North Star Writers Group

I was listening to my car radio the other day when I heard an advertisement that urged parents to make sure their kids were in school during a certain week because it was “count week” – the one week each year when a school district reports to the state how many of its students attend. More kids in school that week means more bucks for the school district.

When I was a kid growing up in Flint, Michigan, my parents didn’t need any reminders via the radio to send me to school every day. They always made me sure I was there.

“I don’t feel good, Mommy,” I’d say on a particularly nasty day, like the days most kids growing up in Flint experience during their lifetimes.

“What seems to be wrong?” she would ask.

“I think I have a cobe in my nodze,” I’d tell her.

“No problem. I’ll make you some nice oatmeal and you’ll feel better.”

Oatmeal was Mom’s answer to all the problems of the world. Unfortunately, nobody made worse oatmeal than my mother. Her oatmeal always tasted like an old sweat sock and it had lumps the size of Colorado in it.

I guess over the years I tried every trick in the book to get out of going to school. But nothing ever worked.

At one point, I decided increasing the seriousness of my imaginary early-morning maladies might convince her that going to school on that particular day would be totally foolhardy.

“I don’t feel good today, Mom,” I’d moan.

“What’s wrong?” she’d ask.

“I think I have . . . um . . . Malaria,” I’d tell her.

Then she’d haul out the oatmeal and 20 minutes later I’d be trudging off to Oak Street Elementary School with a six-pound wool scarf wrapped noose-like around my neck, four-buckle arctics flopping around on my feet and a lump of oatmeal the size of Colorado lodged somewhere in my throat.

I always walked to school back then because there weren’t any school buses. If I remember correctly, the distance I had to walk to and from school was something like 73 miles. Each way.

In the spring and early fall, the walk was a piece of cake. In the dead of winter, when Flint is doing its very best impression of Antarctica, it was a nightmare.

So there I was, trudging through the waist-high snow, sliding on the ice, and being buffeted by 100-mile-an-hour winds and blinding snow. Other kids’ dads took them to school in the family car. My dad never did because he built cars for General Motors and had to be at work very early in the morning.

But for me, getting to school was only half battle.

Once I arrived, I faced a nightmare even worse than the cold and snow.

Once I was at school I knew I would have to clean blackboard erasers on the fire escape that ran from the roof to the basement of the three-story school building. If it was cold on the mean streets of the city, it was triply (is that a word?) cold on the fire escape at Oak Street Elementary School.

The worst thing about being tapped to clean erasers on the fire escape in the wintertime was that the principal expected you to do a good job cleaning erasers on the fire escape in the wintertime.

The bad thing about that is the principal – a mountain of a man with a bald spot smack dab in the middle of his head and the nickname “Killer” –would summon you to his cold and drafty office if he didn’t think you did a good job, and introduce you to Mabel, his 11-pound, two-foot-long paddle.

Consequently, during my year in fourth grade I became the best darned eraser-cleaner in Flint. On second thought, make that the entire state on Michigan.

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