Twenty-five years ago the New York public transit system went on strike. And I missed school.
Elementary school alternated good years and bad years. Second grade? Bad. New school, unpleasant teacher, incomprehensible math (they taught us to add and subtract in base 3 before base 10), and worsening undiagnosed myopia. Third grade? Fabulous. Fourth? Not so good. Fifth? Wonderful. Having my two best friends in my class, especially. We played freeze tag, highly strategic freeze tag, every day at recess.
I can synchronize family events with my academic progress, although there's no emotional alignment of the memories. My mother's breakdown, the one that got me sent to live with Ray, was in the middle of second grade. Ray moved to a larger apartment early in third. And my grandparents got a court order blocking me from going back to Ray's during Christmas break of fifth grade.
I had to finish out the year. The school only went up through fifth grade and I was doing so well there. So my mother took me down to school every day. We walked to the station, took the train to Grand Central, took a bus downtown. After school, she met me at the door and we reversed the journey. I think it had all been cleared with the principal.
Annajane was thirty-seven, only three years older than I am now. I have no idea what she did between 9:00 and 3:00 for those six months. She was less depressed than she'd been when she first gotten out of the hospital, and she didn't cry most days. But she was very thin and had already lost a couple of front teeth. I could tell she was different from the other mothers. Back then, even in New York City, most fifth-graders weren't met by parents every day; there was little risk of her being revealed to other adults, but I was still embarrassed.
She had a pastel cotton shirt, one wide stripe in each of pink and yellow and blue and green, with white cuffs and collar, that it seems like she must have worn almost every day that spring. I had a shirt with narrow stripes in the same colors and she liked the near match. I found her widde-striped shirt, worn to indecent translucency, every time I had to pack up her things last year; she'd taken it to both adult homes.
After looking at a modern account, I suspect I didn't miss much school, and probably didn't need to miss any. Apparently it was spring break for part of the strike. The long-haul trains kept running, and the two miles from the train terminal to the school would have been quite feasible to walk—I did a comparable distance many, many days in high school, saving the subway fare to supplement my allowance.
But, just like my family would never have considered taking taxis in Manhattan, we never even considered walking. My mother never learned to drive, and my grandfather took the only car to work, anyway. The bus was the right way to go, but there was no bus. So my mother and I stayed home.
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