Confessions of a Grade School Role Model

A woman stepped off my bus this morning, across the street from the State Psychiatric Hospital.  I noticed her because she looks like someone I know, but wasn't.  The stoplight turned red when she got off, and she went towards the crosswalk and waited.  She didn't cross though, but instead walked slowly up and down the sidewalk a few hundred yards in either direction, staring intently across at the hospital as she did.  Then, just before the light turned green again, she got back on the bus.  "I just wanted to see what it looks like from out here," she told the bus driver, and she sat back down.  The bus driver tensed uncomfortably, and squinted at the road ahead.

I have a thousand routes home on the walk from work, and one of these routes takes me past a kindergarten.  I looked in the windows as I passed last night across the street, and the familiarity made me smile.  It looked so much like the kindergartens I worked in in Japan -- the construction paper animals on the windows, the bright solid-colored fixtures, the child-drawn misshapen human figures grouped on walls, the tiny furniture all arranged at knee-level.  Something was very different though, and I thought about it long and hard, thinking maybe I was about to stumble across some cultural epiphany about American education or child-rearing.  Several blocks later, I realized what it was.  There wasn't any place to take off shoes.