Day seventeen - Epicentre

These memories I've been putting down on word, I'd place right about just before I started going to school. Most, if not all, of these writings, would have happened when I was five or younger. That was the age I was at when my sister was born - and I can barely recall my mother while pregnant. I sort of remember her with a very big belly - me not knowing nothing about nothing, I thought she was sick or something, and then I remember going to the hospital to see my sister right after she was born. There's a memory of just me, my brother and my father having a kind of indoors picnic, eating sandwiches on our sitting room floor. It'll be, as I shall be telling in further detail somewhere down the line, one of the very few memories that involve my father that I look upon with some kindness.

But as I started school, so too did a pattern begin to weave itself, though I wouldn't know it for years to come. You see, my first four years of school were spent in three diffrent places : first and secong grade I spent in the same public school, then third and fourth grades were both spent in different private shools. And why the change from public to private, I never quite figured out. I mean, I'd say we were that kind of middle class family that, while not being too ostentatious, we never lacked for food, or the occasional trip to the movies, sometimes we'd eat out, but more often than not our parents took care of our food at home. And it wasn't like I'd been doing bad in the public school, far from it. I wouldn't say I was a model student, but I was certainly competent enough.

So, ok, let's begin with the first two years in public school, which to my mind is something that I can't really distinguish from one another. I'm not sure that I have any lasting memories from that specific summer between shcool years, so it all kind of rolls together.

I've heard many a tale over the years about people's first day in school - how it was very traumatic, and everyone cried, and such things. Me, I don't remember having a difficult time of it. Rather, what I remember is how quickly I struck up a 'friendship', so to speak, with three other boys. I mean, day one, me and two other kids were already singing Queen songs in broken english, and let me tell you : these were quite likely the two dumbest people I ever met, because how in heaven's name do you fail first grade? These two kids - let's call them A and F - were so incredibly dumb... and they'd turn out to be the very first bullies I'd ever meet : that early friendship fast evaporated, and soon thereafter these kids took every single opportunity to bully me and the other kids in the schoolyard. Thankfully, I only had to endure them that year, but what a long nightmarish year it would turn out to be.