My first school was the storied one-room
schoolhouse. An old white washed building with a red roof and a vane on the
peak, it sat at the top of an unpaved hill surrounded by farmland.including a
barn rife with livestock.in a then-unin-corporated area of Urbana, Ilinois. The
school housed all six primary grades and, as I recall, there were about
thirty-five of us, mostly very young, although we ranged in age, of course, up
to twelve or thirteen.
The year was 1953, and I was six years
old, a first grader, and the son of a Ph. D. student at the University of
Ilinois. My peers and the upper graders were farm kids or children of
undergrads taking advantage of the GI Bill. Some were just too poor to live in
the city, which would have qualified them for a city school. I suspect my
parents dismissed the relevance of first grade, since most of my education came
at home, at their hands, anyway.
The sole teacher in that school was as
classic as the building itself. Mrs. Knapp was a schoolmarm by profession and
she’d been doing it, she said, all her life. By then, I’d guess, that meant
thirty-five or forty years on the job. She had to have been in her sixties：white hair in perfect
array.
She handled our diverse intellects with
perfect aplomb, guiding those of us who could read well through the pleasures
of Stevenson’s poetry and Mr. Popper and those who struggled with reading
through the joys of Dick and Jane. If every grade was a different country, Mrs.
Knapp was fluent in the six languages we spoke, always having appropriate
conversation to offer on whatever subject—academic and not—that our curiosity
was heir to. She knew, for example, more about baseball and its history than my
father did and was always ready to argue the merits of Pee Wee Reese her
favorite shortstop against Chico Carrasquel mine.
The one Mrs. Knapp incident that will always
remain engraved in my memory didn’t happen at school, however. It happened on a
deserted country road that divided corn-fields on the afternoon of the last day
of that, my first full-fledged school year. To celebrate the beautiful weather,
she’d taken us on a field trip, literally, through the bright yellow and green
of corn and wheat stalks that were taller than I was （and than she was, too） but still two or
three months shy of their harvest.
We wandered, as large groups of children
are wont to do, our eyes catching with fascination on every bug and bird and
leaf, every one of which, unfailingly, Mrs. Knapp had explanations for. We
trekked along utterly untrafficked gravel and dirt roads that had been
bulldozed just wide enough for tractors or a single car to travel. There were
no trees: The Ilinois prairie land was flat, and we could see only the blue of
the horizon and an occasional farmhouse rooftop beyond the fields of grain. We
ate our lunch sandwiches along a roadside, listening to the rustle of the wind
through the gently waving crops, the cries of the crows, the chirrs of the
crickets and beetles.
After lunch we walked more. Now, though,
the trip had become repetitious—more fields, more crops, more birdcalls—and I,
certainly among others, was becoming impatient. Then, it happened: There, in
the absolute middle of nowhere（straight out of what, some years later,
I would think of as The Twilight Zone or a Stephen King novel）, on the side of
another single-lane road hundreds of yards from anything that resembled
civilization, stood an ice cream stand. Nothing fancy, just a wooden counter
six or eight feet wide, five feet high, two feet deep, with poles supporting a
wood sheet that served as sun cover for the grizzled, but smiling, middle-aged
man who stood behind it. The words“Ice Cream—10 Flavors” were painted
prominently on the front.
The man and Mrs. Knapp greeted each
other as old friends. She turned to us and said each of us could have an ice
cream cone, any flavor we wished, her treat. Our enthusiasm was, naturally,
boundless, and debate over whether to stick to the known delights of chocolate
or vanilla or whether to experiment with the exotic Rocky Road or Blueberry
raged among us. But we each settled on something, and the man scooped large scoops
into waffle cones and handed them out. We savored and devoured.
Then he asked Mrs. Knapp, “ What would
you like? ” I like to think there was a twinkle in his eyes as he did and that
what followed was a ritual between them, although the few kids who’d attended
Mrs. Knapp’s classes in years before hadn’t been to the stand.
She paused thoughtfully, then said, “ I
think I’ll have a cone with a scoop of each.”
He didn’t bat an eyelash, but we did. A
scoop of each? All ten flavors? In one cone? Mrs. Knapp, this woman who was
smaller than the oldest of her stud
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