Learner's Permit: Part #2 - The Early Grades

When writing this, we are quickly approaching over 25 years since I started my education. I cannot give a specific date, but I can tell you this much. It began in Paramount, CA at Our Lady of the Rosary (OLOR). It was across the street from the park where I had daycare and neighbored a Mexican Swap Meet. Nearby was a local movie theater that I went to a few times. 

I think my parents, more specifically my mother, envisioned OLOR as a legacy school. She had gone through with her sister and many of the staff members were people she had known personally. The principal, Sister Anna, was known for approaching my sister when we’d stop by and cheerfully say “My namesake!” It’s one of those odd details that is neither here nor there but shows how affectionate the staff was. 

It was a Catholic school with one of those gigantic churches that opened out to the main street. The bells would ring every 15 minutes. The walls were built high enough that nobody without assistance could get out. There were arguably only four ways you could exit as a student: the main entrance where the cars drove in. It would be gated during school hours except during drop-off periods. The other would be the exit for the cars. Otherwise, your best bet was somehow making it past the main office desk or wandering through the church unnoticed. Given there was usually an active prayer group going in there, it would be difficult. And besides, where would a child go from there?

I wouldn’t say that I had much of a relationship with Paramount as a city, so I was often trapped on the campus during those school hours. It is difficult to fully process when certain people entered my life during those years, so I will try to keep them at abstract starting points. I want to believe that a core group, or 80%, of the names mentioned, were present from the very beginning in kindergarten. It’s the type of enthusiasm that I wish I could say lasted me through my adult years. Even now, I sometimes get insecure when people talk about having “childhood friends” because of what happened at OLOR. In some ways, it was just a side effect of being socially awkward and not having anyone to discipline me properly. It was also just that late 90s youth culture was the absolute worst and I wasn’t going to listen to Limp Bizkit at any cost.

But that’s further down the line. For now, everything was starting off on the right foot. I don’t remember my kindergarten teacher’s name. I am just going to call her Kimberly. She was a nice older Black woman who did what any kindergarten teacher would do. We had the arts and crafts, some reading, playtime, and even sleeping. These were your typical social adjustment assignments that any teacher would give you at that impressionable age. I’m not entirely sure how to be critical of this time because I think what happened was largely conventional. However, I do know that one day during a school fair, many had gathered in the classroom to watch The Princess Bride (1987). It’s not a terribly important detail, but I remember Robin Wright wandering through massive piles of spiderwebs.

I’ll shift to the school fairs. The concept was simple. There’d be a handful of booths set up around the blacktop area and the grass. From there, we had a random assortment of games and activities for the students to do. Maybe you could even get concessions at one of them. They were largely student-run and some would bring in boomboxes to play their music. At one point I remember going to a palm reader and it had this aura around it. Unlike the other booths, this was designed as a closed-off room where to enter was to be immersed in silence. There weren’t any crystal balls or tarot cards, but there was this teenager who would look at your palm and read the creases. I think I had a swimming pool and a mansion… but that could just be me remembering jokes on TV of people spitting into someone’s hand.

When this ended, the bells would ring. I forget how many there were, but the initial one was supposed to gather students and have them collect the trash off the ground. They wouldn’t be excused until the grounds were immaculate. It was an easy way to get things done, though I want to say that I was also involved with helping to take down the tents when I got older. I’m unsure if that was before or after I became more of a permanent employee of Fun Services. Given my age, I want to say I wasn’t tearing down tents three times taller than me.

But kindergarten in general was fun. No real complaints. You had your whole life ahead of you and I think academia suited me well. I was studying whenever I could anyway. When I was at Fun Services during the busy seasons, I was often relegated to a back computer in the main office where I’d play Jump Start games starting with Kindergarten and working up to Fourth Grade. Maybe it’s because of this indoctrination, but I came to find “edutainment” to be very enjoyable. Because we didn’t have cable, we’d either watch Kids WB, Fox Animation, or the good old reliable PBS. Even if WB is known for its cartoons, Animaniacs and Histeria still had this way of sneaking information into every episode alongside the slapstick. Basically, I came from a family that pushed education at any cost. Not to the extent that some stricter parents would, but enough that I had an ethic before I even knew what a homework assignment was.

But the one thing that I remember regardless of accuracy is that kindergarten always ended with one ritual. After finishing loading your backpacks at your cubbies, you gathered on the mat and sang together a farewell song. It was simple, repetitive, joyful, and encouraging. It was our unified version of “Happy Trails to You,” but a Spanglish mix of simpler phrases. Among the more noteworthy was “Hasta la vista,” which came with the delightful lilt as you got to the “ee-sta!” Even then, I liked the teacher and presumably, she liked every student. She did her job.

