I never was a kid who loved school—though I did have a shining moment in fifth grade. I mock eighth grade because I’m outside of things, and I can see the shallow pride and the mean attitude. Back in fifth I was an outsider, too, but I wasn’t aware of it. I sailed along in my own world, feeling smart and awake and alive.
One reason I liked school then, for a few minutes, was because of all the independent projects. The teachers ditched the textbooks and taught us by letting us do things. It was a little like my Montessori pre-school when I got to pick up beans with a pair of tongs and drop them in a bowl.
In writing center, I got to write whatever I wanted, and I made up all kinds of stories and poems. But the projects were the best part. You had to include every subject plus one of the arts, and you researched whatever you wanted. My first project was on vegetarianism, titled, “Should Things with Faces Eat Things with Faces?” My second was going to be “Beyond Vegetarianism—Faceless and Hidden Meats,” but they said that was the same topic.
Then I went on to more animal rights stuff, and one of my favorite things was making up titles:
Love Your Pets—Set them Free
Of Course I Love Animals!
But If it Means a Closer Shave, then TORTURE the Little #!**&#$*&%$!
(Why Cosmetics Users Should Have Products Tested on Themselves)
Fab, Fab Fur— Inside Animal Concentration Camps
My projects were sort of inflammatory for fifth grade, I guess, and the last one was nixed for political incorrectness: how dare I equate a mink farm with a death camp?
“This really happened,” my teacher said as he leaned forward, his face drawn. “The Nazis tortured and murdered people, people, do you understand?”
I did understand. I had just read Anne Frank’s Diary, and I used to look at those smiling pictures of her, that girl that they murdered. I know it was typhus, but they killed her just the same. And not just her—millions like her.
I didn’t see the difference that gave us the right to torture and kill animals. And I couldn’t explain it to my teacher. “That’s not what I meant,” I mumbled, about to cry. “I know about that. But it doesn’t mean we should hurt animals. I’ll change it. I’ll change it.”
“It’s okay, Cassie, I just wanted to make sure you know. We have to be sensitive.”
“That’s what I’m trying to say.”
“Okay,” he said. “That’s good. Same topic, different title, and stay away from the concentration camp thing. Stay sensitive.”
I went back to my table, thinking, What about you? Were you sensitive to your bacon this morning? And what about the chickens who laid your eggs, their claws locked around the cage wires, pumped full of drugs and blinded by artificial sunlight? Stay sensitive!
2 September
At the concert in the park:
Aye, ’tis hot, Di, down here on the flatlands. The park is filled with people enjoying a “pops” concert. My mother is beautiful on stage: straight back, dark hair up above her slender, pale neck, and most of all, her concentration on the music.
I’ve brought some poems to help me forget the seething crowd—Sylvia Plath, Galway Kinnell—but it doesn’t work. The “rare, random descent” of the angel in “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” just pisses me off, probably because I’d like to feel some sort of enlightenment myself, and it’s so far away.
I wonder if other people keep it away: the angel, the radiance? Not always, because I have seen it burning on them. And in a crowd like this I have seen it too, but it separates me from them because they don’t see it.
Why do I hate them for that?
Another question is, do the smug, self-satisfied Christian soldiers see it? Does Jesus give it to them, does he give them the light? Do they only see it through him, and is that why they want to kill the world and die and go to pure light while the rest of us sinners are left behind in a toxic wasteland? Do they want to kill the world?
As usual, no answers, but good ol’ Cass keeps askin’ them questions. So you don’t have to.
I come across another poem, “When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone.” This one helps a little more, but it makes me envy the poet. I need to live alone—in my tipi with no one, not even family around—and for months, years, if I want to get to the point described at the end, when “one wants to live again among men and women.” At this point, I feel like the poet does in the first stanza, hesitating “to strike the mosquito, though more than willing to slap the flesh under her … ”
After a nice post-concert dinner at home, Dad grilling up some tempeh for me along with their chicken and wine, I came upstairs to read.
I could have brought my book with me this weekend, but I saved it for tonight. I’ve read it before, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and knew I could polish it off in a night. My lit circle group picked it, and it’s easy and good, a futuristic story of a “community” with no problems and no freedom. Also no differences and no prejudice, no history, no sense of future, no choices, and no books except for a book of rules.
Only “the Giver” has real books. He is an old man who also has, through some sort of psychic ability, memories of all time. After being the “Receiver of Memory,” he now becomes the Giver, transmitting those memories to the protagonist of the story, Jonas.
One thing I noticed reading it this time is that there is no nature in the community. A river runs along one border, and there must be a sky because there are fighter planes, but there are no hills, no animals, nothing except “sameness.”
The other thing that struck me was how the Giver’s previous apprentice, who happened to be his daughter, committed suicide. I could imagine that, after being raised in a society in which “I take pleasure in your accomplishments” and “I enjoy your company” are considered better word usage than “I love you” (an ancient phrase that no longer signifies), learning real emotion might be hard to handle. Was it really the memories of despair that brought her to despair, or the memories of bliss and love that, once her training was over, she could never share?
