I write this for you, my Love, to make you smile. I remember it not as a trauma; on the contrary, it makes me laugh.
I was in first grade in primary school. The first hours of calligraphy… we were drawing curved strokes / overturns as preparation for writing. The task was to fill the page with curved strokes drawn in a line, but instead, I was drawing one stroke up, one down – as shown in the image.
The teacher was walking through the benches, watching us. She stopped at me, bending over my notebook: “W-W-What is this? W-W-What are you drawing?” Me: “Sticks…” She sat next to me and started to draw strokes in a line to show me how I should draw them. “Do you understand? Iii-n liiiii-ne…”
I didn’t. I started again to draw them in the same way: one up, one down. The teacher got nervous, then furious. I still remember her red face and her high hair chignon trembling as she yelled at me and drew the strokes in a line again, and I drew again, one up, one down.
After a few failed trials, she slapped me… once, twice, I don’t remember. I didn’t cry. I was shocked. I didn’t understand… WWWhat was her problem? I still don’t know why I couldn’t draw them in a line. I can only guess that the intermittent lines confused me, but how and why, I have no idea.
At the end of the class, she gave me a big 5. That is the equivalent of a “D,” maybe – something like not completely failed, but almost. (The Romanian grading system uses a 1-to-10 scale, with 5 as the minimum passing grade, where 10 is excellent and 1–4 is failing.)
I went home with a red face and showed my parents my report card. They asked me: “WWWhy?” Me: “Don’t know.”
For a few days I was fuelled by the idea of revenge, something to do with her chignon, but then I forgot the whole thing.