In the fall of 1952, my mom carefully dressed me in my yellow raingear, kissed me on the cheek, and sent me down the long road that would take me to Larrabee Elementary School. There, far from Mother’s focused tutelage, my first year of grade school unfolded at a pace that was so unbearably slow, I feared I would burst into flames out of utter frustration. At home, things moved along nicely. At school, we spent three days studying the letter A. It was if the very fabric of time had been altered.