Then there was recess, but also more importantly lunch. When you gathered for lunch, you went behind the classrooms where kindergarten through fifth grade would meet. There was a long row of tables underneath an awning where the bustle took place. We were split up between the younger and older grades as to when we’d have said lunches. Those who had meals would be served the food of the day along with boxed milk or chocolate milk. This was the trickiest part because sometimes the paper was so thin that even with a nail, you had difficulty popping a hole. Those brave enough to potentially consume particles would just slam the straw in and go for broke.

Like any other scenario, you were predicted to sit with your own group. So, hypothetically I would sit with a group labeled “kindergarten, boys.” The place was loud with conversation. Everyone was planning either what to do after eating or what the upcoming weekend looked like. The sports were diverse, though I feel like more often than not we were stuck playing basketball on the blacktop or kickball over on the baseball field. I wasn’t exactly the most athletic, but then again “kindergarten, boys” were more competitive without any larger motive at that point. You just had to run fast and hope nobody got you rounding home.

The one thing that was interesting about the lunch area was that it introduced me to one of the stranger beliefs I formed about myself. Because we were next to a swap meet, some powerlines ran alongside the dividing wall. Not knowing how electricity worked, I would sit there listening to the buzz and think less that it was an external and more an internal one. It would happen whenever I was around electricity. Because I also had been tested for hearing issues for most of my early childhood, I had this self-consciousness about sound in general. There were periods where I’d have eardrops inserted daily or my father, quite painfully, would scrub wax out my ears. 

Because of this, I thought that the sound was in my head. The buzzing noise had a very distinct sound and it echoed through my skull. That’s why I came to believe that I had swallowed a fly that was running through my insides. It didn’t feel painful nor did make sense, but maybe it entered through my ear or when I left my mouth open. Whatever it was, I was hearing the buzzing. As I’ve gotten older, I would chalk it up to potential signs of being autistic and having sensitive ears. As a child, it was more often than not a shame that I kept to myself. 

I’d like to say that as I aged I developed into the Grade A student that I alluded to earlier. This isn’t to say I was a bad student, but there was the familiar pressure whenever a report card came around. I didn’t stay atop my grades, eagerly putting every decimal in the right place. No, I simply went about my school season and prayed that I got to the end in one piece. I would receive a little folder with the report card in it and hope I was deemed smart. Like all parents, there was the drive to get good grades for the sake of reward. Because my grandfather ran Fun Services, it might’ve even been financial at some points. I think the idea was to suggest that The Willetts were putting in effort. I can’t say what grades I ever got but I’ll say this much… I graduated from university, didn’t I?

Another issue that formed as I rounded first grade was that I had the aggression that most male-identifying children have at that age. If I wasn’t playing sports with the other boys, I was somehow stuck behind a random classroom getting into fights. To be honest, I don’t remember how I got into any of those fights, but they were all in the same spot, just adjacent to the playground and out of sight. Someone would snitch and I’d get punished. What became confusing was the conjoined opinion that doing the “crime” was bad, but “snitching” was somehow punishable too. I don’t think the school enforced that, but it was a common belief among different groups there.

For some reason, it feels like most fights started midway through a memory. I was there but not cognizant of how. Otherwise, I’d just jump over to the playground where the metal merry-go-round and jungle gym stood. It was the 90s and by the end of my time there a student would fall off said merry-go-round and bust up their leg. I remember arriving that day as she was put into an ambulance and being very alarmed. The playground was shut down shortly after, only repaired after I had left.

But moving on to first grade, I think that was still in the glory days of OLOR. For starters, Sister Peggy is another teacher who thought of me fondly throughout those months together. I think it was because I read books and presented a student who was willing to learn. The only time she didn’t like me was during the occasional spelling test where we’d put up our folders to keep the neighbors from cheating. I was caught one time because I had left the answers in said folder and I was very obvious about my cheating. Alas, I got a zero. She was a good teacher, the type who suggested: “The truth will set you free.” 

