The new kid at school
I always have a soft spot for the new kids. I was one of them.
The summer before I started the fourth grade, my parents took me and my oldest sister to Washington, D.C.
There are three things I remember most about that trip. We took the elevator to the top of the 555-foot Washington Monument, and my father decided we would walk down. My mother’s legs were so sore the next morning she could hardly get out of bed.
At the Lincoln Memorial, my dad asked me to read the Gettysburg Address on the wall. “What wall?” I said. Yes, that was the summer I found out I needed glasses.
On the way home to LaGrange, Georgia, we stopped in the Tidewater area in Virginia. We stayed at a fancy hotel in Norfolk called the Golden Triangle. It was 13 stories tall and shaped like a “V.’’ The architect was the same man who designed the famous Fontainebleau in Miami.
We crossed the Elizabeth River into Portsmouth and Churchland, where we spent one afternoon riding around neighborhoods.
“What are we doing?” my sister and I moaned from the back seat. We were bored out of our skulls.
“Looking at houses,’’ said my mother.
We thought she was kidding, of course. Except for the first few months of my life, I had never lived anywhere but LaGrange. Life was comfortable in the mill town near the Georgia-Alabama border. My dad was a doctor. We walked to school. The man who ran the gas station and the owner of the hardware store knew my name. It was Mayberry.
Then one morning my father came into my room, sat on the edge of the bed and said he was joining the Navy. We were moving to Virginia in December – the middle of the school year.
It rocked my little world, to say the least. And so it began. My sheltered life was uprooted. I attended six different schools over the next five years and seven schools over the next seven years. My family owned the kind of furniture that jumped into moving vans at the snap of a finger. And the toughest part was when the school bells started ringing at the end of every summer.
I was always the “new kid” at school.
It’s why I have a soft spot in my heart for every child who is trying to navigate the unfamiliar territory of unfamiliar faces, strange hallways and uncharted classrooms.