Wonderland, Part Two: Mount Olympus and The Foibles of Zeus

Just as I was falling hopelessly and eternally in love with baby dragons, the Wonderland Avenue curriculum moved on to Greek myth. My bus, traversing the moneyed community of Laurel Hills, passed by a set of golden gates every morning, as tall as houses and ostentatiously bedecked with a glittering chrome sign reading "Mount Olympus" in scripty lettering. Naturally, I was happy to learn that I lived right near the famous Mount Olympus, and I yearned to go there. I was confused when my friend Lindsay told me that all that lay inside were big mansions for rich people. "You mean mortals?" I asked. "Well, I think so," she said, suddenly unsure.

Somehow, none of the parents were fussy enough to censor the parts about Zeus impregnating different ladies while dressed up as different barn animals. Thank the Gods for that, because these parts of the story caused me no end of mind-expanding consternation. Why would the ladies want to go anywhere with some strange cow, even if it was white as snow? What were they doing over there? Did cows do that with ladies? Could they? And, most importantly, why were the babies that resulted from whatever the heck they were doing half-God, and not half-cow? I mean, we were second-graders, not total idiots. We knew how DNA worked, roughly. Brown-haired parents made brown-haired children. Cows made cow babies. It didn't matter if the cow was Zeus or Captain Kangaroo. It was totally simple, and a matter of science.

Wonderland, Part One: Pillow Talk of the Round Table

I started attendance at Wonderland Avenue Magnet School in the second grade, thanks to my mom's dogged and somewhat dishonest insistence that I be tested again and again until it was scientifically proven that I was a genius. At my last school, the only slightly-less-fun-sounding Dixie Canyon Elementary, my first-grade teacher was one crotchety and terrifying Mrs. Ishihara. Whereas Miss Chan, who I'd had the year before, had liked to do things such as make stone soup and paint our faces with butterflies, Mrs. Ishihara had a more stoic, spartan, old-fashioned sort of teacher-sense. Her most confounding punishments would be doled out to students for a crime dubbed “getting ahead of the rest of the class"--which she seemed to define, mysteriously, as being already good at something that she was attempting to teach. For such an egregious offense the smarter, i.e., the hopelessly disobedient, children would be taken by the shoulders, gripped firmly, and shaken until they cried in bewilderment--or once, to Mrs. I's increased frustration, puked all over the place. Others, like me, who were merely insolent but not yet insufferable know-it-alls, would be sent to the corner routinely, to muse silently and privately about things that were invariably more interesting than whatever we were "learning" that day.

Wonderland Avenue was not like this. At Wonderland, the first thing we did was read a book about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Garb, I whispered to myself, devouring with my eyes the armored knights in velvet tunics, the ladies in gleaming, mossy silk, the gold circlets on the wizened foreheads of the grey and reclusive wizards. Scabbard. Merlin. Excalibuuuur. We went to the Medieval Times tournament in Buena Park, where a stadium full of other eight-year-olds with their teachers chomped on roast turkey legs without benefit of utensils and gulped juice served in goblets “fashioned”(molded) by “alchemists”(factory drudges) from “sacred pewter”(glittery grey plastic). We goggled and allowed tired-looking, yet lively actors to feint and charge at one another on modern-bridled horses, swing broadswords made of the same counterfeit material as our cups, and roar "thee" to everything and everyone, although even we, second-graders on a field trip, knew that Medieval people never said "thee" to common friends or enemies, but pretty much only to their sworn leige the King, or when they were pillow-talking.