Mementos Background

Perennial

The local PBS station is running a special on folk music that is, of course, one big fundraising effort. I'd taken the dog outside to Rick Steves' talking about European festivals and returned to find the 1960s had returned: Judy Collins was singing "Both Sides Now." Wheeee. Childhood came rushing back. Between the sets of the special, they are hawking a four-CD set of classic folk.

My mind paused on "Puff the Magic Dragon."

Rewind. It's kindergarten or first grade. We're back in the 1960s, remember. No t-shirts, jeans, ratty sneakers in this classroom. The girls are in dresses or skirts and blouses, in tidy white anklets or leotards, depending on the time of year. The boys are in collared shirts, mostly button down, and pants with belts. Shoes are the usual footwear, with a smattering of clean sneakers among the boys (no mother worth her salt sent her kids to school in dirty clothes or footwear; the other mothers would talk) and patent leather for the more fastidious of the girls. Hair is short and neatly parted among the boys; the girls' hair, if not short, is pulled back tidily with barrettes or headbands.

The classroom is tidy, with wood-topped desks with metal legs and undercarriage. One wall of the classroom is three-quarters window, a row of which can be opened with a window pole on warm days. A flag is near the wooden teachers' desk. We start the day by standing to "The Star Spangled Banner" and saying the Pledge of Allegiance. The blackboard (not a whiteboard, but a genuine chalkboard upon which the teacher uses colored chalk on special occasions) is topped with cards of alphabet letters and a corresponding picture: A for Apple, B for Ball (or Boat), C for Cat, etc. and a row of Arabic numerals. At the back of the classroom is a big corkboard that is decorated and redecorated by month: back to school with apples and slates in September, leaves and jack o'lanterns in October, and so on. There are also corkboards on the tilting doors that cover the coat closet, and on those the best papers of the week go: Allen got an A+ in spelling, Arlene got 100 in addition.

It's fingerpainting day, so we may actually be in older versions of our clothes. I can't remember if the teacher gave our mothers warning so that spills wouldn't stain good clothes. Whatever. We were swathed in big aprons anyway, and the floors were covered in newspaper on which we spread our big white sheets of fingerpainting paper. The teacher, an older woman (to us positively ancient, like our parents, although she was probably only in her 50s), has the bold bright blues and reds and yellows in big cans and pours out smaller portions for each pupil.

http://www.kasbahouse.com/images/CR-49.gifTo accompany our artistic efforts, we have some music. This is supplied back then by the classic "school phonograph," a big, heavy "portable" unit with rough burlap on the case cover in a really ugly khaki brown. The teacher has a stack of 45 rpm records with songs suited for kids and starts with a favorite: "Puff the Magic Dragon."

I doubt that in those days we understood the full import of the song, but we understood enough about its melancholy theme: loss of innocence as we age. As we swept fingers through the gooey paint and spread it liberally over the white paper in abstract designs understandable only to its child creator, we sang along about Puff and Jackie Paper and how Puff went away when Jackie "made way for other toys."

The song ended. The teacher inclined hands to the phonograph, to whisk the disk away for another.

"No!" we protested. "Play it again! Please!"

And this is what we said, every time the song ended. For a half hour, or maybe 45 minutes, we fingerpainted our dreams and hummed along to "Puff the Magic Dragon." I don't remember what precious masterpiece I painted that day, or whether it was brought home to Mom or posted on the corkboard bulletin board, but to this day "Puff" brings back the sharp smell of fingerpaint, the rustle of paper, the faint scritch-scritch-scritch of a well-played record, the flash of plaid and blue and red of classmates' clothes, and a patient teacher who understood a child's attachment to a timeless song.

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