February 8, 2021

         I was a first grader in Miss Cicirelli’s class. My twin sister was in the neighboring classroom with Miss Foley. Sometimes I’d get jealous – they had a camping tent set up as a reading nook that I always eyed as I passed the doorway. Miss Foley and Miss Cicirelli were close friends, so they often coordinated classrooms, and I saw my sister at various events. First grade classroom events. There was the St. Patrick’s Day movie party where we watched Pixar’s Finding Nemo and sipped Shamrock Shakes. There was the Thanksgiving Harvest Feast, when our class dressed up as Native Americans and her class dressed up as Pilgrims, and we all sat at one table — or, rather, a slew of cheap plastic tables pushed flush together lengthwise and draped with decorative plastic cloths. We ate senselessly. I had pumpkin bread for the first time. There were holiday parties when we cut paper doilies into snowflakes using tiny scissors with dull blades and made gingerbread homes and messes which we eventually cleaned off the desks with shaving cream. These events comprised my first taste of what I thought as indulgent American Tradition. I was delighted in its soft, mellow taste – of cloves, nutmeg, and marshmallows and crumbles of pumpkin bread and the saltiness of gravy and buttery mashed potatoes.

At home, we spoke French. Sometimes we baked chicken on Thanksgiving. Sometimes we had ham. We put up Christmas decorations and enjoyed hot dogs and egg sandwiches. Venturing into my first-grade classroom was a new cultural experience full of canned EZ Cheese and tradition. I begged my mom to buy pumpkin bread so we could have it at home.

There were lots of clocks in my classroom. Only one was real. It hung above the doorway by the intercom speaker. There were dozens of other clocks that were fake – laminated paper practice clocks where we would rotate the big hand and the little hand to manipulate time and try to tell it.

There were also three main bookshelves near the carpet where we sat for morning meeting. They contained mostly picture books: Amelia Bedelia, Frog and Toad, Skippyjon Jones and the Big Bones – and they were classified into bins by genre: Nonfiction, fantasy, biography. They were labelled by reading level, alphabetized from level A to K, which marked the level up to which we were allowed to be to reading in first grade. They didn’t want us sacrificing comprehension for literacy. No student gets left behind.

I often read through these books during silent reading time. I would put the words to song, in attempts to escape boredom. I read and reread the books in different cadences to pass the time. After reading we had lunch and after lunch, we had recess and after recess we did yoga and danced and laughed as we told stories of our weekends. “TGIF,” was what Miss Cicirelli would say every Friday. I could never remember what the acronym stood for or what was so special about Fridays. She would sing “the Ninety-Nine Restaurant” jingle and I would laugh. One of my classmates would be so plagued with second-hand embarrassment, she would cry. I don’t remember why she sang the jingle it so often.

I do remember that I wanted to have Miss Cicirelli’s hair – it was thick with super tight curls and she’d always tell us that straightened it would reach all the way down her back. My hair was wispy and thin. I convinced my mom to buy me plastic rolling pin curlers and I would spend hours pinning my hair up the night before big events like the Winter Concert or the first-grade production of Skunky the Skunk.

There was a black plastic crate in the back corner of the room behind Miss Cicirelli’s desk where she kept a series of tightly packed books. These books were off limits until you passed the reading level exam half-way through the year. Except Miss Cicirelli let me read from this bin. These books were at a second-grade level or higher and had red strips on their bindings. I adored this privilege. I would spend my reading time much more enjoyably, taking and replacing and each book with an air of satisfaction and care as I finished them.

I was about half-way though the red-tape books when we got the news. Miss Cicirelli was going to be gone for the week. I worried how my reading situation would be hampered with the substitute teacher. Miss Cicirelli let me read from the crate. I was certain the substitute would not.

Ms. Blue ended up being the opposite of Miss Cicirelli. When she was on lunchroom duty, she made me eat every single bite of the unappetizing hot lunch meals. “Not one carrot left on your tray,” she’d say, as we fearfully forked in every last bite. She once made me put my head down at my desk for walking my friend to the nurse’s office after he had lost his tooth because I hadn’t asked for permission. I cried in frustration. I wanted my teacher back.

