random thoughts – Day 1,323 – (Tuesday) – Oct 31

Once upon a time before "the move."

It’s possible that the most impactful Halloween of my life happened when I was 10 years old and in the fifth grade. I had been attending the newest elementary school in the city since kindergarten, where we had lockers, a gymnasium, and a cafetorium where we ate lunch and saw performances. The boys and girls had gym class together and I was usually one of the last or next to last picked for any team including, and probably especially, the brutally cruel game of dodgeball where we were expected to pelt each other with balls. At least it was a good way to burn off the energy and frustrations of being a kid. 

My family and I were living in a brick house on a dead-end street. My sister and I shared a room, and my brother, as the only boy, had his own room. A cousin and our grandfather lived downstairs. There were kids on our street, but the girls were either five years older or five years younger than I was, and I spent most of my time reading books in my room or at the public library. 

On October 31 of the year I was ten, we moved across town. On Friday, October 30, there was an event at school and volunteers were needed to direct visitors and I volunteered for a shift at a desk in the hall. During my shift, while staring down a quiet hallway with polished tile floors, I imagined that upon my return to the classroom, my teacher and classmates would surprise me with a going away party. This did not happen. Later, I wasn’t sure that anybody even knew we were moving.

The house when it was less scary.

The house my parents bought had been built in 1900 and sported faded gray paint and hedges that were about eight feet tall. The place looked like it came from central casting in response to a call for a haunted house. Thankfully, once the hedges were cut, there was an immediate improvement and it looked less scary. It was painted green, and years later, blue, and later still, there was new siding and trim and the place looked even better. 

That Halloween day, as we moved our things into the house where each of us kids would have our own room, my brother, sister and I met some neighborhood kids. There were kids the same ages as each of us, and they invited us to go out to Trick or Treat with them. My brother met his childhood best friend. My sister met her childhood best friend and lifelong friend. The sisters across the street who were close to my age attended parochial school and became my neighborhood friends. 

The house had weird noises. The radiator pipes rattled regularly. A kitchen cabinet door sounded like it was opening and closing on its own. Items disappeared and reappeared elsewhere. Dad felt someone touch his shoulder one night. I had scary dreams about the lady who used to live there. Mom saw a ghostly silhouette in the bedroom window and one night, after she told it to go away because it didn’t live there anymore, the ghostly sightings stopped.

The site of fifth and sixth
 grade torment.

That Monday after Halloween, Mom took the three of us to our new school, around the corner from our new old house. It was old and brick with wide, creaky, wooden staircases and handrails. Instead of a locker, we each had a coat hook with our name written on a paper label. Boys and girls had separate gym classes where the girls had to move the classroom furniture against the walls and square dance and the boys went outside for baseball or to the basement for pushups.

With no cafeteria, students walked home for lunch unless they took a bus or had parents who worked. We had to stay in the classroom with our sack lunches. It was positively prehistoric. It was a culture shock.

Some of the girls were mean and by sixth grade, the ringleader and her minions had graduated to full-time bullies. One lucky girl was chosen and the bullies would be horrible to her with name calling and even physical aggression. Then they would move on to another girl about a week or two later. There were two or three of us who were the lucky regular recipients of the cycle of torture. It made dodgeball feel like a party, because at least phys ed was only one class period a week. Classmate torture was every day.

I was made fun of for being Protestant (the “Holy Protest-Ant”) and for having a flat chest and being skinny (“flat as a board, skinny as a nail” and “a pirate’s dream, a sunken chest”). Orange peels were shoved down my shirt (“adding to the cause!”). I was called a traitor for being friends with the girls from Laurel Street School, our volleyball rivals, but it was worth the label, because at least those girls were nice to me.

I never told my parents about the bullying, because I didn’t need them thinking I was the loser the girls at school said I was. Instead, I took it out on my sister. 

As an adult, I wonder what was going on at the home of the chief tormentor and what life would have been like if we hadn’t moved or had moved somewhere else. But we did move there, and life changed. Some of it was better, not all of it was worse, and here I am, older and wiser, and slightly less insecure.