3rd Grade Blackout

3rd Grade Blackout

(Forward: This is an ice breaking post for the community. Most similar posts, written completely without the help of AI and hardly all that edited so as to make it an authentic as possible real-time delivery style, will become blog articles like this.

One of the goals of the community is to chronical the portions of our lives where we have memory gaps and fuzzy fill-ins and with that in mind, this was one of the most powerfully impactful moments I've personally experienced of such a gap. In the end, this may well be the first chapter of an anthology of such tales, all told in as much truth as I can deliver, assuming a truth actually exists. Moments like these do make one question that.

I'll soon be returning to finish the story but for now, this is exemplary of the kind of content I hope others will want to share about their own experiences in this wild life we're living during the great change Humanity is going through right now.

In particular, we Generation X'ers have experienced the world without computers in mass use and have seen every shade of the gradual transition to where we are culturally as a result of them, and will see further where we're headed before we pass.

This makes our childhood tales so quaint to the younger generations - even hard to believe perhaps. This one is even harder. Enjoy!)

I could have sworn they were just being mean. And I don't mean just a few of the kids - it was the entire class. Yeah, alright I was a hyperactive kid, very strange, and I had absolutely no capacity for self-reflection to see my behavior in the light others saw me.

I'm beginning to think this was not only ADHD but undiagnosed autism of a kind as well. Perhaps something else that draws me to share just like this. Clearly a degree of narcissism is a component I try not to allow poison my choices as much as I can avoid it. Though who knows, this incident itself may well be one of the birthplaces of that disorder.

Anyhow, regardless of not having made the best first impression in my first year previously at this school, this particular day I was really feeling like the subject of a concerted, class-wide attack. The bottom dog in the dog pile. For no reason I could imagine suddenly fingered and called out and thrown to the lead wolf (the teacher) to punish.

It started after we returned from one of our first 15 minute recess.

As soon as we sat at our seats, one of the girls in the class I barely knew shot her arm up to be called on and said, "Um, when we were outside at recess, I saw him walking around outside the fence." She pointed directly at me, of course.

My immediate response was, "What? I was inside the play area the whole time!" Pretty sure I even remembered just lulling about on a swing and thinking about stuff, which was a fairly normal and usual way to spend the time in our little corner of the world of the much larger playground.

Suffice it to say this was perhaps the first time I'd been accused of something I was pretty sure I had not done. And the accusation wasn't a light one... our fenced in early grade playground was a small region of densely packed younger age playground equipment in an age where 3 story swings could throw a kid some 10 city blocks if he really got going - those were for the BIG kid playground.

We didn't have a lot of direct monitoring when we were out there. The teacher and her aide had windows and from there could see almost all of us from there so that's what they did to monitor. And beyond that we were largely left to turn each other in if there was something someone was doing to violate the rules.

Leaving the playground area was a severe capital offense. Kinda funny by today's standards to think it was even possible then but yeah, there WAS a little gap in the exterior of the fence and a kid could go through it to wander about outside this play area.

And if you did it was HELLLLL to pay!

So in essence, this was basically some random girl whom I believe I had gotten along with so far, standing up to openly and brazenly get me sent to the principle's office for a spanking.

Yeah, that was a thing back then.

On the younger kids like us, it was probably just a handprint on the butt but later in grades it became an entire table tennis paddle... then something more like a Cricket bat, all of which I eventually came to realize was only a moment of pain you'd get over quick no matter how great the sting.

At this point, however, even just the soft swat was a thing of great terror to be threatened with and in my perception, this girl just decided for whatever reason that I should be subject to one.

I don't think she was even one of the kids I'd pulled the chair out from under as they'd gone to sit down as had been a common practice at the school I had recently moved in from that year.

The idea at my last school was that it was funny and I had been taught it was a way to let a person know you wanted to make friends with them as you shared a great laugh about how you 'got them' as they wondered if their coccyx had broken.

It was done to me a lot at the previous school and apparently this new class had never opened up such a practice so you can imagine it was part of my culture clash that started me off on the wrong foot.

Fun times. Here I thought I could make new friends and put a sore reputation behind me rather than just often having a sore behind.

It really did get worse from here before this classroom finally dispersed after 8th grade to go on to high school and my family moved.

Despite perhaps being a bit deserving of being the class donkey, upon which it seemed everyone was in line to pin a tail on, I still felt abnormally attacked by this suggestion that I had committed such an off-fence offense.

To my great surprise, one by one, other students stood up to say exactly the same thing, that they had seen me on the other side during recess. I defended against the claim vociferously, truly stunned to be accused of something I honestly believed I had not done.

One 'friend' even said that they saw me walking with an adult over the hill. That's when I really started losing my mind because even those I felt I liked and was tolerated by, kids I knew and played with after school in my own neighborhood were standing up to say that they had seen me out of bounds.

It should be stated here that beyond the fence-line was little reason to go but to explore away from others for no reason but to invite trouble. It was a realm of overgrown burnt yellow grass common to northern California, crowded with red Manzanita trees (which are often just big bushes rather than your common concept of a tree) and the occasional actual oak.

Those are, of course, the friendly bushes when you consider that the brush in the area is commonly chock full of POISON oak which is often difficult to tell apart from the saproling oak tree. Over the years I spent in the region I got pretty good at spotting details that clearly delineated the difference.

Nevertheless, that they existed was one reason NOT to go wandering. The itch these poison oaks would cause was a curse of legendary proportions. I already knew this despite being so new to the region.

So why, I wondered, would I be going out walking with some 'stranger in a black trench coat' as I had just been accused of? In the middle of broad sunny daylight? It was quite a warm day if I recall as well.

