The Apple Slag
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Robert Frost
Seven of my eight children had the same kindergarten teacher. I figured if the teacher and I wanted to remain friends, I’d better make a serious effort to soften the effects of the Wild Voorhies Clan at every opportunity. As a result, I did a good deal of volunteering in her classroom. Some years, it was my job to pretest new students—how much did they already know about the alphabet, numbers, shapes, etc.? It was eerie how often those few moments I spent with kids at the beginning of the year held true all the way through their public-school experience.
(I remember one little girl had a crusted, runny nose and seriously snarled long hair when I interviewed her. She struggled with that apparent lack of concern at home until the day she graduated (just barely) 12 years later. A couple of little boys could already read well enough to understand the directions on their assessment form without my help. Down the road, they both won full-ride scholarships to several colleges. Another little girl burst into tears while I was talking to her. She told me that her parents were getting a divorce; her mom took her and moved to Salt Lake. Her dad kept her little brother–her only friend–and stayed behind in some little town to the south. I wondered how any five-year-old could be expected to learn with such an unimaginable rife in their life experience?)
My favorite school volunteer job ever, hands down, was the year I read stories to Son #5’s kindergarten class every Friday. I’d gather the group of five-year-olds in the center of the room clustered on a colorful rug and read to them while their teacher did prep work (or just relished the quiet!). This also meant I had to spend an hour a week in the children’s section of the county library perusing books so I could choose several. Oh, dang.
One day we read a story about a little boy who desperately wanted to be just like his big brother. The boy tried a dozen ways to get stronger and taller. None of them made any difference. Having heard that apples are super healthy, this boy decided that if one apple a day could make him grow healthy, five a day would certainly be more effective. From the back of the class I heard Son #5’s voice say, “Huh oh,” under his breath.
I stopped reading. “Michael,” I said. “Would you like to tell the class what happens when you eat five apples in one day? Will it help the little boy in the story, do you think?”
“No.” Said Son #5 reluctantly.
“What does eating five apples in one day do?” I asked.
“It makes you throw up,” he answered. “All over.”
True. But it turned out that wasn’t the only negative effect of extreme apple consumption.
Son #5 loved apples. He’d grab one as a snack on his way to bed almost every night. It was kind of inspiring really: a kid who preferred fruit to ice cream.
Some months into Son #5’s kindergarten year, the annual scrub-the-downstairs-bedroom-carpets day arrived. We had four boys in one room sleeping on two sets of bunk beds. My routine was to pull one set out from the wall and shove it against the other set, so I could deep clean under those two beds; then I reversed the process. There was always some of the detritus of lazy bedroom-cleaning chores shoved in corners under the beds—dirty socks (never a matched pair, for some reason), old math tests someone didn’t want me to see, once I found a dead mouse, and often Legos or Tinker Toys which hadn’t been rounded up.
This time, moving the second set of bunk beds proved more problematic. I tugged at the frame until I got the beds to move away from the wall, but the light from the overhead fixture didn’t quite reach that corner of the room. I could see a dark form of some kind where the head of the bedframe had lodged. Grabbing a flashlight, I shone it into the corner and immediately began involuntary gagging. Growing up the wall was about two feet of furry, spider-like black mold. The mess formed a pyramid which reached out from the wall across the carpet for at least 18 inches.
I called for reinforcements before I started heaving in earnest. My husband, with his usual fascination at bizarre scientific phenomena, concluded that someone had been discarding half-eaten apples off the edge of the top bunk for quite a while—maybe months. The pile had grown so high it finally reached the angle of repose and slid out from the wall in a random apple-slag heap. Mold covered every square inch of the pile. Science or not, I escaped to the bathroom.
When we confronted Son #5 with the appalling mess, he wasn’t in the least squeamish about helping to clean it up. He cheerfully dug handfuls of mold and rotten apple off the carpet, then the walls without a single ripple of disgust. Fortunate, because he is now beloved by his nursing colleagues for his ability to face any combination of intermingled bodily fluids without a sign of gastrointestinal reaction–a beacon of undeniable proof from kindergarten that there’s a silver lining to everything. If you wait long enough.