For Ms. Gilmore and her 3rd-grade class

In September every year, I think of kids going back to school and their teachers.

Ms. Gilmore’s been teaching for several years now. Her mother was a teacher. So was my father. When she started, I gave her some money. You know, I thought she might need some new clothes or shoes or something. She wasted the money on supplies for her students. Apparently, pens and paper are not a priority in school budgets.

September is hot in Southern California. When I was growing up, school started the Tuesday after Labor Day, but the summer sun was not like the thermostat on the wall. You can’t just turn down the relentless heat. The air was too dense for recess, and red flag warnings were issued throughout Los Angeles County. That proposed mega bond measure for cooler air in our classrooms failed to pass every year.

Back then, my dad was a High School teacher. He often suggested that parents should attend our classes and we students could replace them in their air-conditioned world of work. “Let those adult bastards cook in our little wooden desks and try to take a test or learn.” He never said this out loud, but you knew he wanted to.

Los Angeles County could never afford air conditioning for all the classrooms. The L.A. Unified School District is the second-largest school district in the nation. Almost 26,000 teachers fan out into over 1,200 classrooms spread over 710 square miles. The teachers are responsible for molding the young minds of nearly 600,000 students. With a budget of almost $13 billion, air-conditioning is always just one vote away.

In 2024, almost sixty years after I sat in that damned oven, the voters of Los Angeles finally approved a $9 billion bond bill to fix the school district’s aging infrastructure. The air is a bit cleaner now. The gray dome of poison is much less, and recess is back in fashion.

Funny, looking back. After lunch, our fifth-grade teacher didn’t mind if we put our heads on our desks. The slant of the worktable was perfect for folding your arms into a pillow. I can’t remember a single dream I had at night, but I can replay with vivid recall the hundreds of worlds I drifted into with my arms cradled on my desk, head down. These memories are filed away in my brain but remain instantly available, as clear as if they were from today.

It was rare back then to have a male teacher in elementary school. I suppose it’s still a bit unusual. I’ve long since lost his name, but his voice is well preserved on my mind’s cassette tapes. Too hot to learn, the air too dirty to play, he told us stories and read to us. None of us realized it back then; he didn’t care if we listened. Nap if you must, but if you were awake, you got to live in another world.

… we froze in the winter but trudged on through the snow. In the relentless summer sun, we drank our fill from the streams that brought the small flecks of gold that would make us kings. Our names were no longer John, Betty, or Robert. We were Buck. We weren’t children anymore, certainly not students; we were Buck, the bravest and fiercest sled dog in the Yukon.