NONFICTION  -
    Lucky/Unlucky?        
We did have a lot of books and I read a lot.    -   Weebly.com                                    

Growing Up on a Farm in Wisconsin
​Lucky or Unlucky?
by Charlene Anderson

Some friends recently got into a discussion about kindergarten. One said he didn’t like his kindergarten teacher, another said she did. Someone else remembered the field trips they went on and especially the snacks. I didn’t go to kindergarten, so I just listened. Afterwards I asked myself if I felt deprived or short-changed by not having the kindergarten-experience. It was hard to say since I had nothing to compare with except secondhand testimony.
 
Back then and back there, with respect to education, it wasn’t just kindergarten that was different from the so-called norm. I went to a one-room school and all eight grades (for a total of about 30 students) shared the same classroom and teacher. That meant that all eight grades had to share the teacher’s time too, so my class met for about an hour a day and the rest of the time we spent at our desks doing assignments. That had the advantage that I seldom had actual homework to take home! But it had the obvious disadvantage of having a lot less instruction time. I did well enough in high school and college, but who knows what I’d have done if I had had the standard education. And what about some of my classmates who didn’t do so well? Could they have done better under different circumstances?
 
There was a definite bias against country kids once you got to high school too which, maybe if we had had the standard curriculum, would have been less pronounced. For example, even as a freshman I knew full-well that I was going to college, and I was outraged that, since they had too many students enrolled in the Freshman Algebra class, they excluded us country kids. The official stated reason: “You won’t be going to college anyway, so you don’t need math.”
 
One thing that being more or less on my own at school for most of the day meant was that I had to be, like it or not, relatively self-reliant. As long as we weren’t disruptive and got our work done, we could move at our own pace. So, I did a lot of work and a lot of thinking too and, I suppose, contemplation, though I didn’t think of it that way then. In fact, what I now call that ‘rural-contemplativeness’ carried over to all areas of my life. As a teenager, I sometimes did get bored since reading, walking around the yard and the pasture and even the woods behind our house weren’t always stimulation enough, but I felt that was how life was and rarely felt alone or lonely. 
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That sense of being on my own had a definite upside. Though we lacked direct instruction in elementary school, we did have a lot of books and I read a lot. One thing I found a love for was astronomy and dreamed of becoming an astronomer but found I wasn’t very good at math (Could those high school administrators have been right??), and moved on to other things, such as literature, history, and writing. But I loved astronomy then and still do and organized mini-watch parties with friends to observe the meteor showers in August and November—well, more August than November since it’s pretty cold there in November. We would lie in an open field, drinking pop (soda) and, talking and giggling, watch the sky. And what a sky! Even with no meteors, with the lack of city lights, you could see a zillion stars against a brilliant deep blue-black background. And with the meteor showers it was spectacular.
 
Then there were the Northern Lights—Aurora Borealis. Red and green swirls through the northern sky in summer, white diaphanous trails in winter. I remember looking eagerly to the north, up the little hill behind our house, hoping that tonight I would see something, and I often did.
 
So, there were both advantages and disadvantages to growing up there and it’s hard to say if I was lucky or unlucky. Maybe the answer lies in a different direction.
 
 
 
I attended high school in a town of 3,700. There were 400 students and—unlike the one-room schoolhouse—the classes were standard, one teacher to a class in each and every subject. In my sophomore year, I was even ‘allowed’ to take Algebra and so fulfilled my college entrance requirement and wasn’t banished to tending cows on the farm for the rest of my life. But it was something else that happened that year and a similar event the following year that, though they didn’t address the larger luck-question, were exceedingly fortunate in themselves.
 
I doubt that our little high school band had ever performed anywhere, for any function other than school games and concerts in the totality of its existence, but during my sophomore year, the National Lions Club invited us to march in their annual parade in Chicago. At that time, the biggest city in our area was 50,000 and our family only traveled the 35 miles there for optometry and orthodonture appointments, and occasionally to visit my aunts. Of course, Wisconsin has cities, but we never went to Madison and only made it to Milwaukee twice, once for a baseball game and a second time to show my prize heifer at the Wisconsin State Fair. Neither time did we actually go into the city, even to eat or shop, but lingered in the outskirts. The unspoken ‘rule’ in our area regarding cities seemed to be, “They have too many people too squashed together and way too much crime,” and that rule was pretty strictly adhered to.
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​I’d never seen a city, and that first ride down Michigan Avenue in Chicago will be stuck forever up in the far corners of my mind. I lay back in the bus seat and stared upward, mouth gaping. And the lights. They weren’t anything like the lights in the firmament I’d studied so avidly as a kid: They were like something from another planet. Yet they were right here on earth, not in the sky, or on another world.
 
