Plastic

It’s September 3rd, 2024 — back to school in Ontario. Our breakfast and departures resembled an airport catastrophe training exercise, and I’m left with a kitchen that looks like we hosted a frat party the night before. There’s a chill in the air that confirms the red creeping into the green of our backyard maples. I pull on a sweatshirt and make a cup of tea before opening my laptop. Dishes can wait. I need to catch my breath.

The screen door to our deck lets in the sound of a school bus farther down the road. It brings to mind my first day of kindergarten: the bus grumbling to a halt, the door folding open, and the step being so high for my five-year-old legs, I tripped and fell forward. The bus driver looked down at me and then significantly at his watch. In a voice as deep as the Brylcreem in his hair, he said, “You’d better get a hitch in your get-along.” I had no idea what that meant, but I righted myself and climbed the steps as fast as I could.

My favourite school photo of myself was taken in grade two. My previous school photos feature brushed-to-a-shine hair and a dress, but on this occasion, I’d forgotten it was picture day. It’s a candid portrait of my everyday look in the early 1980s: Smurf blue sweatshirt, face a little grubby, and hair that began the day in Princess Leia braids atop my head, now a fuzzy mess. I’m not smiling, so I can’t tell whether this was in the days before or after I’d fallen from the monkey bars and knocked out both my front teeth. Probably after, considering my awkward non-toothy smile.

I attended a rural public school of less than 100 students in grades one to six. Kindergarten was spent at a city school, and the first lessons I learned there were lunches and seating. School lunches were sent in plastic lunch boxes with matching thermoses. (Mine had Snoopy on the front.) Bringing something that looked or smelled strange meant sitting alone, and from the national anthem and the Lord’s Prayer in the morning until bus time, everything revolved around seating. When you got on the bus, who would make room for you? In class, where were you assigned to sit? In gym, you needed to sit one person away from your best friend, so when the teacher counted, “1, 2, 1, 2,” you’d end up on the same team. Seating could make or break you. 

Seating in kindergarten was around trapezoid tables that fit together to form hexagons. Our classroom also had wonderful orange plastic chairs, just our size. They were so wonderful, in fact, that my best friend and I decided to paint them during the art activity. We were not allowed outside for recess that day. 

Besides acquiring friends by way of classroom crimes, a good rule of thumb is to choose friends who have attributes you would most like in yourself — such as kindness or loyalty or bravery. I chose long hair and freckles. When I met my best-friend-to-be, I knew that if only we could be friends, my hair would surely grow as long as hers and my freckles just as plentiful on my freckleless face.

Having a physical party trick is also handy when trying to win friends or gain popularity. Disjointing your fingers. Burping on cue. Flipping your eyelids inside out. Unfortunately, aside from being a great chair painter, I had none. The gymnastic club girls were exceptional at this strategy. Handsprings and backflips could earn superhero status on the playground. However, real power came with control of the half-buried tractor tire. If you were first out on the playground and took charge of who could climb on or sit in the tractor tire, you were the playground god. Thinking back, I always felt not enough popularity points were gifted a particular boy who could run up the side of the brick school wall, flip over, and land on his feet atop the black pavement beneath. Not a huge margin for error, in my opinion. 

After we graduated kindergarten — in those days, you could actually fail grades and be held back, and there was often one suspiciously tall classmate attesting to this fact — students who lived “in the country” began a new school outside of town. My grade one classroom was equipped with individual desks, a record player, a stack of carpet squares, and hospital-green window drapes that looked like heavy plastic shower curtains. The record player was for listening to music, like Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf”; learning poetry, like Dennis Lee’s “Alligator Pie”; or playing games, like Sandy Offenheim’s “Let’s Play a Statue Game.” The carpet squares were for sitting on during story time. It was here, seated on one of those multicoloured flooring samples, that I committed my second act of school rebellion. 

I touched a classmate’s shoe. They were mauve running shoes with white stripes and zig-zaggy treads. The reading stopped. I was warned to keep my hands to myself. Then, as our teacher resumed reading aloud from the over-sized picture book, my hands slowly left their obedient clasp on my lap, and, overcome by some maniacal six-year-old compulsion, I reached out and touched the shoe again. I was sent to the hall. I stood and carefully walked from the jigsaw of story-listeners to where the hallway gaped at me from beside the chalkboard. Missing recess seemed silly compared to this unbearable shame.

Was I to stand? Sit? Was there a marked spot? The normally chaotic corridor was quiet and unmoving. Across from me, outside the grade three door, an older boy slumped against the painted cement wall. His long legs were stretched out across the tile floor and crossed at the ankles. His hands were folded leisurely in front of him. 

“Don’t worry about it, kid,” he said like some 1920s gangster. “Sit down. Chill out.” I recognized him as the sibling of a girl in my class. He was known for walking with an exaggerated slouch, which teachers considered undisciplined and disrespectful. I later wondered if he slouched because he’d spent the majority of his school hours lounging, L-shaped, in the hall outside his classroom. He must have touched a lot of shoes.

