Lessons at the Chalkboard
My first introduction to a chalkboard was at my Grandmother’s house. I was five years old, and I quickly learned that her chalkboard was not meant for children to write on. She looked at me from the dining room doorway, her shoulders dropping as her eyes landed on the just-erased board and the empty space where her long list of groceries had been only minutes ago. She informed me calmly that she had been keeping track of what she needed from the grocery store. I let go of the dust-covered eraser that hung from a string next to the chalkboard and looked at the place where her neatly written list had been. She didn’t scold me, but I never saw a piece of chalk on the ledge ever again.
From then on, my siblings and I were relegated to the sun porch where there were two toys set out for all of us kids to share. My oldest brother always claimed the mechanical circus toy with the clown-like character that held onto a wire above its head. After ratcheting the lever several times, the clown would flip in circles repeatedly at break-neck speed. The rest of us were stuck with a wooden cobbler’s bench toy – the kind with wooden pegs that you pounded down with a mallet, then flipped over and pounded the colored pegs back in the other direction.
During most visits, I grew tired of waiting to play with the cobbler’s bench and turned my attention to the seven pink roll-up window shades that ran the length of the sunporch. My grandmother had each one pulled down exactly half way so that from the outside of the house, everything looked uniform and tidy. The roller shades were temperamental and reminded me of a mousetrap. At times they would glide easily up and down, and then without warning, they would lurch and fly upwards, flying off the metal holders that kept them in place. The crash as they hit the linoleum floor would send my mother scurrying from the dining room out to the sunporch, where several ratfinks sat smirking and pointing at the guilty party. Visits to my grandmother’s house were usually short.
Elementary school was my next encounter with a chalkboard. I watched in amazement every time our first grade teacher, Sister Michaelynn, pulled a five-pronged contraption left to right across the dark, matte surface, leaving perfect lines on which we could practice our alphabet letters. She was sweet and filled with compassion, and I mistakenly thought that all nuns were happy to spend their days with young children.
By the time I reached third grade, I had begun to notice the boys and decided I was tired of being invisible. I wanted to be noticed and didn’t care which nun ended up as collateral damage in my scheming. Corporal punishment had few limits in the 1960s and Sister Emeldine had no qualms about swatting any of us, but in particular the boys. They tested her patience daily and were promptly reprimanded with a slap across the face whenever they crossed a line. She and sister Antillia were both from Germany and were far more clever than my third grade self realized. Seeing the boys get swatted became our daily entertainment, and so I hatched a plan to keep the laughs coming. At recess time, I promised all the boys in our class a full-sized candy bar every time they were able to make Sister Emeldine mad enough to slap them. The ensuing days saw all hell break loose as the boys attempted some next-level misbehavior. I never found out who the snitch was, but a week later, Sister Antillia was ready for me.
I stood at the chalkboard with several other students, attempting to solve a long division problem. One by one, the students to my left and right put down their piece of chalk and returned to their desk until I was the only one standing at the board. She let me stand there for what seemed like an eternity, nose to nose with my humiliation before cooly saying, “Maybe you should spend more time on your math instead of thinking up ways to upset Sister Emeldine.” Some things sting worse than a slap, and she knew it.
By fifth grade, I had redeemed my reputation. So much so that I, along with my best friend Barb, was entrusted with one of the best helper jobs there was – pounding the chalk dust out of the erasers at the end of the day. We carried the basket of erasers out to the back porch of the school and proceeded to beat the erasers together, two at a time. It was probably the temptation of our black watch plaid uniforms – all of that dark fabric practically begging to be decorated. I’m not sure which one of us threw the first eraser, but by the time Sister Meinrad stepped out onto the porch, our uniforms told her exactly how many times we had hit each other. We had also decided it would be a good idea to throw them at the dark red brick wall, leaving dozens of tell-tale prints that we couldn’t have lied our way out of even if we had wanted to. Without saying a word, she went back inside and returned with a bucket of hot, soapy water and two brushes, instructing us to get busy and clean the chalk marks off of the wall. While we scrubbed, Sister told us how disappointed our mothers would be to see our uniforms such a mess. Didn’t our mothers have enough to do? Now they would have to wash our uniforms on top of all the other work they had to do. Weren’t we just ashamed of ourselves? We both showed up for school the next day with faded eraser prints dotting our black plaid jumpers. Neither of our mothers saw chalk dust as a reason to start the washing machine up on a Wednesday.
When my husband and I bought my grandmother’s farm in 1992, the first thing I did was put up a chalkboard on the kitchen wall, right in the same place where she had kept hers. Through several renovations, the chalkboard has been a constant, being moved from one room to another as old walls came down and new ones went up. I would be lost without one as it is the hub of information in my home. While other people are syncing their electronic calendars, I am buying boxes of chalk.
There is something endearing about chalk – the way if feels on your skin, and the way the dust drifts downward with every stroke of a new, white stick. Unfortunately, chalk is not what it used to be when I was a child. I remember how smoothly chalk wrote back then, always gliding across the surface of the board in one fluid motion. Now, the quality is poor, as evidenced by the deep scratches left behind on the black surface. I’ve tried several brands and they all seem to be the same, with some type of hard particle in it that necessitates turning the piece repeatedly in order to find a place on the chalk that will write without making a scraping sound on the board. The inferior chalk has left permanent traces of words, sketches, lists, and artwork behind – a history of events large and small from the past 33 years. Viewed from the side at just the right angle, everything that has ever been written on it is still visible in the scratches that remain, with the words Merry Christmas and Happy June etched on top of reminders to water the sunflowers and call the insurance company on Monday. I find it sad that most children today will not have this experience, or this memory. I wonder if dry erase boards and low-odor markers will even be worth reminiscing about 50 years from now.
Unlike my grandmother, I keep my grocery list on paper, where it belongs, and I don’t hide the chalk when children come to visit. The sunporch and the pink roll-up shades are gone, but in their place are several more rooms to wander through and explore – just as it should be in an old, continually evolving farmhouse. In the end, I just want the children who visit here to know where the candy is kept, and where to find the board games. Mostly I want them to remember me as someone who handed them the chalk, not someone who took it away.