Another reason that there’s something admirable about Sister Peggy is that she encouraged reading despite me choosing material that may seem objectionable to a religious background. We weren’t exactly staunch Catholics, but there was still the pressure to present a good image to the school body. They were predominantly Mexican. If you sat around in the quad on the other side of campus, you were likely to hear Mariachi music and hip-hop as students were picked up. Every now and then a low rider would come through doing the hydraulic dances. I think Sister Peggy was just enthused I was reading at all, which is likely why she was cool with me reading R.L. Stine’s “Goosebumps” a bit too, ahem, religiously. It was the main series, but also the choose your own adventure spin-offs. Something was thrilling about every read, like discovering a world not dissimilar from your own, but dark enough to hide something sinister. It was a trip to turn on the TV on Saturdays and see Stine presenting a Twilight Zone-esque introduction of a filmed adaptation. While I wouldn’t say I was devoted to horror from an early age, it was crucial in my reading journey much more than other more noteworthy coming of age classics.

It is here that I also begin to introduce the major students present for most of the few years I was there. 

The most contentious was Francisco. For reasons I never learned, I was encouraged not to hang around him. I don’t think we ever committed vandalism or anything mean-spirited. I think Sister Anna simply believed that he was a bad influence on me. I forget if he was in our class or not, but given that he always seemed to be more buoyant and energetic than my peers, I want to say he was from somewhere else on campus. We were the same age and there was something delightful about tapping into his energy. We shared the same type of creativity and made the familiar first-grade-level jokes together. It felt forbidden because we knew if they ever saw us happy, we’d be in trouble simply for talking during school hours. 

I can’t say exactly what became of him. What I can say is that the one event that does come to mind is us sitting outside during recess on a bench. It was a bit warped, so we’d jump up and down while sitting on it. It was the funniest thing in the world. Another time we’d lie down and look at this flock of seagulls circling overhead and pretend that they were dropping missiles on us. We’d overact every hit. Our games meant nothing, but I was still told by Sister Anna that Francisco was “a bad influence on you.” Whatever.

If we’re talking about what I would prescribe as a “first crush,” it had to be Marissa. The way I remember her in my mind was that she had long hair, partially covering her face with this pout. There’s nothing terribly interesting about this story other than I thought she was cute. 

The other girls I tended to know fell under the more “academic” section of the class. For the sake of brevity, I’ll lump Cindy, Vaiuku, and Grace all under the same category. They were who you turned to if you wanted the answers. As we got older, they were the ones dominating all of the bees: spelling, math, and geography. They would be escorted out of class to the library during these seasons to study for them. Much like the monthly blue-and-white striped pins we got to determine who were the excellent students (for example: Boy of the Month, Girl of the Month, Perfect Attendance), they would often get the ribbons for coming in the top spots. I would only say that I was friends with them in the conventional sense that everyone in first grade at least tolerated each other.

There were others like Jose and Roger that I remember enjoying being around. However, if you want to talk about the behemoth of childhood memories, I would have to dedicate a large section of this journey to Marco. For whatever reason, Marco and I hit it off to the point that our parents were temporarily friends. We hung out together and even became pen pals over the summer. When Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1998) came out, we had plans to see it together. We were the type of friends that you’d assume would make it. We kept in touch during the summer to the point it became exciting to imagine what the next school year was going to look like when we met back up.

We were naïve children, that’s for sure. I think so long as we held onto the simple things in life, we would get along. For example, there was a time when we’d obsess over the Youngstown song “Everything You Want.” It made studying pop culture and being aware of a larger world more entrancing. We played sports with the other boys and I think he was genuinely one of those people that made arriving at school a delight most mornings. But… I’ll get into the fallout later.

I think beyond that, there was only one specific student who meant a lot to me. I think it’s difficult to really assess because, again, so much is attached to the fallout. However, Crystal D. was special. When I wasn’t playing with the boys, I was hanging out with Crystal D. and her friends. She was one of three Crystals at the school (the others being A and C). With jet-black hair, I like to think much like Marco we hit it off in the way that school kids do. She thought I was cool. I thought she was great. There was something about simply being together that made recess a lot more meaningful.

It was mostly a platonic feeling, in large part because first grade didn’t present me with more than the abstract sense of emotional “she pretty” basicness. As the years went on, she openly admitted that she would never kiss me on the mouth but would be fine with one on the cheek. Even then, it was about more than that. Sure, the novelty of “grown up emotions” was alluring at the time, but having someone who you felt respected you meant a lot. Regrettably, she was another figure who got caught up in a complicated web towards the end that I’ll get into later on.

But the reality was simple. Within the first few grades, I had a core friend group and one that in an alternate universe, I would’ve probably stayed friends with to this day. It seems ridiculous to think given what’s happened, but as people discuss OLOR reunions, I still go back and forth between having positive and negative emotions for that place. 