Our grade one teacher was the stuff of legends. She was tiny, round, and well-loved. It was said she’d been a miracle baby who weighed only a pound when she was born. As my young mind estimated from her greyish white hair, that must have been in the 1880s. I remember her as energetic and nice, but she ran a tight ship. This wasn’t kindergarten. Every Friday, there was a spelling test on the word list found at the back of our Mr. Mugs reader. How we faired decided what reading group we’d be in for the week. The pressure was intense. Once, I saw a boy in my class attempt to hide his tears after returning to his desk a third time with his math marked “incorrect.” What if you were trying as hard as you could, but your answers were still wrong? I was distressed by this thought and felt sad for him, but I looked away so we could both pretend I hadn’t seen him crying. Even in grade one, you have a level of dignity to maintain.

At the other end of the spectrum, but just as memorable, was my grade six teacher. He was a man of stories, and it was he who told us of our grade one teacher’s miracle birth. At the time, I calculated that he was as large as our grade one teacher was small. It was as though the size of the teacher increased with the grade level. He was a giant of a man who wore a coach’s whistle the way other teachers wore ties. On a windy day, his slick silver combover would lift from his head in an impressive foot-high salute. He didn’t permit the response, “What?” (The correct reply was, “Pardon me?”) Neither did he tolerate students standing with their hands in their pockets. He told us of a former student who had always fiddled in his pockets with loose change until a day the coins had struck against some matches in the same pocket and set his pants on fire. Perhaps, the real concern should have been why this kid had matches in his pocket.

Between the grades of one and six, the magic of childhood unwound. Like a ball of string full of potential, it unraveled with alarming speed once dropped, and in summer, both childhood magic and its expenditure were amplified. Until you attend school, especially elementary school, you cannot fully comprehend the euphoria of summer vacation. Two glorious months of warm weather and no schoolwork. For me, summers were filled with trips to the beach, visits to my grandparents’ farm, and sleepovers with my friends.

A sleepover at my best friend’s house included reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book together before bed, getting up early to watch Saturday morning cartoons on TV, and, if it rained, roller skating in her basement while listening to Mini Pops on her ghetto blaster. However, if the weather was anything milder than a hurricane, we biked all over the neighbourhood. On a good day, we acquired more kids at every house we visited. 

Beyond the borders of the sprawled village, a few kilometres away (farther by bike), was a highway. Across the highway was a convenience store. And, inside the convenience store, with whatever pennies, nickels, or dimes we found in our pockets, we could fill a small brown paper bag with candy. My favourites were Bazooka bubble gum — jawbreaking to get started, but well worth a cracked molar for the humongous bubbles you could blow — and Popeye candy sticks, which we called Popeye cigarettes. By eight years old, I was a candy stick chain-smoker.

My best friend lived near a quarry that was no longer in use, and the property was completely fenced off, with “No Trespassing Signs” bolted to the steel mesh. Nevertheless, there was a section of fence that was torn and folded back like wrapping paper on a Christmas present. In the summer evenings, it seemed the entire community migrated to that tear in the chainlink fence and ducked one by one under the sign that said, “No Swimming in the Quarry.” Although I have matured into an unbearable rule-follower, at the gilded edge of those long afternoons, I simply climbed through the fence with my friends and swam in that magnificent limestone colosseum. We believed what the adult swimmers wordlessly proclaimed: in summer, rules were flexible, changeable. They were…

The phone rings. Our landline. Like the drill of a school bell, our rotary Bakelite telephone shatters my reverie. My tea is over-steeped. The call goes to the answering machine. I search for a spoon to fish the teabag out of my cup, then set the mug beside my laptop and ponder the memories I’ve written.

Bakelite plastic was invented in 1907. By the 1960s and 70s, plastic was being mass produced. By the 1980s, everything was plastic. At least, that’s how I remember it. I was still a child and a lifetime away from my teenage years. For me, the 80s were a wonderland of plastic. Jelly bracelets. Jelly shoes. Just the smell of a new shower curtain can send me back. But, the word “plastic” also means flexible, changeable, and adaptive. My school years were filled with the changes of growing up, alongside the changes of the world around me. I remember when my parents bought our first VCR and the excitement of renting a movie instead of watching whatever was on Channel 6 or 11. I remember the first time I saw a home computer, a thing of wonder set up in a classmate’s kitchen. I remember lying on a friend’s waterbed while we threaded friendship beads onto safety pins for our shoes and listened to a Cyndi Lauper record — even though we preferred Walkmans and cassette tapes. Music. Fashion. Technology. Friendships. It was all plastic. 

Was that the lasting lesson of those school years? How to be flexible. When to adapt. How to chew that pink brick of bubble gum without breaking a tooth. How to rewind the cassette ribbon when your tape player tears it out and tangles it up. When to leave other people’s shoes alone. And, when to bike all over the neighbourhood and collect a friend at every stop you make.