On the Way Home from School

I should have been home for lunch no later than five minutes past twelve, but I yielded to temptation and made a stop at the Grand Book Center. It was nearly twenty to one when I finally climbed the stairs up to our small apartment. My mother was furious.

"Where were you? What were you doing all this time?" she demanded.

Strictly speaking these were rhetorical questions. I was late home for lunch nearly every day, even when I didn't stop at the Grand Book Center. The walk home from St. Mary’s was no more than five minutes, but I had a tendency to 'dawdle and daydream' as my mother liked to put it.

Actually, what I did do most days was stop in front of the washing machine repair shop in the next block and tap on the glass until Max, the jowly and wrinkly old Bulldog who slept his canine days away behind the greasy display window, finally roused himself onto uncertain legs and wobbled over to slobber the glass on the other side of where my hand was pressed. "Good boy," I'd whisper. Then he'd turn around and make his painful way back to his sleeping spot, shaking and trailing yards of drool behind him, collapsing once more into unconsciousness. Everyone said Max was the ugliest creature they had ever set eyes on, but that was probably because they'd never looked into his eyes. Those were large and brown and sad and beautiful. I loved that old dog. But even on those days I was usually home by twelve-thirty.

“Do you know what time it is?” I looked up meekly at the big clock hanging over the stove.

"And what's in there---" her attention was suddenly arrested by the paper bag pressed tight between my arm and rib cage. This question wasn’t rhetorical.

“Let me have it,” she said.

I handed her the bag and she slid the contents out on the table. Two Green Lantern comic books and one Justice League of America. Two issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine. One receipt for .71 cents.

"This is what you waste your money on? Junk that will rot your brain? They're going right in the garbage," she said, but she only slid them back in the bag and tossed them on top of the breadbox. I knew she wouldn't really throw them out. She might yell when she was worked up but she was never mean.

"Wash your hands and sit down."

Lunch today was my favorite: tomato soup and American cheese on toast and Devil Dogs for desert. Which meant she had been looking forward to surprising me. It made me feel rotten---but not for long. I broke off a piece of my cheese sandwich and dipped it in the tomato soup and felt happiness seeping through all the pores of my body. After a while I worked up the nerve to ask, "Do you think you can write me a note for Sister Anne?"

It was one of the rules of St. Mary's: If you were late or had been absent, you needed a note from your mother when you finally showed up. I knew there was no way I would make it back to school by one o'clock today.

"I will not. You can tell Sister exactly why you were late."

"I'll be punished," I told her. "I'll have to stay after class."

"Then maybe you'll learn not to waste time anymore."

"Just this once?"

"Eat your lunch," was all she would say.

But by the time I'd taken my first delicious bite of cream-filled Devil's Food she had scribbled a note and slid it into my shirt pocket. "Give that so Sister," she told me. I was saved.

A few minutes later as I was going out the door at 1:05 she said: "Please see if you can at least get home on time this afternoon. I want to take you to Izzy's. You need some shirts."

"Izzy's" was where we bought the white shirts and blue pants that, along with a blue-knit tie sold only in the Principal's office, made up the St. Mary's School uniform. There was a back room at Izzy's where they stored boxes and boxes of clothes, and it doubled as a dressing room. It had a nice smell of cardboard and camphor, and that's where I always tried on the new pants. For some reason though I always seemed to 'dawdle' and my mother would have to come in back to see what was taking me so long.

"OK," I said.

"No later than three-fifteen. Please."

"I'll be home on time," I assured her.

I meant it, too, when I said it. But I had skipped Max at lunchtime and I was always afraid if I let a whole day go without seeing him he might not be there next time. He was old and nearly crippled and it was probably cruel of me to make him get up and walk across the floor to the window. But I figured if he sat there all day he'd just die. I loved that old dog.

We never made it to Izzy's that afternoon.

Not long ago I read of a study that found that our personalities and our individual tics and traits are set in stone by the age of six or thereabouts:

“We remain recognizably the same person,” Christopher Nave, study author and a doctoral candidate at the University of California at Riverside, writes. “This speaks to the importance of understanding personality because it does follow us wherever we go across time and contexts.”

This morning, as I was preparing to leave for work, I picked up a copy of Brambley Hedge and allowed myself to become lost for some minutes in the wonderful world of small mice who live inside of tree trunks.

I was late to the office.

Somehow, I don't think my mother would have been surprised.