When I was very young, I had no idea what school was really about. My mom was taking college classes at Old Dominion University, so she arranged for me to attend the Children's Learning and Research Center, the university's preschool program. My family always called it my kindergarten. The teachers were earning their own degrees at the time, researching how to teach younger children. The program emphasized self-motivation, creativity, the development of positive attitudes toward learning, and the establishment of a good self concept.

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Somewhere along the line, I missed the entire concept. By first grade, I couldn't stand school.

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I remember there was a big mirror in the room where someone could stand behind it and observe the class. I was just a toddler taking my first steps into learning without even knowing it. Little did I know that years later I would return to ODU for my final classes.

I remember the first day of first grade. I was crying and begging my mom not to make me go. I had already figured out by then that I hated school.

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My first grade teacher was Sister Mary Gertrude. I used to look out the window and daydream. She had the alphabet posted above the chalkboard going around the room, like most first grade classrooms. I should have gotten the message that the main point was to learn it by the end of the year. You would have thought that as many times as my sisters made me play school, they would have taught me that already.

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I did find the math fun, but once I realized Sister Mary wasn't checking our math books, I just put any numbers in the squares so I could go out and play. By the end of the year, she thought I was slow in math and the last student to learn the ABCs. She told my mom I was a daydreamer and the slowest at developing my reading and math skills. That is when she came up with the brilliant idea that I should repeat first grade.

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My one real achievement that year was coming closest to guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar, which earned me a big lollipop.

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Perhaps I was on the spectrum a little, but I think I could have moved on to second grade without being held back. This happens to a lot of kids, and most feel they could have caught up without the fear and stigma of being left back. It is counterintuitive to building confidence, and the topic is still highly debated by educators today.

My mom listened to Sister Mary Gertrude, and there I was again in the same classroom with the same nun.

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That year I met a kid named Will Hayes, who later became one of my best friends. I also had a best friend outside of school named Tommy Levity, who was in my younger sister's grade. Our favorite thing to do was go trash picking. We dragged home stacks of Motown records and once rolled home an entire stereo console from the 1970s. It worked, so we played the records on it. Some of those records eventually became frisbees, which I cringe to think about now.

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After a while I took apart the console and started poking around at the tubes. My father made it disappear one night before I could electrocute myself or blow a circuit breaker.

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Tommy and I had older siblings who taught us how to light fires and smoke cigarettes when we were seven and eight years old. We graduated quickly to what I can only call amateur pyrotechnics. We would fish cigarette butts out of the Levity family ashtray, making sure to grab the ones with lipstick and not the gross ones from his father.

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Years later I found out Tommy's sister Donna had been a student of mine at Centura College. Tommy and I reconnected, and one night he told me something I had completely forgotten.

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"You were the first guy I ever kissed."

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"When did that happen?"

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"You got mad one day because I accidentally landed on your foot jumping out of a tree. I said, do you want me to kiss it and make it better? You said that won't make it better. So I kissed you on the cheek."

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That is when I realized that as a first grader, I had already had a gay experience, though I had no idea at the time. It ended up teaching me something important: there is nothing wrong with it. Childhood is full of moments we do not fully understand until much later, and most of them are far more innocent than they sound.

I had my first crush in second grade. I was really shy around girls, so I expressed my feelings the way most second grade boys do: I threw a chalkboard eraser at her. It is a common thing for young kids to act out toward the people they like. In my mind I envisioned a world where second graders could get married, have a little playhouse in the classroom, and live happily ever after.

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When I heard she was moving away, I bought her a locket from Roses Department Store. I am not entirely sure how I came to have the money for it. It was either allowance or possibly connected to the incident where my five year old sister got caught shoplifting and we all got in trouble. I walked to her house with my older sister, knocked on the door, and her mother answered. I was terrified. But her mother brought her to the door and I gave her the locket. I am glad she knew, in the end, that I cared about her.

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Will Hayes from first grade and I were spending more time together by this point too. We would walk over a mile to each other's houses, something kids do not really do anymore.

My family moved the summer before third grade, from 615 Shirley Avenue in Ghent to 3751 Little Neck Point Road in Virginia Beach. Our house sat on the fork of a road, with the other fork named Oyster Point Quay, a short little street that ended in a circle with bushes. The neighborhood was called Kings Grant and we lived in the back of it.

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Our backyard bordered a cove that looked like a swamp at low tide, all silty mud and marsh grass. At high tide you could actually launch a boat with a motor. If you followed the mouth of the cove you would end up at the Lynnhaven River, four to ten feet deep with oyster beds below. The cove had the remnants of old sunken wooden boats at the bottom. We used to lay boards across the mud as planks to reach them and pretend we were boat operators.

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My sister Barbara and I were happy to have so much woods to explore. It was a big change from Ghent. Starting at a new public school in Virginia Beach was also a big change after the strict Catholic school environment. My classmates had opinions about which teachers were nicer, which were prettier, and so on. Across the street lived Tim and Dan Withers, who Barbara and I played with constantly. Down the street in an orange brick house lived Pat Burns, a bit older, closer to my sister Carol's age.

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Barbara was more of a tomboy, and I was her willing sidekick. We spent endless hours playing with army men and GI Joes while our younger sisters played Barbies with the neighbors. My nearest brother Mike was eight and a half years older than me. Charlie was ten years and one day older. Bobby was eleven and a half years older and already married by then. I was the youngest, and in many ways I grew up in a house full of people who had already figured out the world before I arrived.

A couple of things stand out from fourth grade: Ms. Wilson and Igor.

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One day the neighbors had some trees cut down and there was a big pile of logs in the yard. We kids started crawling into the pile because we were small enough to weave through the gaps. When I came out I scratched my head and felt something gooey. My first instinct was to throw it to the ground. It turned out to be a small pink bat, hairless and wide-winged. All the kids gathered around in fascination. We figured out how to nurse it, emptied a shoebox, filled it with old cloth scraps, and I named him Igor. I imagined him as a lifelong companion who would always come to my aid in times of need.

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My sisters and I asked our mom to take us to the pet store. The lady there told us to fill a sandwich bag with milk to mimic his mother. The next day I came down to the garage and was relieved to find Igor alive. I petted his pink body and tucked napkins around him to keep him warm. I thought about how excited Ms. Wilson would be when I brought him to show and tell.

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He lived maybe one or two more days. Poor Igor. I found him lying motionless on a utility cart in the garage, lit by a single forty watt bulb. Years later I was eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant in Barbados at dusk when swarms of bats flew overhead. I thought to myself that one of them might be a great great great grandchild of Igor's sister, the one who survived the day we were crawling through those log piles.

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Fourth grade is also where I met friends who would stick around for years. Tommy Gallway. Trey Jennings, the quarterback on my flag football team, coached by his father. Craig, a kid with diabetes who did not have much muscle mass but had tremendous wit. Eric Culver, who shared my interests in music and fashion. I believe this was the year my birthday party was six close friends watching Smokey and the Bandit at the local theater.

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We rode the bus five miles to Kingston Elementary. I appreciated even then that there was forced busing to bring more diversity into the schools. I met and befriended so many kids from different backgrounds that year, and it genuinely shaped the way I see the world.

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I was bullied some in fourth grade. I eventually confronted my bully and we became good friends. I will admit that I was the bully myself a few times in fifth and seventh grade, and I genuinely regret each of those moments. I hope I was not too mean to those kids. I think about them with respect to this day.