I hope you know this will go down on your permanent record

They were called blue slips because they were printed on blue paper. A name decided by committee, I’m  sure. Standard 8 1/2” x 11” paper, black typing, and several blank spaces where the teacher could fill in various specifics (student name, date, description of offense, teacher’s signature), typically with a red pen. Just the sight of them instilled me with a cold terror, like catching a glimpse of your father washing blood off of a machete through a door left slightly ajar. That color combination became, in my mind, representative of some awful unknown fate. Had you placed me in a room with walls of light blue adorned with black and red decor, I’m sure my anxiety level would have increased with each passing minute. 

So you can imagine how horrified I was one day in third grade when my teacher, an angry little crab of a  woman by the name of Mrs. Bayerle (pronounced “bay-ur-lee” or more commonly, “barely”), sent me home with one of these death warrants. In fact, on this particular day, she sent most of the class home with one, and all because of a single event. Our offense? Clucking. Like chickens. Mrs. Bayerle had said something about chickens, and as if we were sleeper agents who had just heard their activation phrase, we all formed our arms into little flapping wings and erupted into a harmony of “Ba-COOOOCK! bock-bock-bock-ba-COOOCK!” And so on and so forth. This was too much for poor Mrs. Bayerle’s delicate sense of order, and she retaliated with class-wide blue slip distribution. We were the marauding enemy and her blue slips were her bullets, fired from the tip of her fully automatic red ballpoint pen.

Some of the other kids, the ones who took blue slips home on a regular basis, seemed unphased. They were totally Judd Nelson about the whole situation, whereas I was full on Anthony Michael Hall. I was doomed and I knew it. I was supposed to return the blue slip the next day with my mother’s signature, which of course meant showing it to her, which of course meant she would read it, which of course meant that she would find out about my chicken-ary. (I’m sorry, but that really should be a word). I had tried forgery before, an attempt so poor that it not only got me into deeper trouble, but had also been ridiculed by both my mom and the teacher for its complete lack of resemblance to my mother’s Johnna Hancock. I would have to fess up. Every kid knows that honesty is always the worst policy, but it was my only choice.

“What’s this?” my mom said when I handed it to her.

“It’s from Mrs. Bayerle.” Sure, I’m paraphrasing this conversation, but I remember handing the note to my mom and the look on her face as she scanned through it.

“So,” she said, “what did you do?”

“We were bocking.” I did say that. I remember that. Or at least my memory tells me I do.

“Bocking?”

“Like chickens.”

And that was the end of it. She signed it and I took it back the next day. She had bigger fish to fry than her son’s clucking in class. I would live to cluck another day.

I got my first taste of this from the parent’s end of things last week. My three year old and my one year old both spend Monday through Friday, 8 - 5, at a daycare up the street from our house. I picked the boys up one day and the director had a note for me. It was white instead of blue, no red ink, and its content concerned the youngest one. Apparently, he had bitten another little boy on the hand. Biting has been a problem for the kid ever since his teeth starting coming in. “We’re aware of the problem,” I told her, “and we’ve been working on it. And it’s gotten a lot better, believe me. He used to take some serious chunks out of my shoulder. But what can I say? The kid’s feeling his inner animal. Every bite of meat that we feed him at home is cooked through, which does nothing to satisfy his craving for flesh, for blood. He can suppress it for a while, perhaps even for long stretches of time, but eventually, the beast within must emerge.”

“I see,” she said.

I was a bit amused by my reaction to all this. It wasn’t pride exactly. Rather, a recognition that yet another in a long line of firsts had just taken place. Plus, you pick the kid up and he’s adorable and smiling and laughing and waving and the whole idea of him getting a note sent home from school just seems ludicrous, except for the fact that, yes, he did bite a kid, and yes, it sucks for that kid. I just had to laugh on the way home. Sure, I’d probably feel differently had he actually drawn blood or if there had been some other more serious injury or damage done, but there wasn’t, so I don’t. It’s just all part of the deal we struck when we decided to bring these little animals into the world.