1st Grade Blues

I had a problem walking the straight and narrow as a kid. I just couldn't do it. In this day and age, I would have been considered a "special needs" child, diagnosed with ADHD and any other mental disorder worthy of a seat in a smaller classroom, a daily ride on a short bus, and a year's supply of Ritalin.

Until I entered 1st Grade in Our Lady of Sorrows (Roman Catholic) School in 1969, I was a cute kid.

Before then, I was known to get in all manner of trouble. Don't believe me? Ask my older brothers. They'll tell you. One of them once found me with my head caught in a wrought-iron fence begging to be let out of jail. Another time, I walked out of my kindergarten class at PS 140 to hang out with my brother George's 7th grade class because I was bored. What boy wouldn't get excited by a bunch of giggling and fawning pre-teen girls?

But life completely changed for me in September 1969. I no longer got away with the same crap I did the year before. Discipline was the order of the day, and no form of misbehavior would be tolerated. I got no quarter from Sister Patricia who did not appreciate my "artistic need" to draw my sentence-ending periods the size of golf balls. Nor would my brother Joe tolerate my wanderlust. He walked me to and from school every friggin day with his hand gripped around my neck for two years until he graduated OLS.

For the first time in my life, I was learning those lessons that can only come through the experience of pain. I've already described the physical kind. Now let me tell you about the emotional kind how I came to know the joy and the pain of love....


The little girl you see seated in front of me in this 2nd grade class photo is Maria. I fell in love with her on sight the school year before. This photo does her no justice. She was stunning. However, being the naive young lad I was, I simply had to tell my family about my new special "friend". Big mistake.

For the next two years my brothers teased me mercilessly about my "relationship" with Maria. As teasing often goes, the more you cry the more it happens. My mother would intercede every now and then with a well-meaning but ineffective "déjelo quieto." But recall that this is the same mom who wanted to me experience the pain.

Still I would not be denied my huge crush on Maria, even after she left our school following the 1970-71 school year. In fact, I never really got over her until I penned this poem a few years ago.


Johnny and Maria

Oh what cruelty it is
To have an unblemished six-year old
Find the first love of his life;
To see his vision of beauty standing before him
In all her honey-haired, blue-eyed,
Forty-pound splendor.

Oh what horror perpetrated
On that poor young boy
To have his brothers learn
Of his new-found love;
To suffer the taunts of “Johnny and Maria”
And shrink in the embarrassing truth.

I know that booger-nosed kid.
He still cries somewhere
In the depths of my past;
Not just from the hurtful teasing,
But from the immense loss he felt
From the day Maria left his school.

Damn his brothers, all of them,
For making him keep quiet and
Filling him with shame.
He never shared with Maria
His longing feelings and
How she made first grade bearable.

I’m not exactly sure how
A kid so young
Can be so passionately resolute;
To stamp a petulant foot
In the face of so much hurt
And hold true and faithful
To such a fleeting dream.

So…Jesus can come back to life,
Moses can part the Red Sea,
Mohammed can command mountains to move,
But a six-year old discovers love –
An angel sitting two rows over –
And it’s not possible?

In the end, we believe in
Those miraculous notions that ring true.
Yours are in gods and prophets;
Believable absurdities from centuries past
That hold on strong
For the irresistible promise of heaven.

Johnny's is Maria.
And tho’ he knows not
The state of her Grace
She lives on in that place
Where he goes
To find the joy first love brings.

(2005) All rights reserved.