Castle Gate

     For a few years in the early 1970s, I team taught in a multi-graded K-6 classroom at Park-the-Year-Round-School in Hayward, California.  My memories of those years are among the best of my thirty-nine teaching years, and the children are forever etched in my mind and heart.  I was responsible for the K-3 children – “the youngers” we called them.  My teaching partner, Tom Davis, was responsible for “the elders.”  And, ultimately, we all shared in the responsibility for one another through our class meetings and our self-management program.
     One of the children who I think of often was a kindergartner named Allegra.  She was about as big as a minute, dark and quick, her soft voice giving just a hint of the Japanese and Spanish she spoke at home.  During story time, she often crawled up into my lap for a better look at the pictures in the book I was reading.  Or if an “elder” was reading the story, theirs was the lap she would go to.
     On cold days, Allegra wore mittens, sometimes even in the classroom.  She was learning to deal with Renaud’s Disease – a circulatory problem which often caused her fingers to go white and numb.  When this happened, she would come and get me and we would go to the sink and hold her hands under warm running water until the color and feeling returned. 
     That year our culminating social studies and science activity was an overnight stay at Half Moon Bay.  Allegra’s parents and I consulted and it was decided that she could go, as long as she was my ‘partner’ for the weekend.  It was an agreement that was just fine with Allegra and even finer with me.  We had a fabulous time – hikes, discoveries, cookouts, sing-a-longs around the campfire.  On our way home, quiet with our thoughts of the weekend, Allegra asked, “Are you all right?” 
     “Oh yes,” I assured her.  “I’m just a little tired.” 
     “I know how that is,” she said, “but when it happens to me, I just reach down into my energy pouch for a refill and then I’m fine.”
     I’ve never forgotten Allegra.  And I’ve never forgotten her gentle suggestion.  It works every time!