Tales from a Free-Range Childhood

by Donald Davis

  Valentine’s Day in the second grade was only slightly different from that in the first. We did have better scissors, and we got mucilage instead of white paste. The mucilage tasted terrible and you couldn’t get the taste out of your mouth, but it did stick a little bit better. We also got to use the stapler to put our mailboxes together.

  There was one other big difference. After Eddie Bryson’s mama served the half-dried-up cupcakes, we opened our mailboxes and shouted out the numbers. This year, I got twenty-eight Valentines, because there were twenty-eight children in our total class and Eddie Bryson had taught me to give one to myself. It also turned out that Willie Freedle got two Valentines.

  After what happened in the first grade, my mama and Eddie’s mama found out about it. This year, both of them not only made us fix Valentines for Willie, they each walked us to school and led us into the classroom by our ears and made certain that the designated Valentines were properly deposited into Willie’s mailbox.

  Third grade was somewhat different. We were in Miss Metcalf’s room this year. She was a new teacher, just out of college, and she had a lot of new ideas. We got to use doilies in addition to red and white construction paper in making our mailboxes. With doilies, scissors, mucilage, paper, and the stapler, we made mailboxes that today could have come from Victoria’s Secret. Some of them draped from the chalk tray all the way down to the floor.

  This year, Willie Freedle got three Valentines. Harold Allen’s mama found out what was happening, and she pulled Harold in by the ear also.

  In the fourth grade, we were in a different world. Our teacher this year was Miss Daisy Boyd. It was her fortieth year teaching fourth grade, and she taught, as she said, by “doing things instead of talking about them.” We spent the year taking an imaginary trip around the world, a trip in which the places we pretended to go and the things we pretended to see were the context for shaping everything we learned, from spelling to arithmetic.

  When the first day of February came, she started the day off with a surprising announcement: “Today, boys and girls, we enter a very special month. First of all, it is the shortest month of the year. I think it is made that way so that winter gets over sooner! It is also the only month of the year in which we have four holidays.”

  Miss Daisy was all excited about every holiday she could find. We knew that something special was coming.

  “The first holiday in February is Groundhog Day. It is tomorrow. We will watch the weather carefully tomorrow to see whether we think that the old groundhog will see his shadow and give us six more weeks of hard weather.”

  At this time as we were traveling along on our imaginary trip, we happened to be in Italy. We asked Miss Daisy whether they had groundhogs in Italy. She told us that it did not matter because the groundhog about which we were concerned lived in North Carolina. It was the one that made our weather.

  She went on with the holidays: “On February twelfth, we have Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday. Then we have George Washington’s Birthday on the twenty-second of this month. Two of our most important presidents were born during the same month, but not the same year, boys and girls.

  “But my favorite February holiday comes before those two birthdays. It is Saint Valentine’s Day. The old groundhog will take care of himself tomorrow, but we need to go ahead and begin to think about Saint Valentine’s Day even today.”

  Later that very day, as we continued our imaginary travels around the world, we came into a little town which Miss Daisy told us was the very town in which a man later called Saint Valentine was born. That very day, she told us the entire story we had never, ever heard about the man from whom Valentine’s Day got its name.

  It was way back in the time of the Roman Empire, she told us. The emperor of Rome was having a hard time getting young men to join the army because they did not want to leave their young wives. So the emperor got a bad idea. He decided to make getting married against the law. That way, none of the young men would have any wives of any kind, so they would join the army and not have to miss them.

  Even we knew that this sounded like a very stupid idea. Right then, we knew a lot about why the Roman Empire did not work in the long run.

  Then, according to Miss Daisy, this man called Valentine came into the story.

  He was a plain old priest who heard about what the emperor had done. He knew that this was a dumb idea, so Valentine performed marriages for young couples in secret. It turned out to be hundreds and hundreds of couples, and he showed the world forever, she said, that even the emperor of Rome can’t stop love.

  We heard the story, but we secretly talked among ourselves about two things. If Valentine was a priest, he was not married, so what did he know about love? And more important than this, Miss Daisy herself was not married, so how did she know? Or maybe Miss Daisy knew that love was about more than just getting married.

  Miss Daisy’s classroom was a strange and different place in many ways. We had no school library at Hazelwood School at this time. Miss Daisy’s room had more books than most school libraries had anyway. All day long, people were coming in or being sent in from different classrooms to borrow books from Miss Daisy.

  Another thing was that Miss Daisy never closed the door to her room. Even when we all left the room to go to lunch or recess, she always made sure that the door was left wide open. When we asked her about this, her answer was short and simple: “Someone might need something from our room while we are gone. We have to be sure they can get in if they need to use something that is ours.”

  We argued with her: “What if they take some of our stuff?”

  “What if they do, if they need it? Besides, what if they are bringing something to us and the door is closed and locked? Think about all the things that we would miss if we locked people out of our lives.”

  It didn’t make much sense to us, but she was the teacher.

  When the story about Saint Valentine was over, it was time for us to make our Valentine mailboxes. Miss Daisy suggested that we wait until the next day to start them. She thought we might want to go home and find something like a shoebox as our starting place. We realized that what she had told us about leaving the door open had something to do with this. We might need big mailboxes if our door stayed open, for all the people who might want to bring us stuff.

