Can I Sit With You?

Ken Putnam
Fourth Grade

In 1959, I was in grade four at Brentwood Park Elementary School in Burnaby, British Columbia. I was not a bright student; far from it. One day, while I was trying my best to avoid a question from the teacher, the PA system came on. It was the school secretary, summoning me to the nurse's office. The school nurse was a nice lady, and since I did not feel sick and other kids got called to see the nurse all the time, I was not at all concerned.

When I knocked on the nurse's door, a male voice said, "Come in." I went in, and was met by a really old man -- probably around forty years old -- who introduced himself as Doctor Someone. The good doctor wore a light scruffy beard, thick glasses with large black rims, a plaid sports jacket, and of course a tie. On the desk was a pipe, because this was back when most adults smoked just about everywhere.

The doctor asked me some questions: "Ken, do you have brothers and sisters?" "Where do you live?" What's your favorite colour?" "Do you have a pet?" I answered all the questions to the best of my grade four ability and was feeling pretty good about the whole deal. At least here I could get some answers right, not like in the classroom.

Then he hit me with the big one: "Ken, I'm going to give you some coloured pencils and I would like you to draw me a picture of a man." I began to panic. Fear froze me. I couldn't draw a straight line, let alone a picture of a man. He told me he was going to leave the room and come back in about 10 minutes. He left. I wanted to jump out the window. I had no idea why this guy wanted me to draw a picture of a man. What had I done? Why was this happening to me?

I did know one thing: the results of my artistic endeavors were going to be very very important to my future. A pass or fail on my drawing would no doubt be the catalyst for something great or terrible. I picked up the green pencil, then the red, followed by blue and yellow. My brush-cut head was wet from sweat, and my fingers sore from squeezing the pencil so hard. My little brain was roaring at 1000 MPH.

The door opened and back in came the doctor: "Well, how did we make out, Ken?"

"Okay, I guess," I said, and I handed him my picture. A slow smile came across his face and then a soft chuckle. He put down the picture, looked me eye and said, "You know Ken, I don't think there is anything wrong with you at all, you're going to be just fine."

The doctor was right. I'm 58 years old now. In 2005 I retired after 34 years with the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] and now work for Yukon Department of Justice. And the picture? Well, I drew the Doctor: complete with his pipe, plaid jacket, glasses, and beard.

by Wynn Putnam
Age seven at the time

When I was almost eight years old, my family emigrated from Holland to Ontario, Canada. We spoke only Dutch, so when we went to school in Ontario, the teacher put my twin sister, me, and my two older sisters all in grade one. Once we learned how to speak English they would reevaluate us to see if my twin and I should really be in Grade three, and my older sisters in Grades four and six.

This was a one-room school house so we felt awkward and big sitting in the grade one row while kids our own size sat on the other side of the room and at the back. When the older, bigger kids would point and snicker at us we did not know what they were saying so we smiled at them. We wanted to learn to speak English, and be able to join in with their fun and sit with them.

This was a country schoolhouse, so everyone brought their lunch. At noon we followed the other Grade Ones, got our lunch bags from the hall, and started to eat. But one day when we went to get our lunch bags, a couple of the bigger kids went in front of us and grabbed them. They looked in our bags, ate what they liked, then tossed the bags into the garbage.

My sister and I went back to the classroom and tried to communicate to the teacher that these kids had taken our lunch. We could not say what had happened, and she thought that we did not have a lunch that day. Apparently a kid at the back said that we had already eaten our lunch and some other kids laughed. We started to point at the kids who had taken our lunch and made gestures with our hands, when the teacher took an apple out of her own bag and started to cut it in half. We shook our heads and started to cry. All of a sudden a few of the younger children came over to our desk and gave us some of their lunch, a cookie, an orange -- I can’t remember exactly, but they wanted to share. We stopped crying, smiled, and told each other in Dutch that the foods we were now being given were delicious, even better than what had been in our lunch bag. We communicated our thanks to these kids by smiling and making gestures of what we were trying to say.

For the next while we put our lunch bags in our desks, because it took quite a bit more time before we could speak English well enough to tattle on the few kids who tormented us because we spoke a different language. Most kids in the class tried to help us belong, even when they could see how big we looked in the grade one row, and that we talked in a strange language.

