Kids never seem to settle in at school until they’ve settled a few important matters. Finding the new best friend was near the top of my list. Charles had been my best friend for four years and I missed him. Walking with Betty for only the two blocks to her house left me to walk alone for the rest of the way. I began taking a different route after school, emboldened by my growing experience with the local geography. I now knew the way to the library, downtown stores and movie theaters. My new route to and from school took me past Eleanor’s house.
I’d known Eleanor as a classmate since first grade – she had missed kindergarten and first grade while she and her father had both been recovering from polio, so she had skipped kindergarten and entered first grade a year older than the rest of us. A heavy metal leg brace caused her to walk with a clank and an odd little hop as she swung the braced leg forward with each second step, but that didn’t slow her down or impede her ability to take part in recess games or acrobatics on the jungle gym. I began walking home after school with her almost daily and soon became so accustomed to the leg brace that I seldom noticed or thought about it. By sixth grade the leg brace was gone.
As I look back to those days, I suspect that, because she had entered school two years late and had missed playing with other children her age, her mother encouraged her to make friends, and so it was probably inevitable that she would invite me to stop at her house on the way home after school several days a week. There were days when she had piano lessons or therapy after school, but it became routine to stop at Eleanor’s house to read comic books, play in their shady back yard, polish pennies for her coin collection, or dig through a trunk of old toys, clothes and costume jewelry in one of the spare bedrooms upstairs.
Often there would be after school chores for Eleanor, and I gladly helped her with them so that we could get to our playing. One of those chores was picking up after Eleanor’s dog Chummy. Chummy was a small, white terrier who had a serious thing about wastebaskets. He couldn’t resist emptying them and strewing the contents all about the house. Eleanor’s mother serenely ignored the mess, leaving it for Eleanor to deal with. It was clear to me that Chummy and his misdemeanors were strictly her responsibility. Just before five o’clock, their telephone would ring and it would be my mother, calling to have me sent home in time for supper.
The day Eleanor and I went home at recess time must have been one of those days that were seemingly endless, for even though we saw all the kids playing on the jungle gym, we still felt as if it must be time to go home. I remember them yelling at us, and we yelled right back, “You know you aren’t supposed to be on the playground after school.” We still didn’t realize that it was recess time and that we were the ones breaking the rules. Not until after we reached Eleanor’s house and her mother looked up from her book and said she hadn’t known that school was to be let out early that day. We made it back to school, in spite of the heavy leg brace, just in time for class to resume and apparently the teacher never knew of our truancy.
I don’t remember which one of us first came up with the plot to pass out the Valentine cards during the usual classroom Valentine’s Day party. We wrote a “play” whose only two characters – the Valentine Fairy and the Valentine Princess ended up opening the Valentine Mailbox and scurrying about the room delivering the cards to our classmates. We’d even conned our mothers into making costumes for us and gotten permission from our teacher to perform our play just before the party. Once Miss Kading got over her astonishment, she stopped us and delegated the rest of the deliveries to other students. But, at least we had managed to get our, although brief, chance at that coveted chore.