The remaining teachers were not exactly the most memorable on the same level as Sister Peggy. While I would see her regularly at school events, I don’t think I formed a strong bond with anyone since. There was Ms. Horkey, who was best known for driving a black pick-up truck with a blue lightning bolt down the side. My dad seemed to be a closer friend to her, so I remember once or twice she actually babysat us and took us to school. 

Beyond that, what I’m about to say is an amalgamation of the grades first through fourth. There isn’t a particular order to events otherwise, but I hope they help to paint a better picture of my time at OLOR.

There were a lot of expectations of being a student at a Catholic school. On top of maintaining a religious education, you had to wear uniforms which for boys was a white shirt with the seal over the breast along with shorts or pants. I remember my mother having to go to the clothes manufacturer’s warehouse and waiting all day to have her number called just to make sure I got the right pair. For women, it was a similar shirt, but they had a plaid skirt. Their rules were much stricter than men’s, which included the familiar “tip of fingers” rule stuff. I think one of the few things that I’ve held onto from my time there is the strange indoctrination of uniforms with success…or at least a fascination with collared shirts.

Because of this, I learned all of the prayers. I went through the sacraments and had the familiar sets of rituals. When visiting my grandmother, we’d watch these animated Christian VHS tapes that retold bible stories. I can’t speak to the quality of animation, but they likely felt stiff compared even to PBS alternatives like Arthur. Again, we weren’t devoted to the point that certain media was blasphemous. However, I still remember buying a Rage Against the Machine album once and them getting mad at me because “the machine is the government.” Other than that, you can assume what channels and when I was allowed to watch. Somehow Fox was okay and The Simpsons quickly became my afternoon ritual at 6 PM. A small piece of comfort from the frustrations of everyday life.

But we were religious to the point that we’d have annual Rosary walks. What this meant was that every class would gather in one long line and circle the school while reciting every prayer on a Rosary necklace. The few who were lucky not to do this walk were part of the elected student body. Those were the handful who got to stand in the quad and stare at a statue of Mother Mary the whole time. I got to do the staring once and let me tell you it was still kind of dull. Either way, the Rosary has remained one of the more baffling parts of faith to me, as it really drives most students’ impatience. I get that there is something to routine and repetition, but it really did get tiresome circling the campus.

Because of the religious implications of the school, you’d also get offered a part-time job, without pay of course, to be an altar server. While I’m sure there was some curiosity on my part, there was an effort put forward for me to join. As a result, I got to miss class somedays until mass ended at 8:30. For as banal as it sounds, having a valid excuse was one of the best parts of altar serving, even if you were instead sitting in a church all wardrobed up waiting for the priest to call you up.

I am not going to go through the entire process of a mass. For those who have gone, you are aware of what the usually three servers do. During regular midweek mass, it was often reduced to one or two, and that was where I came in. You looked at the schedule and maybe you had 8 AM mass, but every now and then some poor soul would get 6 AM. This one was in Spanish. As one of the few non-lingual students at OLOR, this may seem daunting on the surface, but I have massive respect for how the priest navigated our limitations. Because I knew what I was doing, he would turn to me at appropriate times with head nods. When he was done with me, there would be these small gestures, like a book closing, to indicate that I move on to the next stage. If I got the 8 AM mass, I was likely to run into two regulars including this old guy with a long white beard who sang in a very commanding way that drowned out the rest of the church.

Then there was Friday mass, which was rarely as fun because you weren’t getting out of anything. You missed the part of school where you lined up by the last name and listened to announcements. There was something fun about listening to those at OLOR because we were a nothing school in terms of talent, but we’d always hear something like “And yesterday Rosary played Cypress…” pause for emphasis, “and we lost.” The shared disappointment before joining in the pledge of allegiance was comical because we all wanted to be the very best like no one ever was, but I couldn’t even tell you who was on the team. I didn’t even get to the grade where this was an eligible option. At most, I got to hear who won the spelling bee, which was a little more delightful. 

But mass was what it always was. As the years went on, we went from the conventional organist to a “youth band.” I forget who they were, but there was a drummer and guitarist along with a singer. The only songs that strayed from the familiar territory were stuff like Godspell where they’d lead us in “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.” Other than that, I can’t say that mass was either great or terrible. We all had our favorite priests. Father Dober was very kind and insightful. You wanted him. It was usually the homilies that ranged from glorified crowd work to boring preachy stuff that most of us tuned out. Even then, it was the price of going to a Catholic church. You just had to go along with the doldrums.

