The Inkwell Threat

Lubbock, Texas. 1994. I’m almost 47 years old. Terrified. Texas Tech University and at least a thousand - well maybe a few hundred - students were going to accompany this so-called ‘mature’ student in moving forward into Addictions Nursing from twenty years of General Duty nursing.

The knot in my stomach had tendrils reaching up to squeeze my heart and were so real I called my sister in Calgary, Alberta to help me untie it. ‘One class at a time’ was her advice, not a whole semester but each class. I could take the opportunity to walk out of any class at any time that became too much for my very fragile ‘mature’ psyche.

Tumbling back in time as we talked, a narrow window opened on my first day in Grade One  ~ 

Milestone, Saskatchewan. 1953. All the kids were the same age and I knew them all. From Sunday School, the skating rink and playing Hide and Seek and Kick the Can on dusty gravelled small town streets. I had yet to met Mrs. Jones, our Grade One teacher. School was an old building, a two story brick school with floors that sagged, a metal Maypole in the front playground and gigantic monkey bars in the side playground. The Grade One classroom was on the first floor that also held classrooms for Grades Two, Three and Four. The old school and playground have been gone for many years. But not this next memory.

Mrs. Jones was introducing herself to the neat and tidy class, all sitting expectantly in old wooden desks with brass inkwells. You know, the ones with the sharp edged brass lids that flipped up and made a really neat noise when you flipped them over and over? Mrs. Jones was a nice lady. I liked her immediately. But......if any of us were to misbehave, her stern but gentle threat was that the finger of the miscreant would be put under that brass lid and she would sit on it! I don’t know if any of the class believed her. I don’t know if I believed her. In retrospect, no one, even the smallest kid, would have fit over that corner of the small desk. Those were the days of getting ‘The Strap’, but I do not recall any corporal punishment happening in Mrs. Jones class, only a threat on day one.

Recovery of memories is not a task easily done on command. Nor is the task of shaking off troublesome memories. Special memories are just saved for special situations. Recovery of memories, at least for me, is usually tied to something in the present. My ‘mature student’ fears in 1994 of sharing a classroom with so many younger students now seemed less daunting. Taking a tumble now and then, into the waters of memory, reminds me of where I came from and that I survived even the ‘inkwell threat.’

“What we remember from childhood we remember forever - 

permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.”

 ~ Cynthia Ozick