  At home that night, I hunted in the closet for the box that had come home when Daddy bought new boots at Turner’s store. When I dragged the box out and announced my intention to take it to school the next day, there were plenty of questions about why the box was needed. Both my parents were accustomed to Miss Daisy’s methods, but they were still curious.

  I told them all about the stories of Saint Valentine, and of our curiosity about how Miss Daisy knew anything about love, seeing as how she was not married. I told them about the door of our room always being open and that this was the reason for thinking we needed bigger mailboxes this year, since anyone who wanted to could come in the door and add Valentines to our mailboxes. They listened with patient fascination.

  Finally, Daddy said, “Daisy Boyd knows more than you think she knows. And she often has something up her sleeve.”

  I had personally never seen anything stuck up her sleeve, but I didn’t want to get into this with Daddy.

  The next morning, the boot box went to school with me. All of my classmates seemed to have brought boxes of some kind to start this year’s mailboxes. Most of them were shoeboxes, but I did notice that Mary Caldwell had brought a Kleenex box. She would have to tear it open, I thought, to get out her Valentines.

  There was no hurry in Miss Daisy’s room in making the mailboxes. We could use any color from her construction paper stash that we wanted to use. She had both paste and mucilage. We even got to use her big teacher scissors with the points on the end. Years later, I knew that what we did that day had to be called “art.”

  Finally, Valentine’s Day arrived. This year, Miss Daisy herself brought both punch and cupcakes. These were fresh a
nd not like the ones that Eddie’s mama had always brought in years past. Miss Daisy’s cupcakes had big fluffs of red and white icing and little silver sprinkles on them. Some of them were even decorated with little red hearts she had cut carefully from construction paper and glued to toothpicks so they would stick up on the cupcakes.

  We had cupcakes and drank good punch, and all the while Miss Daisy had us retell the stories we remembered about Saint Valentine. It was one of the best parties ever. At last, it was time for all of us to open our Valentine mailboxes. Soon, paper was flying everywhere.

  For some reason, we were very quiet in announcing the numbers in Miss Daisy’s class. We did count, of course, and we did tell each other how many we got. I actually was highly disappointed that I still got only twenty-eight, including the one I had given to myself. I got no Valentines at all from people outside our class who took advantage of our open door to bring them to me.

  We were just about ready to start cleaning up our mess when we heard an unfamiliar sound of laughter in the back of the room. When we all turned to look, it was Willie Freedle. She had not torn into her mailbox as quickly as the rest of us. Her Valentine experience from the past did not inspire that kind of excitement. Willie was only now opening the top of her shoebox-based mailbox.

  That was when her laughter started. Its sound was not familiar to us, and I later realized we had never heard Willie laugh in the four years our class had been together. She was now laughing before she touched a single Valentine, and we could see that the box was overfilled and almost pushing the lid up as she opened it.

  We all watched, including a quiet Miss Daisy, as Willie opened the first Valentine. It was large and in a red envelope, the kind that Mama had told me was for people who were getting “married or something.” The Valentine was from Haskel Davis, our middle-aged bachelor school janitor. No one in the world had ever gotten a Valentine from Haskel. This was the first.

  The next Valentine was not as large, but it was just as impressive. It was from Mrs. Calhoun, our school lunchroom lady! She made us hot rolls every day, but we did not know she even knew about Valentine’s Day.

  The list went on and on. Willie got a Valentine from Mr. Stephens, the truant officer (we weren’t sure we would have wanted that one), and a Valentine from Mr. Kirkpatrick, who delivered the milk and bread to school. She even got one from Mr. Bowles, the superintendent. By the time the count was all over, Willie Freedle got sixty-one Valentines in Miss Daisy’s open-door fourth-grade classroom. We could not believe it. The entire room applauded Willie and cheered.

  As most of us cleaned up the room, Willie and Miss Daisy were busy together. Miss Daisy had Willie choose one-third of her Valentines, and the two of them made a bulletin board using them. It stayed up long after Washington’s Birthday was forgotten, showing us which holiday Miss Daisy knew was more important.

  Willie took another third of her Valentines home with her. I wish I could have been there that night to hear her tell the true story of what actually did happen on that Valentine’s Day in Miss Daisy Boyd’s room.

  The other third she kept in her desk at school. They lived there for the rest of the year. Every time Willie reached into the desk to get a pencil or some paper, we could see them. They reminded us that we still didn’t know how Miss Daisy knew all about love, since she wasn’t married or anything.

  But maybe Daddy was right. She did know about a lot of stuff, and maybe what he meant to say was that she had Valentines up her sleeve.

  Chapter 12

  THE OCTOPUS

  There was not a lot to do in Waynesville when I was a child. There were two movie theaters, a skating rink, and Charlie’s Drive-In Restaurant. That was about all. This meant that anytime anything unusual came to town, it was really a big deal.

  Every year or two, Rubinoff and his violin came. There were school shows and night shows. Everyone went to see Rubinoff and hoped that he would play “The Flight of the Bumblebee” as his big finale.

