Bluestocking

The lady who taught my first year of school was Miss Carol Bean. She knew our whole family, and had taught almost every one of my older siblings. I remember when we got back to school after the holidays she "went around the room," as we called it, and asked each kid what they got for Christmas. Being a Willis, and everything being in alphabetical order, I was the last person to be called on. By the time the process got around to me, I had the benefit of hearing what everyone else had gotten for Christmas and I was ashamed that the cheap football I had gotten as my ‘big gift’ had been run over and flattened by a truck on the afternoon of Christmas day. It did make a spectacular pop, which was kind of fun, but not the kind of fun you would trade for a football. The truck driver stopped and got out of his truck, as though he had just run over our pet dog. He seemed sorry enough, but he didn’t offer to buy us another football. I guess it wasn’t his fault that our ball ran out in the road in front of his truck and got killed. I also received a paddle ball toy, and it lasted about an hour until we broke the rubber band. We didn’t know how to fix it. We didn’t know how to fix anything, really. When the only tool in your house is a hammer, every problem seems to take on the appearance of a nail. Once anything broke, it just stayed broken. A flashlight in our house became nothing more than a case for storing dead batteries. So, essentially, I was back to square one at the end of the day, and no better off than I was before Christmas had happened, and not a heck of a lot to report to my nosy teacher. If I had been mature enough, and secure enough, to tell the story just that way to the first grade class, I could have closed the show with a big laugh. Instead, I did what any red blooded, six year old, American boy would have done; I lied! I took the best of all the things I had heard from the other kids, plus a few things that I really wanted, and told the class I got all that and more. It blew the other kids away. I think I even got a round of applause.

Later, Miss Carol Bean told my mother that it sure sounded like little Buddy had a mighty fine Christmas, considering all the things that Santa had gotten him. Mama, of course, told the truth, and they both got a big chuckle out of my bodacious story. I’m pretty sure that it was a big relief to my teacher that I had made this up, since she was well aware that I was one of a handful of kids on a free lunch program at school. The poorest kids were also given free milk and graham crackers before classes got started in the morning, under the two assumptions that we weren’t being fed breakfast at home and that it’s hard to learn on an empty stomach. They were right about the breakfast. I don’t think I had a real breakfast in the 12 years I attended the Tullahoma school system.