On Aging Alone
A lthough my memory of the details is vague, I think the following happened when I was eight years old, living in a village in central Saskatchewan and attending a one-room school with grades one through eight. Probably it was a hot day in June, we girls were wearing summer dresses, and because it was most likely a Friday afternoon, when everybody tends to slack off (or did in those days), our young teacher had sent us outside, around to the back of the school, to our baseball diamond. There, we were all—somehow, despite our being different ages, sizes, and genders—organized to play softball. I didn’t enjoy sports, wasn’t athletic, was a tiny child, and was bored. I remember standing in the batting lineup forever, as there was double the required number to a side, until finally it would be my turn and I would be berated by my teammates when I would inevitably strike out. Because of all this, after a while, I wandered away from the game, around to the front of the empty school, and sat down, alone, on the wooden steps leading inside. Eventually, a sweating older girl came panting around the side of the building, looking for a drink of water. Seeing me, she hesitated and asked why I was sitting there by myself. I probably said that I didn’t want to play ball—our mother didn’t allow us to shrug our shoulders or say “I dunno” when she spoke to us, so I would have said something. She went on inside and at once came rushing back out, swiping water from her chin, and ran back to the game.
She must have told the teacher where I was. “Oh,” the teacher must have said, and knowing I wouldn’t be getting into mischief, seeing no other reason to insist I come back, the teacher left me there. This was just after the Second World War, when experienced teachers were in short supply. Ours was a teenager herself, with zero knowledge of child psychology, and she probably just couldn’t be bothered. So I sat alone, listening to the crack of the bat on the ball and the cries of my classmates floating to me through the warm spring air over the roof of the school.
