When I was five, kindergarten was not yet a required prequel to public elementary school. One could go or not go, but if you did, that year of your education had to be delivered by a private institution.

While many of the children enrolled at the wildly popular Miss Caroline’s Day School** would later distinguish themselves as the social and academic standouts for the duration of my public school experience, my parents selected St. Alban’s Episcopal (Patron saint of converts and torture victims). My father, a lifelong Catholic had become a Southern Baptist shortly after marrying my mother, so I assumed their kindergarten choice was an attempt at a compromise. Upon review, it was probably more of a financial choice.

I immediately made friends with two girls: One who ate paste and another who appeared to be listening to music on a transistor radio which hung around her neck. I was a little jealous of the privilege the latter was so blatantly offered until a few years later when I would learn that her “radio” was actually a powerful hearing aid. (If you need any more evidence as to how sheltered a life I led, please leave your request for it in the comments).

Though I had nothing else to compare it to at the time, St. Alban’s offered what I assumed was the usual kindergarten fare: writing and coloring, making birds’ nests out of papier mache, learning the words to “Onward Christian Soldiers” and–daily chapel. I was only five and not yet plagued with the nagging questions organized religion would later raise, so when we girls were told to grab a hat or veil from the box in the corner before entering the sanctuary, it seemed more like a game of dress up and not yet a symbol of the many ways I would learn how the church treats women differently. The fact that the boys around me settled themselves brazenly bareheaded on the polished wooden pews did not trigger even the slightest twinge of “what the actual hell??” in my underdeveloped brain. See above regarding my naivety.

Chapel service was kept short and I don’t remember much about what lessons young Father Roper hoped to impart. I was busy taking in the embroidered altar cloths, the smell of wax candles and the wooden kneelers with the leather cushions. In order to keep us “eyes forward” during his brief homily, Father asked us to keep a keen watch out for his wayward friend Timothy–a tiny wooden mouse with leather ears and tail which he had cleverly hidden somewhere on the elaborate wooden altar prior to our arrival.

Might he be hiding on the lectern? Near the choir loft under the giant crucifix with Jesus actually on it? Over the arched doorway by the communion table? Every day it seemed that Timothy found a different place to blend in with the wooden altar railing, so spotting him wasn’t easy. The first child to locate Timothy had to raise his/ her hand in order to receive some sort of prize or recognition. I never won. I blamed the Baptist church we attended which was so dreary with its beige on beige decor and nothing even remotely interesting to catch the eye of a young kid. Clearly my powers of observation had been stunted by its blatant lack of iconography or ornamentation. As it happened, the real reason I was such a dunce at finding Timothy was because I was incredibly nearsighted and desperately in need of glasses, a fact that no one in my family noticed until later during a family vacation when we played the license plate game in the car and I kept asking, “What license plate?”

Eventually we began preparations for spring graduation. There would be recitations, songs and, of course, prayers. A group of us had been assigned a poem about colors. My line was to be, “Green is the crocus popping out of the snow”. Did I know what a crocus was? Reader, I did not. Did I ask anyone? Also no. Whatever. The obvious highlight of the ceremony was to be the distribution of diplomas and for this, the boys were told to practice their very best bows to the the priest just before receiving their white scroll tied with ribbon. The girls, it was revealed, were to curtsy.

The mysterious curtsy was demonstrated over and over for us by the teacher and girls who had had the good fortune to be enrolled in dance classes caught on quickly. For me, however, the idea as to which leg to sweep behind the other and then whether to daintily hold the edges of my dress on either side before I bent my knees or after was completely confounding. Before or after??? Clearly, there was a process to this thing that I failed to grasp and I obsessed about it day and night, but I never asked for help. So it was no mystery when my final report card was marked as NEEDS IMPROVEMENT under “I think for myself and solve my own problems”.

On graduation day, my name was called by the priest who, to make matters more confusing, was NOT Father Roper. I mounted the steps to the altar rail. Suddenly, in a moment of misleading inspiration, I assumed that doing something incorrectly would be far more humiliating than not doing it at all. I grabbed my diploma, turned on my heel and went back to my seat. No curtsy. And because I truly believed Timothy the mouse was a sentient rodent, I was confident he was deeply disappointed in my breach of kindergarten protocol as he leaned against a chalice while munching a stale communion wafer.

In later years, I would attempt to repackage this moment as a blow for feminism, but I would have had to ditch the hat and veil to make a compelling case for it.

**School name changed to protect the popular kids