I remember marching in the big parade playing my clarinet, of course, but interestingly, something that happened afterwards was almost as memorable. After changing clothes back at the hotel, a few of us went to a corner store to get some pop. After we’d finished buying our cokes, the clerk smiled at us and said, “I’ll bet I know where you kids come from.”
 
“Where?” we asked, surprised.
 
“Wisconsin!” he said triumphantly.
 
I jumped. “What? What do you mean? How can you possibly know that?” We weren’t wearing our uniforms anymore, so there was nothing to give him even a hint.
 
“Why, it’s your accents,” he replied cheerfully and it seemed condescendingly.
 
I just stared back. Accents? People in the South and in Boston had accents, but not us in Wisconsin. And certainly not me.
 
So, I returned home from that trip with a somewhat altered attitude. I’d seen City Lights for the first time in my life and been told I was the outsider, the one who didn’t talk quite right. And someone I didn’t know in a very alien place had been absolutely right about me. I was stunned.
 
The next summer, the Lions did it again. This time it was New York. I know you’re waiting for it, so here goes: “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris?” Or Chicago? Or New York? Well, you can’t and didn’t. Here I am.
 
Still, that pesky question remains. Would I have been better off if I’d started out in a city or a suburb?
 
 
In the sixties and seventies, there was a wave among eco-hip people to “get back to the land.” Asked along, I smiled and couldn’t resist quipping, “Been there, done that.” I admired those relocated-to-the-country folk for their pluckiness, but from growing up in the country, I knew the locals would not welcome them with open arms, but would consider them “citified” strangers with alternate lifestyles who didn’t know a thing about living on the land. And they were right. Of course, in time the newcomers could learn the required practicalities, but even then, they wouldn’t really be countrified because they didn’t come from there and didn’t have the ‘right’ attitudes.
 
I think I’m getting closer to a resolution, if not an actual answer. Maybe it wasn’t so much about being lucky or unlucky, but that growing up there has given me a different perspective. 
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Where I come from, most people are white and Protestant. It’s fine to be white and Protestant, and obviously my ethnicity will never change. But just as I wasn’t happy that that clerk in Chicago could peg me for a Wisconsin kid just by me opening my mouth, I also don’t want and hope I can no longer be pegged as belonging to one particular group religiously or in any other way. In cities there are people of every race and ethnicity and from everywhere, and of every religion and creed, and no religion or creed. And I like that. Those people who rushed to the country didn’t understand that out there, the people as well as the landscape, would be different. They were young, which partly explains it, but maybe if they’d come from a place where they attended a one-room school and couldn’t take Algebra if they had a pasture and owned cows, they’d have had a different view.
 
In cities, besides all kinds of people, there are also a variety of libraries, universities, bookstores, restaurants, coffeehouses, museums, aquariums and you name it, which is why people who get into the city-experience and see and experience its benefits, can’t be kept away. I’m one of those people now. I love the things cities offer. Everybody brings their life experiences with them and mine are no better than anybody else’s, but I think I do have a kind of oblique take on things. So, when I take astronomy classes (Andrew Fraknoi, here I come!) or see a Planetarium show, in my head I’m also lying on the grass on a beautiful August night staring up at the sky or peering out our north window at an Aurora Borealis show. When I go to the Aquarium to visit the colorful sea creatures, I’m rocking in an old rowboat on the Mississippi River trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to nab blue gills and croppies, or shivering beside a trout stream at 6:00 AM with my dad.
 
No matter where I go or what I do, I’ll always have red and green swirls and diaphanous white trails floating through the sky inside my head, and I’ll know the feeling of calmness and peace in an open field and won’t have to ‘go up country’ to find it. All that, along with missing kindergarten and most instruction through the eighth grade and a lot of other things, gives me a diversity of experience resulting in a somewhat altered perspective.
 
I still can’t say I had a lucky upbringing, but I am glad for it and feel lucky in it.  
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​Charlene Anderson received an MA in English Literature from Purdue University and an MA in Research Psychology from San Francisco State University and spent most of her working life at the University of California San Francisco in grant administration. As a child, she always knew she would write, told stories to her friends, and even invented a pen name for herself, Charles Andrè. So, while working on budgets and submitting grant proposals at UCSF, she continued to write and, in 2001 published a novel, Berkeley’s Best Buddhist Bookstore. When Vistas & Byways was launched in 2015, she was pleased to be asked to chair the Editorial Board. She has served in that capacity ever since.
Other works in this issue:
Fiction:
​A Curious Tale of the Holy Grail
Bay Area Stew:  
Brooding City
Photo Essays: 
​An Unlikely Vistas Treasure Hunt

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Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by members of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at San Francisco State University​.​
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​Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State University (OLLI at SF State) provides communal and material support to theVistas & Byways  ​volunteer staff.