Paradise Lost

By David Ruenzel

For most adults, their kindergarten experience is a vague dream from which emerge singular details of great clarity. People will tell you they can't remember anything, and the next moment they're inspired poets, telling you of glass milk bottles jingling notes in the milkman's crate, or of the cool thinness of the vinyl mats they floated on during nap time, or of the huge afternoon sun carving out pockets of the room.

But my own remembrances of kindergarten are far less lyrical, for I was the single member of the kindergarten class of 1960 determined unfit for the rigors of 1st grade. I was what they call "retained," forced to do another year of kindergarten. This was a terrible blow to my parents, and therefore a terrible blow to me, and even now, so many years later, I am still indignant at having been assessed such an early failure. How, after all, could one fail kindergarten? How could adults have the arrogance to so judge a mere child? How could the "children's garden"--where a century ago children were still analogized as "seeds" and the teachers as the "guardians of God's gift"--be such fallow ground?

Of course, school officials didn't use the word "failure" when discussing my case. They used the word "immature"--I remember my parents whispering this word back and forth over the dinner table--as if I only needed some more ripening in the kindergarten's greenhouse climate. But as a 5-year-old, I felt, on some ghastly intuitive level, that "immaturity" was a euphemism for failure, for some kind of gross inadequacy that would follow me through the years.