The week went on as normal, and I sneaked my way to the back of the room to pick up my books during silent reading. Day after day, I worked through the tightly packed bin. It was winter so we frequently had indoor recess and I used this time to work through the bin. I read until I had read each book with the red tape on its binding. One week turned to two weeks, which turned into two months, until Ms. Blue assigned us a special art project: we were to make cards for Miss Cicirelli. She was sick. It was something with her stomach – or so Ms. Blue said, and she wouldn’t be back for a while.

I took extra care in crafting my card — I spent days of indoor recess, art time, and free choice carefully drawing and redrawing, outlining, and coloring. On the cover was a green leaf, half filled in a gradient of forest green to lime hues. My reading time was cut short. I spent my time coloring instead. But I would draw and erase, redraw and crumple it up. It was never good enough.

As we all stood in a line, waiting for Ms. Blue to proof the writing on our cards, I quaked. It made me nervous to hear the judgement of Ms. Blue on my heartfelt card. I knew I had made spelling mistakes – I just hoped by well wishes were powerful enough to bring my teacher back.  Although I wanted it to be perfect, I never quite finished it — it was half-colored when we moved on to the next grade and cleaned out our cubbies for summer break. The cards were never sent – at least not to my knowledge. A first grader doesn’t know much about stamps and postage.

In second grade, I was old enough to understand what cancer was when my mom told me. I asked for details, but my mom was reticent. I wanted to know how Miss Cicirelli was doing. I wanted to know if everything was going to be okay.

But by the next year, Miss Cicirelli was back at school. I was happy to see her name back on the doorway when I passed my old classroom. I greeted her in the hallways and we’d joke about the “Ninety Nine Restaurant,” and how we didn’t understand why it embarrassed students when she sang it like the jingle.

Each succeeding year moved me a story higher from my first-grade classroom. I didn’t see Miss Cicirelli often, but I hoped she would notice my name on the school’s Accelerated Readers List. And every once in a while, during silent reading time, instead of choosing one of my staples – Judy Blume or Roald Dahl – I’d reach for one of the classics: Amelia Bedelia, Frog and Toad, Skippyjon Jones and the Big Bones. I’d read them to a rhythm, as quickly as possible to avoid embarrassment. These were first-grade books and I was supposed to be a fourth-grade reader.

A year later and I was in a new classroom, a grade and a floor higher. Miss Cicirelli was out sick again. It was breast cancer. I wondered what the first-graders in Miss Cicirelli’s class were thinking. Were they making cards?  Did it matter?

Off to Boston for appointments with various oncologists, with the hope of new prescriptions and clinical trials. Back and forth. Hope. Treatment. Remission. Metastasis. Re-diagnosis. Repeat. As if this all hadn’t happened before.

When my sister and I visited Miss Cicirelli, she was always paler and gaunter than before. I tried not to think about it. We talked about the books she was reading to her children – Amelia Bedelia, Frog and Toad, Skippyjon Jones and the Big Bones – and the yoga they were learning. I watched in awe as 2-year-old Amelia did “downward dog.” We sang “The Ninety-Nine Restaurant” song. I tried to keep my composure when she joked about her hair. I almost always broke down. She wore a hat to cover her head, which once dawned the curly brown hair my first-grade self had always wanted. We didn’t talk about her health.

I was a sophomore in high school when she died. But a part of me was still in first grade, clutching to the card I’d colored. As I wandered through the halls of the funeral home, I was drenched in sorrow for a person I thought I knew but only knew as a teacher. I was suddenly surrounded by relatives and friends I’d never met. Pictures I didn’t recognize. I felt like a stranger and that made me sadder. I thought of the leaf, colored halfway with green RoseArt colored pencils. I thought of how I held my breath when Ms. Blue walked into that classroom and how I wished to release it when Miss Cicirelli came back. I wished, in first grade, that my card wouldn’t need to be sent.

Now, I wished I’d colored a little faster.