It was five-thirty in the morning. I had a television in my room by six years old, a good sign that my parents were generally preoccupied. If I woke up early enough during the week, I was able to catch an episode of Flipper before school— the 1960’s television show about an extraordinary dolphin who lived in the Florida Keys. I had come to enjoy reruns from the 60’s and 70’s thanks to Nickelodeon’s most obscure hours of programming. I sat back in my bed, and looked past the the small black tube TV at the end. The wall across the room had a row of four clocks with labels, that read from left to right: “NEW YORK”, “DUBLIN”, “TEL AVIV”, “BELGIUM”, their respective times always ticking out of sync. According to “NEW YORK”, I had just over an hour before my bubble of solitude would be broken. I focused my attention back to the television.
Before long, my door swung open and came to a hard stop in someone’s hand; “BUDS! Ya-up?” It was Dolly, one of my nannies. “Yeah”, I grumbled. The door slammed shut. Maybe I would try to get out of school today, I thought.
I waited for the bus in my forest green long-sleeved polo shirt, which had a bright, crisply ironed white collar, and khaki pants. Weeks before school started, my mother would arrange a day for trying on clothing, often replacing the previous year’s potentially outdated attire. Several short-sleeved shirts, several long. A pair of khaki pants and a dark navy wool sweater with an itchy, tight neck. The shirts were green or blue, sometimes white. School colors. Once an article of clothing was deemed Good Enough, it would be added to the pile for labeling, not to be worn until equipped with the appropriate big, white label, “ADAM HIRSH” written large in black sharpie.
“Do the dance!” My sister said, snapping me out of my general discontent. With one hand on my stomach and another thrown freely to my side, palm out, I wiggled my butt side-to-side, alternating hands, and making her laugh. It would be a few more minutes before the bus came. “Can we play Nintendo later?”, she asked. “Yeah,” I said.
On the bus, I sat beside Maura, our next door neighbor, and a girl in my grade. Sometimes I would play Nintendo with her, too. Her house offered a nice reprieve from the unpredictable nature of my own, with her parents and brother being the only others around at any given time. By contrast, it was my mother, father, brother, two sisters, approximately three alternating live-in nannies, and a crew of caretakers who cared for my older sister Jamie everyday, who had been diagnosed with autism just three years prior.
I took a piece of printer paper from my bag. “Look,” I said, carefully tearing the edge off of the dot-matrix printer paper. Dividing the 10” string of holes even further, I crumpled up one of the small pieces and tossed it forward. The bus vibrated along Valley Road in Montclair, a beautiful and idyllic New Jersey town. I handed another piece to Maura. She tossed it in a small arc, maybe a foot or so. Perfect landing.
I went to this small private school in New Jersey for the entirety of my education, at least until college. A handful of people in my graduating class also attended in full, kindergarten through 12th grade. Despite the negative connotation that such a term might bring, we called ourselves lifers, a word usually reserved for military personnel or prisoners. Maura was one such person, a lifer.
The bus came to a stop, the first of three destinations, those being: the Middle School (Grades 4-8), the Primary School (Grades K-3), and the Upper School (Grades 9-12), in that order. The girl in front of us stood up, confident and ready to tackle the trials of a middle school day, her early-90’s hair-sprayed hair covered in tiny paper balls. I laughed quietly with my cohort. A moment of controlled chaos.
—
In 1988, several years earlier, I attended a Jewish day school in Northern New Jersey for one year. I was four years old, and completely at odds with my environment. Solomon Schecter was supposed to divide the curriculum between religious studies and standard educational studies, but every aspect of education had a distinct air of spiritual importance. As for where my parents had gotten the idea, my brother attended this very place until high school, when he switched to my alma matter. I immediately questioned the practical nature of learning a language that I saw only spoken in the very building in which it was being taught. Early on, I had an inclination that the observance of religion, perhaps this one in particular, was not for me.
This half-religious, half-secular day school would quickly become the grounds of my first rebellion in an academic institution. With a bottle of Elmer’s Glue in hand, I entered the classroom’s single-toilet restroom. I remember covering the seat with the ever-present children’s glue using one of those large wooden glue sticks. My thought was, the girls would stick. The work lacked subtlety, but I was successful in my discretion. Before long, a scream emanated from the corner of the class, and one of my classmates came out crying. My plan had failed miserably. Or had it? Chaos.
Still, I was caught, being five years old. Too young to write sensibly or express with words what I had done, our teachers would have us illustrate our wrongdoings with crayon when they were bad enough to warrant such a thing. I went home that day with a drawing of a girl getting stuck to a toilet seat; my confession. After a year at this school, my parents sent me to the aforementioned private school, where I would remain until graduation.
—
Another paper ball, this one missed. Our laughs of defeat draw the girl’s attention, who has been subjected to paper balls in her hair for weeks. The back of her head somehow conveys frustration. No, there’s no way she’s aware. The bus comes to a stop. The girl turns around to address myself and my neighbor.
“I know what you’ve been doing. Putting paper in my hair?” Maura and I glanced at each other quickly, suddenly terrified. “It’s not funny and you need to stop”. I looked back into our victim’s eyes, our age difference the multiplier of my fear, and nodded my head.