Smiling faces are the same in every language, and it’s easy to communicate with other kids that way and join in their fun. Kids like to sit with you when your face shows a friendly smile -- even if you cannot speak their language, they understand.

by Elaine Park

For a few years, in grades five and six, I went to a small rural school a few miles out of a town that was a few hundred miles out of anywhere else. At lunch and recess we all played marbles and the girls skipped rope. I could manage single-rope skipping, but never double dutch. I was not even allowed to turn the ropes for double dutch. In the winter we played a game that involved tramping out a big circle in the snow, cut into pie-shaped pieces that we had to run around. We played dodge ball, which I was relatively good at, although to this day I am uncomfortable with things flying at my head. The kids teased me for colouring people's hair orange when I was doing art, but I was pretty sure that "red hair" was just a figure of speech and the orange crayon was the way to go.

By seventh grade, I was discovered to be an advanced learner and got sent into town on the bus to Robert Moore Elementary, the biggest school in the area. We had French taught to us by a hip young Quebecois couple who were eventually caught smoking dope and fired. We had music taught to us by the crusty high school band teacher and learned to play recorders.

The students at Robert Moore were contemptuous of "farmers" as they called us kids who came in on the bus. Although some of the kids did live on farms, the label didn't make sense for me. We had moved to the area from an even more remote northwestern Ontario town, but before that we had lived in England, France, and Belgium, as my dad was in the military police in the Canadian Air Force. I had seen the gondolas of Venice, walked among the row-on-row crosses in Verdun, gone shoe shopping in London, and got my first pair of glasses in Luxembourg. I had learned to say "fermez la bouche" courtesy of the rude grandchildren of the lady who lived next door to us in the village of Virton. My parents were both from Toronto, and my mother was painfully intellectual and only listened to classical music and Broadway musicals. She had a lifetime birding list. Clearly it was not I who was the hick.

When I first started going to school at Robert Moore, some of the kids tried to set me up for a prank involving a boy who was overweight. They crafted a pretend love note from him to me. It was going to be a masterful humiliation doubleheader. The girl who sat behind me, who a few years later became quite a nice person, passed me the note. I somehow picked up the wrong piece of paper and opened it up. It was blank. "That piece of paper you passed me was blank," I earnestly told her. Much later I found the pretend love note and realized with some wonder that I had completely messed up the plan basically by confusing everyone too much to proceed.

After a while though, I developed some solid credibility by being compulsively defiant of any form of authority while pulling down some of the highest marks in the school, and also by being a little exotic from having living abroad. I was welcomed to join the bad kids in the back alley while they smoked cigarettes, even though I didn't smoke myself. I eventually became part of a group of girls who liked me as much as I liked them, and we stuck together from then on.

I'm sure I wasn't happy about any teasing I endured during these years, but when I look back, I don't remember feeling that angry or bitter about it. I knew I was an outsider, but I changed school every two years until I got to high school, so I was an outsider for a legitimate reason. I also took my status as evidence of my superiority. I was proud of being different because being different for me meant being better.

Instead, when I think about it all, I feel a softly glowing gratitude for the kids who did befriend me. There was the girl who taught me how to draw a face by making a U and then filling in the details of hair and eyes and nose. The girl who came to my house to make mud pies and act out episodes of The Man From Uncle, and who joined me on a tour of all the town's churches one day when there was no adult around to stop us. The girl who had me over to her crowded, noisy house where the only place to find solitude was on the roof of her porch. The neighbourhood gang who included me in a perpetual travelling game of football that raced from yard to yard on summer afternoons. The tangles of kids who absorbed me as a matter of course into the jumping, swinging, chasing anarchy of childhood fun.

I especially remember with satisfaction the friends who were along with me on the wild ride from grade seven dances to graduation day. It's been a long, long time since I've seen or heard from them. I guess I could find them if I wanted to, find them graying, and matronly, and slightly disapproving of me and my habit of running for freedom whenever obligation got too close. But I prefer to keep them as they were, especially my closest and best friend, who lives forever in my mind with her long, brown hair blowing behind her in overlapping flaps as she bikes ahead of me, sensible, loyal, and kind -- with friends and family intact and the whole glorious future stretching out in front of her -- it's a memory that I treasure and don't want to redeem for the unequal reality of the present. I hold it as a sacred icon -- for me and for her.