Education May Come Down to the Last Potato

There is not a better day in all of summer than the first day after school is out.  The Saturday after the last day of the school year, I woke in my bedroom in a state of consciousness that subtly came over me.  There was no school today and not tomorrow. In fact, I didn’t have to be anywhere for three months. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling in a state of euphoria thinking to myself that I had never spent much time looking at my bedroom ceiling, and that compared to going to school, my ceiling was absolutely the most fascinating thing I had ever seen. In that open white space where cobwebs hid and vagueness took over, I mapped out my entire summer, a map that said, “Nothing to do, no place to be.”

“I could lay here all day long,” my summer voice said, “and be content to do absolutely nothing but memorize every single square inch of this ceiling.” That is how insanely happy I was to be out of school.

The day before, when the last bell for the year rang, the teachers did not stop us from screaming our head off as we ran out of the building because they were going to do the same thing just as soon as the buses pulled out of the parking lot. Our teachers, the all-knowing, all-seeing caretakers of our edumacation, had positioned themselves just inside the familiar barrier of their classroom doors as we flew down the halls and swung wide our double doors to freedom. I heard them wishing us well for the summer as we ran by, but underneath their pleasant smiles were the looks of utter exhaustion and fatigue.

And run we did. At the sound of the final bell, we stampeded down the school halls like a herd of African wildebeests on the Serengeti, kicking each other, making cattle grunts and tripping each other, step on the fallen, and yell “see you in the Fall” at the top of our lungs.

Until that final bell rang, the last few weeks of school seemed like pure torture. Everyone was going through the motions, making school look like school, but not putting any sincere effort or commitment into our work. By late April, the cafeteria had run out of food to serve for lunch and the lunch staff, in a last-ditch effort to appear as if food were plentiful, fed us nothing but potatoes that had been stacked in cold storage since Christmas. Even so, the stored boxes of potatoes had sprouted so many spuds that, when retrieved, looked like a bed of sea anemones that had been harvested from the bottom of the Caspian Sea and sold to America on the black market. They were horrible misconfigurations, poor excuses for food that, incidentally, would become the source for a future documentary on the mismanagement of the National Nutritional and Education Act of 1956, an act that Mamie Eisenhower had championed. The mini-series gave historical evidence that potatoes could not be trusted to a democracy and were more suited for underground movements. Championing the starchy plant in the series was the first lady’s great-great-grandfather who had a brief stint as a potato farmer during the Industrial Revolution when he tried to use potatoes as a source of fuel. He died homeless wearing a torn and tattered T-shirt whose logo read, “Taters for a Better America.”

 When I was in school, the decision to feed us nothing but those oblong starch muffins, mashed potatoes, for the last month of school came during a clandestine meeting of the local school board and was made knowing that feeding kids copious amounts of carbs was a natural way to induce sleep. Managing kid’s energy levels through diet was the key.  So, every day from April 1, like some tacky bad joke, our lunchtime plates were heaped with a massive pile of bleached white mashed potatoes, a warm and steamy substitute for melatonin.

During this same period, President Kennedy had mandated a national fitness program called The President’s Physical Fitness Club, so each day, by the time lunch rolled around, we had all exercised for four straight hours, doing continuous push-ups and the like to prepare us for a Russian invasion that would descend on our playground if their revolutionary rocket Sputnik misfired. So intense was the physical fitness program that from the moment attendance was taken in the morning, kids were required to launch into a routine of sit-ups, cardio lunges, and sprints around the school. We ran looking up into the sky in case the Russian satellite should began its descent onto American soil, stopping only to do calisthenics and patriotic cheers and of course, more push-ups and sit-ups.

By the time the bell rang for lunch four hours later, we were so ravenous with hunger that we would have chewed off our own arms if they had let us. There was no need to do that, thank goodness, because waiting for us under a bright yellow heat lamp in the cafeteria was a mountain of freshly prepared hot whipped potatoes with butter and they were generously spooned directly onto our metal trays as if they had been off-loaded from a dump truck.

Finding our place at tables of fifty kids, we were so hungry we never picked up a fork, but ate with our hands, shoving globs of mashed potatoes into our mouths. We ate freely off  each other’s trays as well to reinforce the democratic and cooperative atmosphere, and then raced back to get in line for a second helping. In fact, we were so hungry we did not even take our trays on the second trip but stood in line with cupped and open hands and let cafeteria workers served us a new heaping mound with industrial size spoons made by upperclassmen in shop class.   

“Oh, thank you so much, thank you, Miss Haggathorn,” we said to the Head Server. She always answered, “You are so welcome,” but now I think that she missed her calling as a jail warden, preferring this job of piling steaming hot potatoes into our hands and smiling demurely as the steam rose and burnt the skin off our tiny fleshy fingers. Later it was found that some of the hungrier children ate off small portions of their fingers thinking they were potatoes, because at that age, having only recently stopped sucking their thumbs, they could not tell the difference between the two textures. Some of those children had to be sent to the nurse for treatment, but the other students went straight to the gym after lunch for the culminating activity of the president’s fitness program, the much-heralded tug-o-war contest. Excitement, as much as could be mustered under the weight of a high carb meal, was mounting as a team consisting of the fittest students stood across from an imaginary Russian team made entirely of a janitorial staff of two.

Those who were not in the nurse’s station or part of the tug-o-war contest lined the wooden benches in the gym and watched the best of the President’s team grab the rope and pull with all their might. The rope barely moved either way for a long moment, but unfortunately, the mashed potatoes had already taken their toll and the students was soundly beaten and drug wholesale across the gym floor like a beached whale carcass.

It was a pitiful display of athleticism, of course, and only substantiated what was already a well-known fact, that we would never be able to beat the Russians during the calendar school year while potatoes were being served. (See David Orslaka’s Book, The Battle of Little Big Potato: The Military Genius of Chief Stands-With-A-Spoon). As the final kid was dragged across the winner’s line, the two janitors, dressed in mechanic’s coveralls, hooped and hollered as they did a victory lap pushing their cleaning carts in what was seen by teachers as unsportsmanlike conduct.

By then it was about 1:43, and with so many kids now sound asleep from the effects of eating a month’s supply of mashed potatoes, the teachers decided just to let them sleep it off. It was, after all, the last day of school, and parents would be arriving soon to pick up their children. I had cleverly found a spot to sleep under a gymnastic mat where I would not be bothered and therefore no one found me until well after 5:30, long after everyone else had left. I was in a deep slumber as they pulled off the gymnastic mat, in the deepest of rapid eye movements, softly whimpering to myself and twitching.

My parents pulled off the mat and woke me gently, spoon feeding me sips of black coffee from a thermos that had the president’s picture on it, and my mother waved peppermint candies under my nose to stimulate my frontal cortex, but when I could not stand up without wavering, my father had to carry me all the way out to the car in his arms. Later he told me I was whispering some gibberish about being attacked by an army of Russian potatoes.

Three days later, an article on the back pages of a Russian newspaper came to the forefront and reported that American children slept on the average of twenty-two and a half hours a day, and only rose to the smell of mashes potatoes wafting through the air. The article claimed that this was part of an American plot to thwart the Cold War, to bring some new warmth and détente to an otherwise viscous relationship between the two countries.

I’m not sure if that is true. I awakened the next day feeling, as I said earlier, perfectly happy, blissfully serene, staring at the creamy consistency of my off-white ceiling and thinking that it was the most beautiful space I had ever seen, and that I could stare at every square inch of it, or sleep, for the rest of the summer.