I Come to the Garden Alone

Labor Day happened to fall on our youngest's birthday. He turned nine. So when he asked for pancakes for breakfast (actually, his stuffed pig -- from Laura Numeroff's If You Give a Pig a Pancake, no less -- did the asking) there was no way I could refuse the request, nor did I want to. One birthday breakfast of piggy pancakes was enjoyed by everyone. Well, not exactly everyone, but I was on an alliterative streak in that last sentence.

Anyway, a bit later, when I headed upstairs to the bedroom to change out of my pajamas after a leisurely morning of web-surfing and pancake-making, the smell of the cooked pancakes had morphed on its way upstairs until it somehow smelled remarkably like my first-grade cafeteria, and this, given the evocative power of smell, instantly gave me a minor anxiety attack. This has happened before -- not just the general experience of having a smell trigger a memory or even some sort of displaced anxiety, but this specific smell of my grade-school cafeteria, and this specific sense of anxiety. Sometimes green beans do it. Do not even begin to look for some connection between green beans and pancakes. I don't have an answer for that.

It is difficult to describe everything going through my head at that moment. My initial thought was to identify the smell, quickly followed by the vague sense of anxiety that I knew was triggered by the smell simply because I hated first grade so much. Then I began to wonder if the smell was really all that similar or my brain was fixated on the memory of grade school for some other reason and the smell was just handy for that purpose, and then I wondered how I might get a blog post out of it because it would be a shame to waste such an interesting moment.

This all happened in the time it took me to find a shirt and put it on along with a pair of jeans, though if I'm honest I'll tell you that I was similarly hyper-aware of the process of finding the shirt and putting it on along with the jeans while at the same time both experiencing and seeking to stave off a minor anxiety attack that I hoped I might be able to milk for a blog post and wondering what that might really say about me, aside from the obvious conclusion that I'm slightly fucked-up but at least, most days, high functioning. Some of you get that. The rest of you probably never will, and that's okay.

I don't remember, of my own accord, why first grade was so traumatic, but the story is familiar to me, told often by my mother. The story is that I taught myself to read at age four, but the school I transferred to in first grade refused to recognize this, apparently assuming my mother's claims to that effect to be just so much maternal hyperbole. Thus I was bored, quite literally to tears, and often tried to convince my mother to let me stay home sick, which sometimes worked. This I remember vaguely. Then one day, as the story goes, I was in the cafeteria line with one of my classmates when he posed some question about the day's lunch offerings, which I answered by reading the menu board to him. This was noticed by a teacher, and thus the school "discovered" I could read. They quickly telephoned my mother, whose response was some rather more polite iteration of "No shit, Sherlock."

So there's the neat package: I hated first grade for the above reasons, and the smell of the pancakes, modulated by its trip to the bedroom, triggered the smell of my first grade cafeteria and prompted a (very minor) anxiety attack which was ameliorated by a couple of deep breaths and relocation to somewhere the smell wasn't. Neat.

Except I don't buy it.

I don't buy it because among everything else running through my head in that moment was the recognition that while I was thinking first grade, I was, inexplicably, seeing fifth grade. Moreover, according to the story, the first grade cafeteria was the scene of my triumph. Why the panic?

By fifth grade I was in my fifth elementary school: one for kindergarten, another for first grade, another for second through the first part of fourth grade, another for the latter part of fourth grade, and then fifth and sixth grades at a Catholic elementary school. We were not Catholic. Nor were we the kind of people who could afford a Catholic school. My grandparents bankrolled it, for reasons I'm still fuzzy on. Something about the school's "great reading program," which was supposed to be helpful to my siblings, particularly my sister, who was behind in almost everything but especially reading skills. I didn't need the help but got to go along for the ride.

Really, the whole elementary school kit and kaboodle was a study in social discomfort for me. I was a supremely nerdy kid, with greasy hair and dark-rimmed glasses, the kind that have become strangely fashionable only 30 years too late. In second grade, I had Mrs. Beverage -- that was really her name, though I insisted on abbreviating it "Mrs. Bev." (I had recently discovered abbreviations). I also insisted on numbering my assignments in Roman numerals (I had recently discovered those, too). I won the spelling contest and went to regionals only to make a rookie mistake on "gangrene" (I knew it instantly but there are no backsies) and get disqualified. I cried and my mom gave me peanut M&M's, which remain a comfort food to this day.