  Every so often, Preston the Magician (“winner of the Blackstone Cup”) came. He would hypnotize some volunteer teenager and have them on display on a bed in the window of Massie Furniture Company the afternoon before his big show. I remember well the year it was Grey Watkins. People gathered and gawked with amazement. That night, the show was sold out.

  I once recall a tiny circus that actually set up in a field below our house. There was one small elephant and a scantily clad trick rider whom even I knew was too old to be dressed the way she was.

  But of all these visiting entertainments, my perpetual favorite was simply that time each September when “the rides” came to town. Big red, black, and white posters would go up all over town: “Strates Shows—Riding Devices” were coming. Excitement was in the air!

  Finally, the time would come, and Joe and I would start begging. We begged each night at the supper table. I remember that I was about eight years old and he would have been turning six when we really got interested, mostly because we heard all the other children at school talk about going to “the rides.”

  “Can we go to the rides? Please let us go to the rides. Don’t you want to go to the rides? Everybody that we know likes to go to the rides. Will you take us to the rides? We’re probably the last children in the world that haven’t been to the rides. . . .” And on and on.

  After spending a couple of suppertimes like that, Mama would finally give up. “Okay. Let’s get it over with!” she would proclaim with a big, defeated shrug of her entire body. “But”— here came the warning—“I am going to tell you one thing right now: when we get over there, you are not going to eat junk. So don’t even ask for it!”

  As soon as the dishes were washed and dried, we all piled in our Plymouth and headed into town.

  The rides were set up on part of what was normally the junior high school playground, which was also the parking lot for football games. It was the dirt field between the junior-high building and the Richesons’ house. When I looked at that space years later, I could not imagine that it was big enough to hold what I clearly remember being there!

  We parked the car on the side of the street next to Bill and Bert Chambers’ new house. They were funny little people whom I liked. Bill always wore a little flat cap and was usually seen walking their little bowlegged bulldog.

  As we were crossing the street, Mama asked the question: “Now that we are here, what do you boys want to ride first?”

  At age eight, I was scared of everything, a total chicken. The only real reason I even wanted to go over there was so that I could watch and hope that someone I knew either threw up or fell out! I had no answer. Joe, however, was ready to go. I later thought that since he was only six years old, his brain had not yet come together, so he didn’t know any better.

  He looked at the first thing he saw. It was the gigantic circular spinning swing ride, with a ring of swings suspended by chains slinging people out from the turning centrifugal force of a huge overhead wheel. “Right there, right there, right there!” He was pointing at the swings. “I want to ride the swings and go around and around and around in the sky!”

  Mama sucked wind. “No, no, no! You cannot get on that terrible, dangerous thing. We do not even know who put it together! Why, if that thing comes apart, you could fly off through the air. You could go sailing across the street and right through the front window of the Chambers’ new house. You could kill their little pet bulldog right in the living room!” (I realized later that she didn’t say anything about whether my brother himself might be killed.)

  Before she even ended her sentence, Joe was pointing in another direction. “Right there, right there, right there! I want to ride ‘The Bullet’!”

  “No, no, no, no!” Mama sounded in a panic. “You cannot get on that terrible, dangerous thing! We do not even know who put it together. If that dangerous thing comes apart, you could land on the moon!”

  Immediately, I thought, Put him on there, then! Quick, put him on there now!


  By then, Joe was again off in another direction. “Right there, right there, right there! I want to ride the Ferris wheel!”

  Mama could not keep up. “No, no, no, no, no! You cannot get on that terrible, dangerous thing. We do not even know who put it together. Why, if that thing comes loose, it could roll to Florida before it stops.” (I thought I might get on it myself if you could be sure it would take you to Florida.)

  After all of that, the only thing we actually got to ride was the merry-go-round. And we didn’t get to ride on the horses either. It was obvious that they went up and down, and Mama did not know who put it together. We had to ride with her, holding her hands, on the little stupid bench that had giant ducks on each end of it.

  Still, I loved the smells and sounds and sights of going to the rides.

  A couple of years passed. By now, I was about ten years old and Joe was not quite eight. Summer ended, and the rides came back! We started our suppertime begging: “Can we go to the rides? You know you like to go to the rides, too. Please take us to the rides. We will not eat junk.”

  We had not yet been when, one night, Daddy looked across the table at Mama and pronounced, “Lucille, you don’t even like the rides. Why don’t you stay home and do something useful, and I will take the boys?”

  Joe and I got into the Plymouth with Daddy. As the car rolled out of the driveway with only the three of us inside, he looked over at us and said, “Ha, ha, ha, boys. We’ve got it made now. We can do anything we want to do. Do you all want to eat junk?”

  He parked the car, and we got out. As soon as my little brother’s feet hit the ground, he started jumping up and down like a bedspring. I understood this completely, as I had seen it before. He was totally overstimulated, trying to take everything in at once.

  Daddy just shook his head and said to me, “You might as well decide. Besides, you are the oldest anyway. What do you want to ride?”

  The answer was both easy and clear. “The merry-go-round,” was my quick reply.