Mrs. Patton, and seeing with your heart

My kindergarten teacher was Mrs. Patton, and she is one of my earliest memories of anyone at all who was not family. I can still picture her like it was yesterday.

I have written before about how lucky I was to grow up in a town as mixed as St. John, where I learned early that a person could be any color, from any background, and be a teacher or a pastor or a doctor or anything else they wanted to be. Mrs. Patton was part of that. I went from a preschool teacher who was an older white lady to a kindergarten teacher who was a Black woman, and to five-year-old me the only thing that registered was that she was kind. That is the whole gift of being raised that way. The differences are just there, normal, unremarkable, while the kindness is the part you actually notice.

And she was so kind. Gentle and warm in a way I still feel when I think of her. The yearbook has a line from her next to her name, and I do not know if she wrote it or borrowed it, but it has stuck with me my entire life:

Tolerance is seeing with your heart instead of your eyes.

That is a pretty extraordinary thing to hand a room full of five-year-olds.

The little lessons

She taught us things that had nothing to do with letters and numbers, and those are the ones that stuck. Every classroom in that school had a sink in it, for messes I assume, and Mrs. Patton would walk over to hers, wet a toothbrush, put toothpaste on it, and show us all how to brush. How to put the paste on, how to rinse the brush, how to spit. My own parents had taught me all of that, but not every kid has parents who do, so I figure it was part of the curriculum, and I love that she made it part of the morning.

She also taught us to stretch. She would stand with her arms out wide, like she was about to give the whole world a hug, and swing them in big slow circles, forward, one and two and three and four, then back the other way. As a kid I thought it was just a funny thing we did. As an adult I do those exact circles and feel in my shoulders exactly why she had us do them.

What kindergarten actually was

There were morning and afternoon classes, and the class photo says I was in the afternoon group, so it was only ever a half day, a few hours, which was fantastic. Because of that I could not honestly tell you that we accomplished a great deal. We had nap time. There were reading circles, her voice reading to us. There was coloring and art, and I remember her encouraging the kids who were creative. There was music sometimes. It is all soft around the edges now, it was a very long time ago, but the feeling is sharp: safe, warm, looked after.

That is most of what I have of kindergarten, and it is really just a portrait of one very good woman. (The other thing that survived from that year is my kindergarten inventory, the one where I announced I wanted to work with computers.)

Mrs. Patton, you taught a five-year-old to brush his teeth, to stretch his arms, and to see with his heart. I have managed to hold onto all three.