subtitle: another post that is nominally about someone who died recently but is really all about me

Yesterday my dad emailed me that my kindergarten teacher, Miss White, died late last year.

Miss White obit

Some memories from kindergarten.

  1. There was a lesson about the now-debunked theory about how different parts of the tongue are specialized to different tastes. We tasted a bunch of things, and part of the lesson relied on not knowing what it was that we were tasting. I was anxious about tasting unknown things, and Miss White was quite willing to tell me what the things were when I asked.

  2. The kindergarten classes had three baby bunnies, two were black and one was orange. My class (morning kindergarten) got to name one of the bunnies, and the afternoon kindergarten class got to name the other two. I remember two of the names, Rusty and Clover, but I forget the name of our third rabbit. At the end of the year we were told that the rabbits went to live on a farm.

  3. At the beginning of the year Miss White made a display on the bulletin board in the hallway outside of her classroom with all the kindergarteners’ names and birthdays. The spring birthdays were on flowers; the summer birthdays were on suns; the fall birthdays were on leaves; the winter birthdays were on snowflakes. I looked at the bulletin board and was really upset: my mid-Septemebr birthday was on a leaf, when everyone should know that fall does not start until the 21st of September. (A LEAF!?!?) Miss White took down the leaf and made me a sun.