear about us?” Lauren asked me.

I must have looked away as I tried to understand the question because she asked me another one. “You did come here for the job? Right?”

She took a deep breath and the temperature in the room changed. From warm and inviting it was now at that place where each person wonders what is really going on and why you are sitting with each other. It was indeed a case of mistaken identity.

“I just happened upon the school. I didn’t come here to apply for a job. I presume that’s what you thought? ”

The silence filled the entire space. I didn’t know what to say, so I said the first thing that came into my head, “But . . . here I am and if you have a job I could do, well, why not?”

“Are you serious? It’s a huge responsibility to work with children. It’s not like getting a job in a library where you put books on a shelf. It takes patience and understanding to work well with little kids. They have so many things on their minds.” Lauren looked at me as if I would understand her.

“Like what?”

She laughed at me as if I couldn’t be serious.

“What are they thinking about? I would like to know.”

I looked her in the eyes. Her big green eyes tried to factor in my knowledge versus my total inexperience with children to see if it was worth her time to explain to me what they thought about.

“I know what you’re thinking. You think I couldn’t possibly be the right person for the job. By the way, I don’t know what the job is. But I’m curious and maybe it wasn’t an accident that I walked in here.”

Still Lauren was thinking. I couldn’t wait any longer.

“I’ll leave,” I said, “and let you get back to work. Thanks.” I stood up.

“Why don’t you come back tomorrow afternoon around 4 and see what it’s like here? Maybe we’re getting off on the wrong foot. Let’s try again when you are coming for a job interview. Does that sound like a good offer? Oh, by the way, I don’t know if you know this, but the College offers credit for this job. So, you can earn a little and I mean a little pocket money and credits as well.”

“What is the job?” I still had no idea. “How did you know that I went to the College?”

She looked at me as if to say, even Helen Keller could see that much.

“We need a tutor for our after school program.”

We said good bye and I promised to return tomorrow.

I walked back to Charles’ apartment. Everything that happened today was due to me skipping classes and going for a walk. How odd life can be.