Spring: 1963

The warmth of spring and the Fifth Grade is almost at an end. I like Mrs. Nolte, and I like the Fifth Grade. After Whee-Zee died I immerse myself in schoolwork.

I'm a knowledge junkie, and I like to read encyclopedias just for fun. Whenever we have to do reports, and we do a lot in Mrs. Nolte's class, I use the time to read about all kinds of stuff in the World Book Encyclopedia. I love the World Book. There's science and history, and biographies of famous people. There are pictures of all of the flags of the world, and geography and inventions and, well, just everything. We don't have the World Book at home, but we do have the Encyclopedia for Children that Mom gets for us at the Acme Supermarket. They're not as detailed as the World Book, and you can only buy them one at a time, but they're better than nothing. My mind absorbs all it can, and I remember almost everything, so I seem a lot smarter than I really am.
I'm still infatuated with Sue Burns. Girls are starting to seem a bit more important to me now. I can't explain it, but it matters to me. I'd especially like it if Sue Burns liked me back, but I'm too stupid and goofy to even tell her how I feel.
We play a game of tag in the playground, boys against the girls. Team tag, I think we called it. You try to capture all of the girls. Usually you tried to catch the girl you liked the best, and so I was always trying to catch Sue Burns. Your teammates would try to tag you when you were captured, so you could be free again. We played this game all spring, a kind of early mating ritual played out in the sand.
We'll be getting ready for the May Fair again, and we'll play softball at recess.
Don Vanneman and Joyce Hoefers are still the leaders in our class, and I'm still one of the last kids chosen when we pick for teams at kickball and such.
I'm working harder at my homework, and I'll get straight A's.
We hear that next year we'll be at the Saint Margaret's Catholic school building while they make a new wing for our school. We also hear that a new high school will be built in Woodbury Heights, so none of us will go to Woodbury High like the kids before us.
A new high school here in town. I wonder where they're going to build it?
I'm riding my new black West German Rixe bicycle, and when it's warm I ride home for lunch, so I don't always have to sit in that horrible little room in the basement so much.
There's lots of stuff going on in the world right now, stuff we don't talk about in our little school in our little town.
Right now we're getting ready for a May Fair, small town white kids without a care in the world.
Right now black kids our own age are getting ready to stare down police and endure the blasts from fire hoses and policemen's clubs and dogs as they march for freedom in Alabama.
Young East German kids are trying to figure out how to get across a wall of bricks and barbed wire, and kids in Vietnam are being forced out of their villages by Green Berets and the Vietcong.
Yeah, it's great to be an American alright.