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Sometimes You Are a Small Child Who Just Needs To Use a Tool
And the adults in the room make it nearly impossible for you
It’s 1974, and probably raining. I am in my first or second week of kindergarten at a small school in Massachusetts, and I am probably sad because it’s dark out — it is always dark out. I am fat and four years old, a slightly strange kid. I never know what anyone is talking about, I don’t like playing very much, and am terrible at arts and crafts. Why anyone would make something that they couldn’t sell? I like stories, and that’s about it. Everything else is the gray expanse between stories and eating.
There are kids who are stranger than me, and I also am aware there are some kids here who are not strange at all. Kids who are never wondering, as I always am, what we are doing here in this thing called “kindergarten”? Why do dogs live with us but squirrels don’t? Why we are alive?
In this moment, I am wondering why so much of kindergarten involves scissors. We have scissors at home that actually cut things — why do we go all the way to this place called school to use scissors that don’t?
There are a few pairs of fine scissors here in kindergarten, but not enough for everyone, not even enough for half of us. Most of the scissors are bad scissors — all metal, with…
