Among School Children by Tracy Kidder

in this neighborhood, but for many immigrants to the city, moving here has meant a figurative as well as a literal ascent from the Flats and the other lower wards. Chris had spent the rest of her childhood in this part of the Highlands, in a single-family house that her parents bought when they left the Flats. Her mother still lived in the house. Chris always stopped there on her drive home from school.
    The street of Chris's childhood is only two blocks long and barely wide enough to allow for parking. Her mother's house has a front porch, like most of the others on the block. Mothers used to stand on their front porches in the evening, calling the children in, their voices caroling up and down the street. A dozen children lived in the house next door, and their mother's nightly call—"Jim-eee, Mare-eee, Bill-eee..."—sounded like a song. On the first days of school each year, Chris's father would assemble the children of the neighborhood for snapshots, out in front of the Paddens' patch of privet hedge, and there were so many children on the street back then that not all could fit in one picture. Now hardly any children lived nearby. "How times have changed!" Chris's mother sometimes said. For Chris, ever since her father had died, seven years ago, the whole neighborhood had felt incomplete, but it looked much the same, and she was glad to have the house in the family still, to connect her to her father and to her childhood. She had known Holyokers who could not wait to get through high school and clear out of town. But she thought she was lucky to have a street like this to go back to every day, and to have a stubborn mother who refused to move.
    Chris remembered walking with the neighborhood kids to school, and, in later years, walking home along this street arm in arm with a couple of girlfriends, kicking out their legs in unison, as in a chorus line, and feeling risqué while they sang:
"We are the Highlands girls.
We wear our hair in curls.
We smoke our sisters' butts.
We drive our mothers nuts."
    Her mother's house is white and small and very tidy inside. Everything looked much the same: the landing at the top of the stairs, where Chris used to play teacher with her smaller siblings, and her bedroom off that landing, the small, dark-stained desk still placed by the window. Chris could not recall a time when she hadn't wanted to be a teacher. In this house she conceived her ambition and also realized it, planning her first real lessons at that old desk when she was still unmarried, staring out the window and wondering what to do about her troubled pupils. From that window, she could see a part of the old brick firehouse, now closed up, where years ago indulgent firemen—Holyoke's firemen were less busy then than now—had let Chris and her friends play hide-and-go-seek. They would step into the firemen's big boots, which came up to Chris's hips, and hide behind the firemen's coats, which hung like drapery from the wall.
    Chris's infant daughter spent school days with Chris's mother. It was a cozy arrangement, and Chris felt lucky for that, too. Coming by to pick up her baby, Chris usually stopped awhile to have coffee with her mother. Chris and Billy lived in another neighborhood nearby, newer than the Highlands but quiet and shaded by big trees.

    The last part of her route home took Chris near the high school and one of the junior highs. Through her windshield she sometimes saw former students among the youthful, homeward-bound crowds on the sidewalks, and she would glance at them to see if they were carrying books—a good sign—or clinging to paramours—a bad one. Some days that fall as she drove home, her mind was full to bursting with thoughts about her class, the most worried, heated ones about Clarence. On those days she'd go inside and head right for Billy or for the phone to call her best Holyoke friend, Winnie. Most days a good talk was all Chris needed to clear her mind for home.