I want to say that I was one of the better altar servers in part because I had developed a good work ethic and usually tried to do things according to dictation. Even then, there were odd stories of working behind the scenes of a mass, such as kids being bored enough to stick their hands over an active flame and seeing how close they could get before black puttering smoke came out. Others would lick their fingers before shutting it out. As predictable as altar serving was, it usually made for some fun banter when you got stuck with the right people.

I was encouraged to be a smart student but also a creative one. My Nana was a teacher up in Washington, and I had shared my fiction with her through a Juno account. They were often centered around talking animals. She’d send me feedback and we developed a relationship around education that lasted up until she died in 2019. Even then, teachers were keen on supporting my artistic whims even if they didn’t fit within the school curriculum. I don’t mean in the same way that the “Goosebumps” books didn’t, but more that I was doing this for fun. 

There was one day when I wrote a short story about a dog that went on adventures. Maybe it was based on my love of the “Wishbone” adaptations of that time. I even got a plushy of the dog from Denny’s. My teacher would provide notes as well, though they never felt as supportive as Nana. My art career, which I don’t think was all that fortuitous, was also celebrated. One time I drew the cover of N*SYNC’S “No Strings Attached” and my teacher showed it to the class. I don’t know that it was any good. I look back on a lot of those old drawings and think they’re subpar, but the support was definitely much appreciated.

The few projects that come to mind involve dinosaurs and missions. To get the dinosaur one out of the way, we were studying them and our job was to do a physical recreation of one. I made one out of LEGO that wasn’t color-coordinated at all. It looked awkward, but I like to think it got good marks.

The missions are more familiar if you’ve grown up within the California school system. They were religious sites built by priests along the western border as sanctuaries. To get the obvious out of the way, they may be declared as monuments now but they’re still controversial for their treatment of indigenous people. However, I wasn’t aware of that in the early 90s. As it was, we were still encouraged to sit “Indian style” (or cross-legged by more common standards). I would see a Native American ceremony at some point in my youth, though it didn’t have a long-term impact on me. What did was visiting the missions.

Or I should say that they did for a while. Because of who my family was, we made it a hobby to visit the missions whenever we’d go on vacations. We’d go up and down the coast to the different ones and spend two hours at each stop. They had their traditional stucco layout and some tour guides would share stories. It was as much about California history as it was religion, and I suppose that seemed cool. After all, we weren’t too far off from where gold was mined. That seemed appealing too. However, it was the fact that my other grandmother owned a box set of every mission that Huell Howser visited on his California’s Gold series that cemented a few things, notably a lifelong affection for Howser.

Whereas my dinosaur was made out of multi-colored LEGO, the mission was often built with a strange amount of pride and precision. I would go so far as to argue that, at a point, it was more of a chance to see what my dad could come up with. We’d slap on a lot of miniature detail recreating the mission and doing our best to create something authentic. Again, I don’t know if I got a great grade, but I made it through university, didn’t I?

The last bit of this first part of my OLOR journey will focus on “summer school.” I was never bad enough of a student that I needed to attend, and yet I was excited to go for fun. They were never held at the actual campus and instead volunteered at parents’ homes. One year we even had it on the second floor of Fun Services. Another was at a friend’s house where I was carpooled by Marco. We’d sit in the backseat looking out the window while singing Britney Spears and having a ball.

The one thing that made my friend’s house year great was that they lived on a cul de sac. Whenever the session was over, we all gathered out front to do some street games. It was often the other kids who were in charge of racing bicycles around the loop to see who was faster. Jose claimed that if he lowered his head to account for wind he may have more of an advantage. The reality is that he never was going to beat whoever the other kid was. Otherwise, I’d be there playing some portable game version of The Phantom Menace that involved pod racing. For something that was essentially a bunch of black squares, it gave me endless joy that summer. I would also collect the comic book adaptation of the film as well as various character heads that Taco Bell was selling.

As much as certain memories are lost to history, this is the chunk of my kindergarten through fourth grade experience. I am about to get into the year that things slowly changed and I feel these are crucial in developing my ultimate self. It features plenty of regret and disappointment but is necessary to understand the bigger picture. Fifth grade is when it all changed. Marco and I had a falling out. Crystal D. stopped being my friend and I coped by reading on a bench for half a year. It was not a good time, but let me talk about how I made it through.