​​​​Stewart Dawson

              My Country Tis of Thee

     Sweet land of liberty, of the icing. Icing? I always thought that song was about a cake. A kid can dream can’t he? We had to sing that song every morning at school. I didn’t know what it was really about until I was fifteen or sixteen and I didn’t know why we sang it. It wasn’t America the Beautiful and it wasn’t the national anthem. The tune was British.

     We also had to pledge allegiance to the flag with our hands over our hearts. We had fire drills where we all had to go stand in the playground for a few minutes in nice tidy little rows, girls in one row, boys in the other. One Wednesday every month at noon there would be sirens blaring throughout the city and we were told to “duck and cover”. If the school was on fire, we went outside. If the Russians were going to drop an atomic bomb on it, we could protect ourselves by cowering on the floor. (Ha ha! Those Russians were a stitch!)

     These rituals were great fun for me. They offered wonderful diversion from the glare of Attila the Hun. Especially fun was crawling around on the floor under my desk where I could look up Patties’ dress while she was cowering. (Don’t mince my words. There’s nothing wrong with curiosity. I was only twelve years old.) 

     So we sang and we saluted and we marched and we cowered our way through the school years. Education can take some very strange turns. You can’t really tell lies teaching math or science, but you sure can come up with some whoppers during history class. Social studies was another good one. Back then, teen-age sex, abortion, evolution and creation were never discussed. Sexually transmitted diseases were a topic in PE but then it was snicker time. Nobody really knew what they were talking about. “If you have sex, you will be monstrously disfigured by hideous, ravenous and ugly bugs. Then you will die.” Sex? Looking up Patties’ dress would be as close as I could get for at least the next five or six years. (She did have nice little breasts I imagined.)

     Bombs? Fire? Disease? Sheesh. Of the icing. I still have the flag that the welcoming committee gave our family when we moved into the house in Albuquerque. It has forty-nine stars on it. That is really something. Does anyone remember welcoming committees? Does anyone remember when there were only 49 states? Does anyone remember the words to the song?