Loyal To A Fault
What I learned about lying in Kindergarten
Anthony held the distinction of being the person most likely to be banished to the time out zone which, in Miss Humphrey’s afternoon kindergarten class, was just a corner in the darkest part of her otherwise lively and colorful space.
It seemed that he was perennially in this Kinder-Siberia, looking defiant, with gray Sen-Sen stains on the outside edges of his mouth. I never really knew what his crime was, but I think he usually worked alone. He may have broken a toy over someone’s head, or shot off a BB gun at recess. Or maybe he didn’t put the blocks away. Who knows? Miss Humphrey had an extremely low threshold for tolerance, so it was always hard to take her time-out decisions very seriously.
I, too, knew the corner well, if only intermittently. My crime: talking. Apparently I was always talking, and for every offense, Miss Humphrey wrote a note and pinned it to the collar of my dress with a common pin (probably hoping it would get stuck in my tongue before I got home). I never had the wherewithal to actually read the note — or rip it off and throw it away — before I had to watch my mom remove it from my dress, her facial expression falling exponentially with the reading of every word. Yet I really never knew what those notes said until some 40 years later, when I found them — the Humphrey…
