Breakfast With the Rainbow

Casey slides into his chair at the breakfast table. It is 6:30 a.m. He stares straight ahead, hands in his lap. Soulful eyes.

Casey is my son. He’s 6. And he’s worried.

“Fat,” he says.

I look at him from the kitchen.

“OK,” I say. “Fat.”

Casey is not fat. His concern is otherwise. In a couple of hours he will walk into his first-grade class and take his very first test. It’s a spelling test.

“F-A-T,” Casey says.

“Perfecto,” I say. But Casey’s soulful look continues. He knows, and I know, that he can spell “fat” forward and backward, as well as “tab” and “mat” and “fast” and the other test words.

No, he’s worried because of another word. “Rainbow.” The teacher tantalizingly has offered two bonus words in the spelling test. The bonus words are “color” and then the really tough one, “rainbow.”

If you spell the bonus words correctly, you get extra points. The moment of truth will come soon enough when the teacher hushes the room with those awful words: “Take out a clean sheet of paper.”

*

Casey goes to a public school--a school deep in the embrace of L.A. Unified--and I am amazed at how much I like it. The physical place is something of a ruin. Fifty-year-old linoleum covers the floors. The paint peels.

Half the school goes to class in creaky old buildings from the 1920s and the other half inhabits double-wide trailers bolted to the asphalt. The double-wides lend a certain squatter feel to the place.

In fact, a little more than a decade ago, the school was scheduled to be closed. Torn down, I guess, and sold off for conversion to a mini-mall.

But somehow it escaped, and now the school boogies. It presents an odd contradiction to the picture of weary idiocy so often connected with L.A. Unified. These ruins are permeated with cheerfulness and bustle. I don’t know how the school managed to rise above its fate, but it did.

Also, the teachers seem to know more, and do more, than the collection of addled dodderers and prim waiting-to-be-marrieds who presided over the schools of my own Jurassic youth.

Every day, the notices come home. “We are doing this in class, we are doing that.” “Please play Mozart this week because we are studying Mozart’s early years.”

And they give honest-to-god tests to first-graders. I don’t recall taking any kind of tests, spelling or otherwise, in the first grade. And I suppose there are those who would argue with the strategy.

Still, I liked it, and so did Casey. It got his 6-year-old competitive juices going. When the notice of the test came home, he decided he wanted to ace it. In his words, “smoke it,” bonus words and all.

But now it’s the morning before the test and “rainbow” still waits to be mastered. “Color” has turned out to be no big deal. The repetition of the “o” sort of glues it together.

“Rainbow,” however, is different. It presents itself as one tough cookie. First, it’s really two words riveted together and the two parts have no phonetic similarities.

Then there is the nonsensical, extraneous, silent “i” hiding in the “rain” part. You can’t hear it when someone speaks the word, there’s no logic to its presence, yet there it sits. Lurking, waiting for unwary speller.

Casey decides to give it a try.

“OK,” I say. “Spell ‘rainbow.’ ”

He starts writing. Scribble, scribble.

I come over for a look. I see this: “RNBWR.”

“Hm,” I say. “Looks like we need some vowels.”

“What are vowels?” Casey asks.

*

And so it goes through breakfast. We keep trying. One time he gets it right. The next time he doesn’t. By the time we set out for school, “rainbow” remains an iffy proposition.

At this school, the first-grade classes gather on the playground, waiting for the teachers to take them inside. As Casey marches away, he looks back and waves. Jaunty. For some reason, he’s stopped worrying.

I go to the office. At midmorning the news says the Dow has dropped by 130. The U.N. has promised to pull out of Haiti by the end of November. California bankruptcies are said to be down, a good sign for the Golden State.

And somewhere in the Valley, a teacher gazes over her hushed first-graders, their clean sheets at the ready, and utters the word, “rainbow.”