Finding 35

9. Southdale Elementary School - My Mother's School

My mother, Mary, was a grade three teacher at Southdale Elementary School in the Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.  When I was in primary or junior kindergarten, we went to school for half a day.  In the afternoons my mom would take me with her and drop me off where a retired woman, Mrs. Casey cared me for after school.  I don’t really know how my mom managed this, as she would pick me up during her lunch hour.  It was a 15-minute drive from her school to our house. At Mrs. Casey’s house I played with another kid, Neil, whose mother was also a teacher at Southdale.  Somehow my mom would get back in time just before lunch ended.  When did she have time to eat lunch?

That would be 30 minutes of driving, eating something, and getting ready to teach her kids again.  I never really thought about it before, but that is a lot of work and running around for your kids.  Then add to that after school skating with my sisters.  My parents spent their entire time devoted to shuttling us around somewhere.  Kids have no understanding of the time it takes to be a parent.

I don’t think kids are unappreciative, rather unaware.

But during those afternoons I spent playing at Mrs. Casey’s with Neil, we would have lots of fun.  We played with big kids hockey sticks in the basement, and we played the spinning tops games for hours!  I don’t know if you can still buy it today, but it was the coolest!  The game consisted of hard plastic blue and red shaped spinning tops, and you would wind a string on these spinning tops that mounted on the side of a big concave dish, and you pulled the string as hard as you could and the tops would launch from their pad and begin spinning around the well worn and scratched dish. The tops would begin circling each other and we excitedly waited for the big moment of contact where one top would bang into each other and launch it across the dish.  The goal was to have your piece spin the longest.  It’s the simple things that fill your time.

The other thing we did was we made peanut butter sandwiches.  Back in the day when everyone could eat peanut butter, that is.  Now, Mrs. Casey used different bread than my mom, but that was OK, because the bread she used had train decals on it!  I think Neil and I would eat as many sandwiches as we could so we could finish up the bread in the plastic bag.  I think the bread bag was printed with trains on it, like an engine, a passenger car, a caboose, and you could cut the bag up when you were done and then we would tape the train to the fridge or windows.  Why don’t they do that anymore?  The other memory I have is of walking to the store and walking on Mrs. Casey’s rock wall.  It was a different from any wall I had seen before, as it was made of big rocks, with a concrete slab on top, and when you spilled water on it, the water ran through all the groves on the top of the concrete, and it was dark gray and cool to the touch.  See, it takes little to entertain a five year old.

I have no idea whatever happened to Neil either.  But we had fun in those days.  One day, my mom’s school was showing a movie in their gym, it was a big deal, so big a deal that my mom took my sister and me out of our school, and we went with her to their school, and we watched Pete’s Dragon in the gym.  They had a movie projector! That was a very special day.  I think they even made popcorn.  Thy gym was packed with kids sitting on the gym floor, and we watched the movie in the afternoon, the images flickering on the white gym wall.  It was magical.