I have been eating lunch every day with first graders in a hot little cafeteria that cannot contain the sound of 45 children. There are two badly painted life-size portraits of ancient presidents on the wall. One of the presidents is George Washington and the other is someone I should know but don't. Each day the boys walk in, or rather, flop in, mostly quiet and in some semblance of a line. They all have button down shirts in various states of being tucked in or not, and ties that hang messily around their necks and chests and sometimes knees. Some of the boys have sleepy eyes and bedhead hair. Some are bouncing with energy. One or two of the boys proudly march in everyday with their arms straight in the air and their fingers flashing a peace sign. This is the quiet signal.
I am not a teacher. I work in the business office as an accountant. But this year the school employed fewer coaches and needed adult bodies to serve lunch. I was asked to help. I have trouble saying no. Unfortunately, because first graders are still guided by unencumbered intuition, the boys discovered immediately that I am an imposter.
As fate would have it, the most annoying boy at my table is seated directly on my left. He does not eat, he does not listen, and he does not like me. He doesn't even fear me. Today I told him at least seven hundred and fourteen times to put away the green pencil he was playing with. It has a soccer ball eraser top. He would pretend to put it in his pocket for a few minutes. And then the soccer ball eraser would mysteriously reappear, tapping on something, or rolling on the floor. I threatened to take the pencil away if I saw it again. And then when I saw it again I threatened to take it away if I saw it again. This happened many times. At one point the boy got up, for the third time I must add, to go to the bathroom without asking. I told him he couldn't go. He stood behind my chair and stared me down. I told him he needed to sit. He replied that he didn't have to sit. I said, "yes you do" with my fake military voice. He squinted his eyes, after he had dramatically rolled them at me, and sarcastically spat out, "why?" This stumped me. So I squinted my eyes back, and fumbled out incoherently, "Because that's the rules we have" or something similar with poor grammar that trailed off into meaninglessness.
The boy on my right is small, polite, cute and wears nerdy classes. His shirt is always tucked in, and his tie is always on straight. He is missing a front tooth. The first two days of lunch he started counting from the moment he sat down until the end of the lunch period. He got into the thousands so I'm pretty sure he one, two, skipped a few. Thousand. But nonetheless, he impressed the other boys at the table and both days they cried out in amazement, "you're the best counter in the whole school, Patrick!" To which he smiled his sheepish, toothless smile.
There is one boy at my table who may be retarded. When words are spoken to him I can count a solid 7 seconds before he responds. And his response is generally only a nod of some sort. I like him. He eats more than I do. And he almost always asks for a third serving. One of the other boys, who is prissy and has a devilish grin and a lot of energy, sits right next to the possibly retarded boy. The devilish boy doesn't obey anything I say, but his disobedience is generally of the misdemeanor type. So I don't waste the energy to correct him. On the first day of lunch he kept saying to me, "Yes Mr./Mrs." This made the retarded boy laugh. Now he generally calls me Mr. O’Gravy. (My name is O’Grady). However, today I was addressed as “your highness” with a smart ass bow and subsequent snicker. This landed him a seat right next to his teacher.
My favorite boy sits the farthest away. The first day of lunch he talked to me for the entire lunch period. Regardless of whether or not someone else was talking to me. But because he sits at the end of the table, and because he has a quiet, soft, high pitched first-grader voice, I can't ever hear a word he's saying. So every now and then I nod my head and smile at him when he's talking and he smiles back. He gets up all of the time without asking to go to the bathroom, but I'm pretty sure he's really going to the bathroom. So I let it slide. The first week of lunch I kept calling him Robert. But his name is Thomas. So one day he smiled, hit his hand on his head, rolled his eyes and said in his high pitched voice, "not again!" Now I try and remember to call him Thomas.
I have another boy who sits at my table who always talks very loudly. He sometimes has so much energy that he puts up his fists in the air and shakes his body until his face turns red. Like the other things I don’t know how to handle at lunch, I pretend I don’t notice this behavior. I think this boy has Asperger’s Syndrome. He is incredibly intelligent and obsessed with monster movies. One day he sang “The Monster Mash” throughout the entire lunch. He often quotes movie lines and other movie trivia that go far beyond my film knowledgebase, which is quite extensive in its own right. On any given day he will mention so and so from Hitchcock’s first film that was released on this or that date. Because I don’t know better I assume he is correct. Once I asked him if he was going to be a film director when he grows up and he lost it. He stared me down, pursed his lips together, and with more drama than a Susan Lucci character on daytime television, slowly articulated, “I’m not going to be a movie director when I grow up, I AM a movie director now!” I immediately apologized for my foolishness. And then I laughed at him.
There is another boy, Andrew, who talks like he is 4. This is annoying, because he is 7. He doesn’t talk really, he more just barks. Like a puppy. An annoying puppy. One day last quarter I had had all the barky yelpy sounds I could handle, and I snapped. And when I snap, sometimes I use fake teacher speak that I have picked up, which is embarrassing. I yelled, “Andrew! What is with all the silliness today!?” (Silliness is the teacher speak word). He immediately calmed down, looked at the floor, sighed, and then said, while still staring at the floor, “I don’t know. I guess it’s because I got extra sleep last night.”
I am learning a lot about first grade food preferences. Some boys eat everything. Some boys eat nothing except bread. Some boys wait and choose only what they see the boys they look up to eating. No one likes salad. No one likes fruit for dessert. They all want only the juice the fruit sits in when we have fruit for dessert. And the most interesting discovery is that lime green Jello is
heroin. I have to count every single square and weigh it on the spoon, to make sure everyone gets an equal portion. And I have to dish out every last sliver. If I don’t do these things, the boys get junkie eyes. And I'm telling you, if you want to know scary, just look at the eyes of a first grader with a lime green Jello junkie craving.
Today my table seemed like something out of Lord of the Flies. The boys finished their lunch very quickly. This means there was dead time until lunch finished. This means chaos. By the end of the period I was tired of hearing my own voice, and since the boys don't listen to me anyway I stopped trying to make them behave. Eventually their teacher, who sits at the next table, came over and quelled the chaos. She did it quickly with grace and authority and power that I fear I will never possess. I was embarrassed. But I figure I'm volunteering in this lunch capacity, so it isn't like they can fire me.
(image by Josh Ford used without permission...but it is on Facebook... is it OK to post Maggie?)