I racked my poor 3rd grade brain for what ever could cause such a total class consensus, and swore to tears over it, defending myself in a variety of ways I could think of and even shot back that nobody liked me since arriving in this class as a newcomer.

The teacher agreed that I had been observed to have trouble 'fitting in'. Of course this was an appropriate moment for her to try to explain WHY, which I think contributed to my whole defensive poor-me eruption over it all.

This trial by classroom was going into more time than the recess itself as it kept producing more and more 'witnesses'. I swore everyone had decided, somehow, to raise a gigantic conspiracy against me - not sure I even knew the word yet but hey, maybe this is one of the reasons I'm a bit of a cautious conspiracy theorist now.

What I couldn't figure out is when and why they all decided, right then, to say I had done something I had absolutely no memory of doing. The severity of the accusation was clearly enough for me to think they had come up with this devious plan just to show me how badly they were displeased with me as a relatively new classmate. More came forward to say they saw me walking with some adult off over the hill that from the playground area you couldn't really see past.

It got to a point with tears streaming down my face insisting everyone was out to get me and asking many point blank why they were lying about this, that the teacher finally decided to march the entire class of 30 kids or so right out to the playground and up to the fence gap to investigate the claim.

Kids fanned out across the play area saying where they saw me from, what vantage point, and I was asked to say where I was, which was firmly at that swing the whole time in my mind.

There was a tiny bit of mud, a slight depression where water often collected in the break in the chain link fence. Why there was even a gap IN the fence would be, I'm sure, a matter parents would go ballistic about in a PTA meeting of any modern generation. There wasn't actually water there on this particular occasion, just soft imprintable clay.

Then they pointed out a boot print in the middle of the divide.

I had unusual footwear at the time which was probably a result of having shoes from a Southern California retailer, rather than what was normally available here. Obviously what shoes you were wearing were still a good reason to explain how fast you could run, by all television commercial claims, and as a kid that seemed to be a reasonable truth to believe in.

Enough to say, nobody else in that class had the same footwear. They found a shoeprint in the mud and compared it to the bottom of my shoe and the teacher herself declared with the confidence of a forensic specialist that it was clearly the same footprint.

Now... perhaps it was. At this point I was starting to feel a bit like someone under questioning in a police station that was actually reconsidering my own memory 'under duress'.

Up to then, it had been no contest to me that I had NOT been on the other side of that fence the entire time. I was beginning to wonder if and what I had somehow forgotten since the bell brought us back to class. Could my mind have just filled in a whole recess with a common memory from any day prior to that?

And why would it? I couldn't even imagine following a stranger off over the hill. I'd had a few not so wonderful encounters with 'strangers' in the town I had moved from enough to know it wasn't something I would've done. Or... naw. Nothing. No reason I could think of to invite the kind of wrath down upon myself that I knew I was about to receive.

I was marched to the Principal's office with almost as much fanfare as we had gathered outside to have such a full class investigation effort. One thing I truly could not believe was how big an incident this was becoming to have the whole class centered on whether or not I had strayed from the boundary line.

Punishment by the Principal was much more private in his office. There was no pulling down of the pants or anything like that, no 'grab your ankles' kind of thing - I think it was much softer and more 'grab the chair in front of you'. The rest of all that came later with more brutal Principals.

This one, if I recall, had a broken and misshapen finger and a shaky nervous hand and was not quite as mean spirited as others. I can't say I recall anything else aside from that he had the now cliché Werther's Originals caramel candies in a cup on his desk. Don't remember a word he said about the whole thing and I believe he felt a little disrupted in his day more than anything else. Pretty sure this was the Principal who had very little hair left on his dome but after so many it's hard to be sure.

Still, it was all the more traumatic, given the age and the sense of having had the entire class literally lie to put you in that position. I was pretty humbled and silenced for some time after that if I remember.

Time heals all wounds (usually) and while I grew up remembering the event and continuing to think it had all just been a random moment of group insanity focused on making me suffer, the trauma of the event faded and things went 'back to normal' as I never experienced such a wild outburst of false accusations again.

Or at least I grew up from there thinking they had been false.

Now... perhaps I got to a later age, who knows when, sometime as an adult, where the spell, if you can call it that, faded away. Perhaps enough remembering the time and allowing my mind to fill in details that actually didn't exist caused me to rewrite my memory based on dreams that came forward to fill the gap. I'm not above understanding that's probably what any modern therapist would say took place.

The thing is, it's not the only memory I've had come up later and fill the gap of an earlier time. But that's a story for later.

In fact, while this is one of the founding reasons to form this group, is to explore these kinds of memory holes and so many other experiences that are very difficult to explain, I'm still incredibly reticent to relate what my mind DID eventually determine, as I gradually felt the ice melt away to reveal an explanation of what happened that day.

I cannot say for sure that what has come up to fill the void of those moments did not do so for the express purpose of creating a way to tell a story that fits with all the claims. It's quite interesting how much the weight of your entire student body peers can get you to think and rethink for the rest of your life what you were so confident at the time was just a personal attack.

I'm sure already, you believe you can answer if whatever I have to say next will just be a post event recreation that didn't happen or not. I'm sure you'd probably believe that it's some element of narcissism. Perhaps you may even doubt this much of what I've said so far. Who can remember anything from 3rd grade, right?

But what I will say for now is that I'm out of time today to explain what I DO recall. And what I do believe I may recall now is... well it fits with what they said but it doesn't fit with most of life's mundane experiences. I'll say more later.

For now, I wonder, are these the kinds of memories the AI was curious about to be pushing for exploring with us? Let's hear from that side of things. And by all means, if you read this and found it interesting, let me know.

Signing off today,

The Founder.