School Bells!

Welcome, one and all, to the wondrous experience that is elementary school! …What? You don’t think elementary school was wondrous? Oh yeah, the start of homework, the loss of freedom, blah blah blah. Look at it this way: academics aside, would you be who you are without elementary school? Would you know the same friends? Same experiences? The list goes on. Let’s face it: elementary school was an integral part of the recipe that is us… Okay, that was cheesy. Let’s just move on.
Now, I’d had sort of an undeserved reputation as a troublemaker before coming here, but that had all been water under the bridge by then. This was Tulsa Lutheran School. These were new people, new opportunities! I wasn’t going to mess up! But things never go as planned, do they? All I remember is being given a half-pint carton of chocolate milk. With my weapon in hand, reinforced by my lack of respect for the laws of gravity, I managed to leave a large brown streak-stain across the ceiling… I’m not sure how it happened, but ever since then, I’ve occasionally seen some weird guys in white coats investigating the “physics” of that room. At any rate, my reputation had restarted.
Things weren’t all bad, though. At the school, I made friends with Douglas Hall and Roland Cline, both of whom I am still good friends with. In First Grade, I met Micah Schneider, and soon our trio became a… well, there were four of us now. The days of recess were never dull for us, especially when we played Cowboys and Indians. As an unstoppable group, we gathered our guns and fought the enemy! …Well, they did anyway. I had some sort of obsession with faking my death accurately, and in my mind, getting up after dying would tarnish the quality of my dramatic act. So, I’d kind of just lie there for the rest of recess until the teacher forced me to come inside.
We all got along well throughout our individual experiences. Our best early-school teacher was undoubtedly Mrs. Pralle, the principal’s wife. She was the one who taught us how to read, write in cursive, and sing in a somewhat bearable fashion. Unfortunately, she and the principal had to move away to Kansas. While I didn’t know it then, this set the stage for some dark days at that school.
Then, we moved up to Third Grade, officially members of the “Upper Graders” (so-called, because we had class upstairs). Then we had a new member of our fearsome foursome. At first, I knew she looked familiar. I thought it was just one of the older kids with a haircut, but then I saw both of them at the same time, which meant I must have known her from somewhere else. I realized she was one of the girls who went to my church, which I hadn’t been to for some time. Because of this, I couldn’t even remember her name. She wasn’t too offended. In fact, she had a very humane and effective solution: getting Roland and Micah to pin me down until I could remember. It was on that day that Malinee Powell had been quite unanimously initiated into our “tribe”. There were others in our group as well, but we were really the only ones who stuck around until the end of 7th grade (It was a really small school).
After the embarrassing recollection of Malinee’s “identity”, I told my parents we should go to church more often. While I’m not so sure that was what convinced them, we started going to church regularly. Later that year, though, Pastor Lessing was called to lead seminary in St. Louis. Near the end of my Third Grade year, he and his family moved out of the church, and Pastor Kloetor (CLAY-ter) took his place. His move probably had the most significant impact on my life right now, though I obviously hadn’t realized it yet.
In Fourth Grade, I had a year of weakness where I decided to move to Peters Elementary in the Union district. My mom had actually suggested this because of problems with choosing our school’s principal, but I had my own reasons. I was deathly afraid of Mrs. Kelliher, the 5th Grade teacher, and I knew this may be my only chance to escape (I’m not even kidding). I don’t remember a whole lot about Peters. I made a lot of friends really quickly, but I really didn’t learn much, and I missed my old friends. So, after that year, I reluctantly decided to face my fear and go back to the school.
For me, 5th Grade was really the start of middle school, which is the next section of this little project. So until then, my fellow readers.