I have to come up with two questions for discussion, so I’m going to ask:
What do you think about the first receiver’s decision? And,
In 100 years, will our society be more like or less like that of The Giver?
3 September
A morning of garbage trucks in the alley.
Though I’m not sure what things will be like in 100 years, I can imagine that in the not-so-distant future, we’ll have a trash quota. All garbage will be weighed and measured to ensure that everyone is consuming enough and throwing enough away. This will inspire all citizens to do their part to make America great. X-ray screening and random checks will prevent people from faking their garbage quotas, but most people will participate honorably and enthusiastically. Nothing shows “patriotism” better than good, old-fashioned garbage!
School today was okay; my lit group is not too heinous. Mr. Sinclair made the groups after my little blow-up, and mine seemed designed to help me avoid the people who hate me. Todd and Maddie had questions that took about thirty seconds to answer, lame stuff like, “Why don’t they get to choose their husbands and wives?”
Everyone except me thought the receiver who committed suicide, Rosemary, was weak and pathetic and made the wrong choice.
“I think it was her dad’s fault, too,” said Todd. “He said—what did he say?—that he gave her memories that were bad.”
“Too painful?” I said.
“Yeah, and she can’t get any of that pain relief.”
Mr. Sinclair pulled up a chair. “Relief of pain,” he said. “You’re talking about?”
“It’s Cassie’s question,” said Maddie. “She wants to know if what’s-her-name—”
“Rosemary.”
“Whatever—made the right choice. Obviously no
t. She’s dead.”
“But wasn’t it her only out?” I wanted to know.
“Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” Maddie said.
Really? That was original!
“And it was cowardly,” said Evan. “She wasn’t strong enough to solve her problems.”
“But,” said Mr. Sinclair, “doesn’t the Giver think she was courageous?”
“That was because she gave herself the needle,” said Evan. “She didn’t need the nurses to stick her.”
“I still think it was the Giver’s fault,” said Todd. “He said he gave her too many memories of pain.”
“Do you guys remember,” I said, “what memory it was that she couldn’t handle?”
Evan grabbed his book. “Wait, I know—where is it?” He flipped through the pages.
“Despair,” I said.
“I don’t think so … Got it! Loss. Loneliness. A child taken from its mother. But that wasn’t the last one.” He skimmed the next page. “It doesn’t say. Finally, one day after a hard session, she acted all calm, but she went to the medical center and before the Giver knew what was going on, she was dead. He watched it on video.
“Wait,” he continued, grinning, “shouldn’t they have DVD by this time?”
“I thought it said despair.”
“What’s despair?” asked Maddie.
“Hopelessness.”
“Well, where there’s life, there’s hope,” she said. “And what she did was wrong because only God has the power to take a life.”
Here we go again, I thought. And luckily the bell rang, because I was about to ask her if that meant God had killed Rosemary. If only God can take a life, doesn’t it follow that God kills everyone who dies? And if God kills everyone, didn’t God kill Jesus too?
So I survived that okay, Di. Where there’s life, there’s hope. Or despair.
Now I want to go back to what I was saying about fifth grade:
Each of my animal rights projects had to be presented to the class. Some kids laughed at me, but I didn’t care. I’d always been a loner. There were a few kids I could play with at recess, but always off to the side, the edges, the corners. If I tried to get into a foursquare game with the perfect kids, the social elite—and this group existed even in kindergarten—forget it. I wasn’t fast enough to get a square in the beginning, and as soon as my turn came, they all bombed me. I never got any further than the “baby” square.
But the fifth-grade Shakespeare performance, Twelfth Night, put me right in the center of things, if just for a moment.
The tryouts were an assignment: everybody had to memorize a section of the play and present it. From that, the teachers decided who would play whom. Everybody got a part or some other job, from stage crew to costumes, and the whole fifth grade put on the play—not exactly as it came to us from the Bard’s own quill, but a fifth-grade version with as much of the Elizabethan language as they thought we could handle. The big parts were divided up, and I got Viola for the final two acts.
This didn’t change my reputation overnight. There were several girls who thought they should’ve had it, some who’d had drama classes and acting experience, and they were not exactly in love with me. But as the rehearsals went on, I was lifted up, I became their Viola (or Cesario) and they did start to love me. So much that the other girl who played the part dropped out and insisted that I do it all. It didn’t make sense—I don’t know why they latched on to me, but they did.
One thing I know they loved was the way I said the lines, the way I used an English accent and even went back to the original script for some of the speeches. Their favorite was,
And I, most jocund, apt and willingly,
To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die.
It killed them. Who knows why, but they loved it, they couldn’t get enough of it. It’s written all over my little fifth-grade yearbook—just the “most jocund” part—along with instructions to call over the summer and not forget them in middle school.
