Second Grade
I was in Miss Meyer’s second grade class at the “annex” to Clifton Elementary School. My Mom was 5’4” and my Dad was too (at least so he claimed) so I definitely wasn’t the biggest kid in the class, but it wouldn’t have mattered out on the playground anyway. The playground belonged to “Marshall.” At the time, I thought Marshall was a fourteen year-old fourth grader (remember I was seven) though he probably was closer to eleven. But he was huge, and he was strong, and he wanted my milk money.
And he took it, daily, for weeks. Standing up to him wasn’t really an option, he would just push me down and take it anyway. My friends didn’t like it, but there was little they could do; if they protested, Marshall would take their milk money too. He ruled the playground like a fiefdom of the Cincinnati Public Schools; I can’t remember the Principal’s name, but I absolutely remember Marshall’s.
Finally my parents intervened with the school, and Marshall went away. We kids thought he went to juvenile prison (isn’t that what they do with robbers?) but I really don’t know what happened. Marshall was gone, and my daily donation to his fiefdom was over. I remember my Dad taking me in the backyard and showing my some boxing moves; that’s how he handled the kids that bullied him for having a German last name after World War I. But I’m glad I didn’t punch Marshall, he’d have slain me.
Second grade: a time when things were simple, and the monsters were fourteen. When you called your friends “pencil necks” and “dumb butts,” or maybe one of the “magic words” you heard the older kids use in the woods behind the house when they saw two dogs locked in love. It was a time when there was no difference between common sense and “apparent” sense.
- “If there was such a food crisis in China, why didn’t they go to a different grocery store?”
- “Of course you couldn’t send a space ship to the sun during the day, you had to land at night.”
- “All of those famous explorers who froze getting to the North and South Poles should have gone in the summer.”
Second grade in Miss Meyer’s class was a learning time for me. I learned that left-handed people didn’t write correctly, and that sometimes you got knocked down for your lunch money. And I learned that sometimes your heroes get shot in a limousine in Dallas.
But as I grew up, I learned that what seemed logical to second graders isn’t really logical at all.
So it is always with some surprise that I listen to our current President of the United States, speaking last night at a rally in Grand Rapids. I have to reach back fifty-seven years to the Clifton School Annex playground and Miss Meyer’s room to understand what he is saying. To hear him call Congressman Adam Schiff, Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, “pencil necked” and “not a long ball hitter” (not a golfer myself, my guess is that is some vague sexual reference) puts me back playing four-square in the sun.
I think of those watching as like my friends in the circle around Marshall and me, wanting to do something to stop him, but knowing if they act, then Trump would turn on them, and take their “milk money.”
I hear that same second grade “apparent logic” we used:
“You’d be doing wind, windmills, whirr. And if it doesn’t blow you can forget about television for that night. ‘Darling I want to watch television. ‘I’m sorry, the wind isn’t blowing.’ I know a lot about wind.” (Trump, Rally in Grand Rapids 3/28/19)
It’s too bad they haven’t evented some kind of energy storage devices, maybe that could retain the power developed by the windmill, to use when the wind isn’t blowing, then recharge when it is.
I bet a fourth grader could figure it out.
