OUT OF THE BLUE

Back to school: three little words, tons of emotion. The event remains fresh and sharp — but not always idyllic — eight decades later.

I started kindergarten in a Manhattan family neighborhood, at a progressive all-girls school with small classes and an interesting curriculum. The poems we memorized were in French. To this day I remember one about “la maison de Madame Souris” being “tres jolie.”

Madam Souris was a mouse.

We learned addition and subtraction with big, natural wood building blocks.

Cartoon characters did not invade our learning space.

We visited museums en masse, dressed in navy blue jumper uniforms with plain white blouses and, ugh, brown lace-ups.

This school believed in streaming quick learners into a higher grade. I was a quick-learn reader, so at the end of second grade I got skipped to fourth. Nobody noticed that I struggled with multiplication “tables.” Administration thought that since my mother had been a high school math teacher with an M.A. from Columbia University her daughter wouldn’t stumble on 12 x 9. So they gave her a pile of flash cards to wear out during summer vacation.

Another weak point: telling time, since at home we had the first electric digital clock, with numbers that clicked into place.

That mid-1940s summer was spent in back-to-school dread. Even now, in a digital world, I wear only a clock-face watch lest I forget.

That resolved, I loved fourth grade and especially fifth grade where my teacher, Miss Parrot, lived up to her name by wearing jungle prints in neon colors.

We moved to Asheville at the beginning of sixth grade. I was enrolled in public school, about 30 students per class, including boys, with their “best” teacher — a lovely, kind, welcoming woman who spoke more Tennessee than French. I couldn’t understand a word she said.

Dungarees were for weekends only. Here, the “uniform” was a plaid cotton dress and saddle shoes from Sears. My mother had other ideas. So did the teaching staff. “Move her up to seventh grade,’’ they recommended.

Seventh grade was in another building, where students changed classes every hour. Remember, I was already a year younger than my classmates. Junior high is no place for a terrified 11-year-old whose knowledge of the South came from reading Gone with the Wind.

Thank goodness I wasn’t forced.

So I spent sixth grade — still shaky on multiplying 12s — learning about schoolgirl cliques formed in utero. Back-to-school meant so much more than blue cloth-covered ring binders and No. 2 lead pencils. The squeals of best-friend reunions, for the most part, left me out.

Eventually I achieved “in” but that’s another story. I’m still shaky on multiples of 12. No problem since every electronic device includes a calculator.

Free public education is a many-splendored thing. Pre-Google students learned how to research a subject, sometimes for a “project,” which sent us running to encyclopedias and old Life magazines. Artificial intelligence was as foreign a concept as walking on the moon.

True, a few hallmarks of back-to-school haven’t changed: Some kids will sport braces, others will have grown tall. There will always be the right shoes or sweater, but by 11th grade that nerdy little Yankee who knows a smattering of French will succeed — or get even — by making cheerleader.

Newspaper photographers regularly cover back-to-school, looking for an apprehensive first-grader who clings to Mommy — or Daddy —  which makes the nostalgic me want to whisper in his/her ear, “Don’t worry, sweetie. Just hang in there. Life’s not all multiplication tables.”