On Remembering One's Childhood and Playing the Snare Drum
www.thechatner.com
It always amazes me when someone remembers enough about their childhood to discuss it in real detail. Lately I’ve been reading Angela Thirkell’s architecture-memoir Three Houses, which is full of lovely details about staircases and neighbors and people’s full names and has sentences like, “Those were the days when the Dover Coach Road still ran to the south of Welfare’s Green and the miller was living in his little house below the great sails of the windmill and the winter storms brought strange cargoes to Rottingdean beach.”
Lightly apropos, I have been often accused of misremembering my own school days because we never had a school nurse at any level of public school I attended, and until I was in my 30s I assumed that school nurses were some Leave it to Beaver TV trope. Apparently most American public schools do have nurses, but I’ve confirmed with others who attended my suburban Atlanta school district that the only relief available for sick kids was to call their parents to come pick them up.
Lightly apropos, I have been often accused of misremembering my own school days because we never had a school nurse at any level of public school I attended, and until I was in my 30s I assumed that school nurses were some Leave it to Beaver TV trope. Apparently most American public schools do have nurses, but I’ve confirmed with others who attended my suburban Atlanta school district that the only relief available for sick kids was to call their parents to come pick them up.
"I wonder if you have ever had to set up a snare drum kit in front of a group of kindergarteners?"
I love the little moment of suddenly feeling like I'm reading one of those chatty, charming 1930s authors.