In third grade I had Mrs. Lamb, probably the sweetest little old lady ever to walk the planet. I also had an obsession with dinosaurs, and a crush of sorts on one of the fourth grade teachers, whose name, interestingly, I don't remember. On what I'm guessing was my 9th birthday, one of the other third grade teachers, Mr. Nelson, paddled me in what I'm sure was a good-natured way, but I cried and this made him feel really, really bad, which I think was the whole reason I cried. I can't be sure. I wouldn't put it past me. Mr. Nelson seemed to be intrigued by my intelligence, and sometimes brought in a Simon game (you know, the one with the pattern of lights you're supposed to match) because, apparently, all smart nerdy kids like Simon.

Fourth grade is a blur. We moved halfway through, and I only remember one incident from the new school. My mom was a college student, and a single parent with three kids, so we had no money. She made us flannel pajamas, which were invariably colors like yellow and pink with bunnies or something on them. The homemade elastic waistbands ended up looking kind of frilly. And I wore them under my corduroys like long johns in the cold winter months. You can imagine the hilarity that ensued when I slipped on the ice in the playground one day and my shirt came up and the whole world saw my pink, frilly, bunny-populated pajama bottoms peaking out of the top of my pants.

Which brings me to fifth grade -- why, after all that, is fifth grade so particularly traumatic that it is that cafeteria my mind conjures? I can't say. Is it another trick of the mind, perhaps? I know that in the fifth grade (and sixth, for that matter), we were still rather poor and I wore hand-me down clothes, as a lot of people do. But for some reason, I refused to wear jeans, and for some other reason, the only available alternative involved plaid pants, and for some reason I was totally okay with this. It was 1980 or 81. I think my favorite shirt might have been velour.

All I know is that in fifth grade I felt very alone -- not an outcast, because that implies having been part of something to be cast out of -- but an outsider. I was at a Catholic school and we were not Catholic and while I don't remember anyone making a big deal out of this, it was there. And I think this is right around the age where your sense of self really starts to come on board, and I was thereby coming more and more to terms with being an oddball. I was weird. There's no way around that. I was brainy and skinny and short and wore plaid pants. I would later learn to wear jeans, and to be funny, and to use my intelligence as both tool and weapon. I would learn to craft words, and I would discover a musical talent that opened whole worlds to me.

There are still plenty of embarrassing stories from those later years, but I gradually learned to navigate the social environments I found myself in. I learned a skill that white heterosexual males don't usually have to learn: I learned to pass. What did I learn to pass as? It's a fair question, and the only answer I have is: whatever I needed to be. (Within reason, of course; I could not convincingly pass as a jock, for instance, but that still left a wide range of options.)

While I most certainly don't want to hang everything on this, it appears at least some of it might have to do with being an introvert. "Introverts would rather be entertained by what's going on in their heads than in seeking happiness," writes Laurie Helgo in a Psychology Today article [H/T Bad Alice]. "Their big challenge is not to feel like outsiders in their own culture." She continues:

As a result, introverts are not driven to seek big hits of positive emotional arousal—they'd rather find meaning than bliss—making them relatively immune to the search for happiness that permeates contemporary American culture. In fact, the cultural emphasis on happiness may actually threaten their mental health. As American life becomes increasingly competitive and aggressive, to say nothing of blindingly fast, the pressures to produce on demand, be a team player, and make snap decisions cut introverts off from their inner power source, leaving them stressed and depleted. Introverts today face one overarching challenge—not to feel like misfits in their own culture.

That I'm an introvert is hardly news to me -- for awhile I was a Meyers-Briggs junkie -- but this article goes some places that I find interesting and strangely comforting. And in light of my description of the scent-induced anxiety incident above, I thought this was particularly telling: "Scientists now know that, while introverts have no special advantage in intelligence, they do seem to process more information than others in any given situation."

No shit, Sherlock.

That doesn't tell the whole story, nor does it get me out of the recognition that I was, and am, an odd duck. At a certain level, I felt like an outsider as a kid because I was just weird, and kids are brutal, and there's no need to (irritably?) reach for a more trenchant explanation.

But I admit it kind of has me eagerly anticipating the first chance I get to blurt out: "Why don't you people just leave me the hell alone?"