Great pumpkin

Before third grade, my family moved to a new town. Luckily, we moved in June instead of August, so I had a few summer months to get to know the kids on my street, and find out about what school would be like. I asked an older girl whether people at school made fun of kids for being new. She said, "There's only one girl who does, but you might not meet her." This was bogus, but I was still scared.

In my third grade class, I never met the supposed girl who made fun of new kids. I made friends with a girl named Jodi who was also relatively new, and a girl named Missy who talked a lot and was friends with everybody, both popular and unpopular.

The previous year, in second grade in my old school, I'd been in a class that was just for gifted kids, the whole day. In my new school, there was no class just for "gifted" kids; we kids were all together in regular classes, but got separated into different academic levels only for reading and math. Those times, we temporarily switched into different classrooms. I found it interesting that I got to change classrooms for reading and math.

In Mrs. Ellman's math class, I always came in and sat down at a desk that said "KARIN" on it. Karin was the name of the girl who sat there most of the day.

We were allowed to read and draw if we got done with our math work before the bell rang. One day, a few days before Halloween, I decided to draw a pumpkin. I was coloring it in with orange Crayon when the bell rang.

As the bell rang, I hurriedly wrote on top of my pumpkin, "KEEP THIS KARIN" and left it on the desk. I returned to my homeroom.

The next afternoon, I was waiting in the cafeteria for my bus, as all the kids who took the bus did. A Chinese girl who was also waiting for Bus 13 said hi to me. It turned out that she was the Karin in question.

She actually lived on a nearby street in my development. She was nice, and we became friends. She was the one I trick-or-treated with every year. Her house was a green split-level with fascinating crawl spaces and a partial view of the tiny "pocket park" where kids made out in the graffiti-coated pavillion or searched for frogs in the stream.

One day in sixth grade, she invited me over because two boys from our grade were supposed to have a fight at the park after school. I watched from her upstairs window, but all we could see was the smaller kid running from a bigger kid. I don't know if any punches were thrown.

At the end of sixth grade, all the kids in my grade had to take a math test to determine whether we'd take pre-algebra in seventh grade. Only kids who did really well on the test got to take pre-algebra. We got our scores back during the summer. My mail said that I'd gotten into pre-algebra, and I was happy.

That night, Karin called me on the phone and tactfully asked, "Did you get something in the mail today?" She'd gotten into algebra too. She'd never been in the highest math before, so I was pretty happy.

After seventh grade, I moved to a new town. As most of you know, and as today's kids might never know, if you moved to a new town during grade school, it was pretty hard to keep in touch with your old friends. Mom didn't want you to tie up the one phone line, and there obviously was no e-mail. We would trade a few letters and then forget it. And that's pretty much what happened.

I haven't talked to Karin since seventh grade, but an internet search shows that she was in the Navy for a little while. Perhaps someday our paths will cross again, and perhaps not, but it's nice to think that there were times when friendships came in uncomplicated ways, sometimes just because I didn't finish coloring in a pumpkin.