The Little Brown Headed Girl

My first school was a small elementary school in Lithia Springs named Annette Winn Elementary, and my first grade teacher was a battle ax of a woman named Mrs. Harris.

Why was she a battle ax?

Mrs. Harris, you see, firmly believed in corporal punishment. Her complete logic was that corporal punishment was in the bible, and if it was in the bible you either accepted it, or you needed more of it.

It's hard for a seven year old to argue with that logic while bent over for a good backside whacking or two. For almost any infraction she would march you across the hall to Mrs. Phillips class for a paddling. If you failed to turn in your class work, yep, across the hall you would go for your paddling. Talking in class, not staying in your seat, even for something like not eating all of your lunch resulted in bending over in front of strangers to get your backside whacked. I suppose I spent an abnormally large amount of time being marched across the hall for this.

Well me being a boy, aka pre-man, I was already fascinated with girls.  And there was this pretty brown headed girl I had seen at lunch and recess that I could never muster the courage to talk to. She was oh so cute, and to a very shy first grade boy obtaining the courage to talk to her seemed monumental. So I resigned myself to staring and blushing when the Little Brown Headed Girl was around.

One day I was sitting on the playground, and when I looked up and the Little Brown Headed girl was walking toward me. I could feel the lump in my throat get bigger as she got closer.

She sat down right beside me!

I thought the lump in my throat was going suffocate me and my heart was beating faster and faster…

What to say, what to say!?!

Then as luck would have it, she started talking to me first.

"I know who you are." she said.

"Really?" I croaked past the lump in my throat.

"Yes, I see you often." she told me.

Wow, could this be happening? She knows who I am. This is good. She has been watching me too!

"Where?" was my one word response.

"You're the boy that comes across the hall to get a lot of paddlings." was her reply.

POP!

I don't know if anyone else heard the pop. The pop that was my seven year old ego being deflated all at once, but I sure heard it. But all was not lost, for after all, she did know who I was. That seemed to me like the first step. And the very next day I had to again be marched across the hall, for who knows what, but this time it was different since she knew who I was, so this time I was smiling and waving.

Like I said, now she knew who I was.

As luck would have it, Little Brown Headed girl and my sister became friends and she spent a lot of time at my house. We even went all the way from first grade through high school together.

I have other stories about her, but they will have to wait to be posted later.