The 4th Grade Recess with Mrs. Timo

I was never a robust child. My grandmother would bribe me $5 for every pound I gained and despite drinking milkshakes with a raw egg in them often, I didn’t collect much money. I was scrawny and clumsy and for much of my childhood, sick.

4th grade. A winter of fevers. I’d wake up in the morning and feel it. Mom would come, hold my face in her hands, take my temperature. It was always low-grade, just above normal. She had to decide if I should stay home and now, as an adult, I realize all she was weighing: who will stay home with her? Do I call the doctor? What about the afternoon? Can she miss more school? If I send her and she gets sicker, can I get away from work to pick her up?

By Menchi (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

Had the fevers been high, the kind that force you to sleep for 20 hours, the kind you can feel before you touch the skin, the kind that make your breath hot, maybe it would have been easier. But every day, it was just barely there, lingering. Will it catch and burn or fade out?

On the days she sent me, I went with a note, instructions to stay inside during recess. No running around, getting overheated. This meant Mrs Timo, my homeroom teacher, had to stay with me. If it bothered her, she never showed it. In fact, I felt like she wanted me there. She’d hand me scissors and I’d cut out snowflakes to decorate her door. Sometimes we’d staple papers together. She showed me how to use the carbon copy printer and I loved the smell of the ink. We talked about books. If I was tired, she let me lay my head on the desk for a while. I would feel her hand on my hair for a second.

Whatever had gotten to me, these constant small fevers, they could never figure out. Tests, x-rays, all different kinds of medicines. Eventually, a series of shots, antibiotics directly into the bloodstream, knocked it out and slowly, the fevers went away. I was free to play outside again. And it was spring, May.

I didn’t want to. Playground politics was not for me. Too many mean girls. Mrs. T let me stay. I’d like to think she needed me there, needed my help. I want to believe she enjoyed talking books with me, that she wasn’t secretly longing to eat lunch in the teachers’ lounge, catching up on gossip and having adult conversations.

With her, those hours, I was not the awkward, sickly kid, all freckles and big glasses. I was a reader, a thinker.