But as it turned out, they forgot me. Boys who wrote in my fifth grade yearbook, “Your cool, letz get 2gethuh!” looked right through me in sixth. It wasn’t that they suddenly turned mean, these popular people who had embraced me, it was just that I thought I had become their friend, but they had no further use for me.
Not that there wasn’t meanness too, but that came from my old friend, former friend, Jenny. Since I’d dropped out of soccer, we didn’t see much of each other that summer, but when we did, it was okay. Then, in the fall, she turned on me. She would pass me in the hall and say, “Hey, Drama Queen” or “Your Ladyship,” and her new group would all laugh.
I was baffled. I had been laughed at before, but this was different. It was cruel, not thoughtless. I feared and avoided Jenny and her friends, but I still felt the burn of shame whenever they were near, even after they got bored and ignored me.
So that was my little rise and fall. It was cool to have all that energy, first my own for animal rights, and second, the energy of the crowd, as they made me their star. Then, sixth grade was a year of falling, and after that, seventh grade—an abyss.
Journal Three
4 September
A fall chill in the air this morning, Di, and birds are flocking. Starlings have filled the trees, making a huge racket, chattering and calling in ascending and descending whistles like the silver whirly-siren I used to have.
School really rules, know that? It just rules. I have two electives this quarter—Español, which is way too easy, but in a tolerable sort of way, and choir. I like to sing, and Mom insists that I take some kind of music. Though I tried piano and cello, I don’t have the knack for instruments. Too uncoordinated.
The show choir is a bit silly—we have to wear these dorky tuxedo uniforms and do little dance numbers. All the parents love it, and we do sound good, except that the boys never really sing loud enough and only care about being paired with some Q.T. for the dance routines. I dropped down into the regular choir for about a day, but I could not handle how slow they went and how bad they sounded. If Mom is going to insist on choir, at least I want to be in the good one.
I sound like a snob, Di, I know. Cassie is better than everyone. Too cool for the show choir, too musically sensitive for the other one. But I’m not proud of it. I just don’t fit in with the over-achievers or the regular people. I’m just weird me, and it gets worse.
“Guess what new song we’re learning in choir?” I asked Mom and Dad tonight.
“Give us twenty questions,” said Dad. “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
“Animal. Mom?”
“Is it bigger than a bread-box?”
“Much.”
“Have we heard it before?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Was it written in the last one hundred years?”
“Yep.”
“When are you going to perform it?”
“School Assembly. September 11 memorial.”
“Was it written in the last twenty-five years?”
“Yes.”
“Is it about pride?”
“Yup.”
Dad burst into the chorus, “‘I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free!’”
“I thought,” said Mom, “that you were learning a new song. This one won’t take much of that, now will it?”
“There has to be the usual choral arrangement,” Dad said. “Some snappy dance steps—come on, Deb, don’t be so elitist.”
“If it’s elitist to hate that song, then I’m guilty. Couldn’t Mr. Kimble have chosen some more significant music?”
“‘America the Beautiful?’” suggested Dad, and I was about to say that we’re doing that one too, but I couldn’t get a word in.
“Yes, ‘America the
Beautiful.’ It’s overdone, but there’s music to it, and the lyrics are at least poetic and written locally. But for a memorial I was thinking more along the lines of a requiem.”
“What about that new Toby Keith thing?”
“Who is Toby Keith?”
“Cowboy dude, blond,” said Dad, “goatee, acts like he has a trademark on the American flag?”
“Cassie,” she said. “What do you think about the song selection?”
“Well, we’re doing ‘Beautiful’ already—not that anybody asked—”
“I did ask, darling.”
“And since you did, I don’t mind ‘America the Beautiful,’ but I despise the other one.”
“Why don’t you just move to I-rack then, little missy,” said Dad. “Move to I-rack and see how you feel about Suh-day-um then.”
“Shush, Gale. Honey, we despise it too. Why do you?”
Now came the critical thinking exercise. Their attitude is that it’s good that I hate what they hate, but I have to explain it myself. It’s almost enough to make a Republican out of me. Just to see them freak out.
“Well,” I said, “I agree that a requiem would be more fitting. If we had time to learn one. And the song is lame, musically.”
“Is that enough to make you despise it?” said Dad.
“Yes.” Approving nods here. “But there’s more.” Expectant looks. “Everyone hates us, right? I mean, not everyone. So many people around the world felt terrible when we were attacked.”
Now the silence. They weren’t going to feed me any hints to help me out. As if they hadn’t already brainwashed me to their point of view.
“I just think that saying you’re proud because you know you’re free doesn’t have anything to do with freedom. There’s nothing wrong with being proud, I guess … but it’s not about freedom. It’s about being all patriotic.”
“So you’re not patriotic?”
“Yes, I am. But standing up and yelling about it? I mean, while people are singing these patriotic songs, our civil liberties are being eaten away, one by one.”
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