Disappearing Act

That I was Sharon Smart’s ‘favorite’ as the ‘one other intellectual’ in Miss Morgan’s third-grade class, but with whom she was not going to play favorites, left me flabbergasted.?These many decades past, it sets me to thinking—finally, poor commentary on my ‘intellectuality.’?Maybe I was not the only new kid in second grade who blipped on her radar screen in art and music class and maybe she knew that, because, come to think, maybe she was at least one of the other ones, ?Sharon Smart of the Boston Smarts and newly arrived from Saudi Arabia and the 1001 Arabia Nights in the citrus and pomegranate festooned paradise of Kingsville, Texas, the caleche side-streets which belied the fact that life could be hard here in the sub-tropics, even for a professor’s daughter.?

When she was not probing the limits of my vocabulary or seeing how much of her irony would bounce off my Texan skull, I would see her sometimes at a distance on the playground, a little taler than the other girls her age and her demeanor as though she were enlightening them on some point.?She appeared always to be in control of these little sociograms.?I, for my part, had no such public except for the captive one in the form of the class where I sometimes tried to walk the thin line between the good-natured class clown and the smart-aleck.?These meditations of mine upon the obvious, whether the Texas heat eight months out of nine during the school year or the gnats swarming around our faces in September, might elicit a titter from the girls, a concealed snort from the boys, but from Miss Smart a look straight at Carter her favorite that said silently, “Oh, really?”?

What was it like to have a real sense of place and rootedness where we in fact lived, not where we were supposedly from??This I have wondered and craved all my life and yet my epitaph will probably read, ‘Drifter.’ ??I wonder if she has wondered and craved this as well.?Whether personnel decisions made at ARAMCO corporate HQ or Texas A&I College or the ruination of a Gonzales County dirt farm was the cause, it did not matter. ?We were both thrust into this school and into his town and away from everybody we knew and had played with, Mary Sue and William Littlefield for me and who knows for Sharon.?But, by golly, she surmounted her part of that situation.?She gathered her little coterie around her and instructed them, and she named her ‘favorite,’ and she was in charge.?

Summer came and went, another family catastrophe rocked my world, and I found myself briefly again at Flato Elementary in a very sweet and intelligent fourth-grade teacher’s class whose name I do not remember.??That was the year I attended four schools, unless I have forgotten one.?Sharon was not in that class, and neither was Dahlia.?No sooner had the semester begun and, even before Fire Safety Week, we were headed West, on Route 66, I reading the Swiss Family Robinson in the back seat and regarding the scenery of the American high desert from that vantage.?We were refugees, fleeing from some unbearable reality I did not entirely understand and toward my Father’s dreams of a California and San Francisco he last saw before shipping out for the South Pacific for four years.?On and on the Ford Fairlane took us, the year President Kennedy was elected, away from school, friends, familiar places and sights, away from people who did not make fun?of the way I talked, away from Grandparents and Robie and Leesville and bitter lore.?Dahlia remained there, I am sure, for she is part of the soul of that country.?But Sharon??What of her??Did she surmount every challenge??I hope so.?I hope even that she is over there in her ancestral Beantown right now, right down the road and on the ‘T-Line’ from here, the Heart of Massachusetts, surmounting away, and thinking perhaps once in a blue moon of her first favorite among all the favorites she has surely chosen, as I think occasionally of her.

?

--gcc

?

?Guy Christopher Carter, 05/12/2023