Remembering a Fifth Grade Field Trip

In an age when public schools have very few field trips because of budgetary limitations, and if they do, the kids travel on public transportation, I have vivid memories of only one field trip in an era where my school convened lots of field trips.

What sticks out most in my mind from this field trip is that my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Kaplan, repeatedly addressed the man chauffeuring us to the Brooklyn Museum in an old yellow school bus as "Mr. Driver." She struck me as condescending at the time, and it now occurs to me that she could have asked him his name when he first pulled up in front of P.S. 196 in Forest Hills. 

Mrs. Kaplan was a rotund teacher who typically arrived in our classroom, announcing "I have a headache. I don't know why I came in today. I'm going to put my head down on my desk."

I don't remember much about the Brooklyn Museum itself as much as I remember getting there. I had my lunch, maybe even a bologna sandwich and a Sundew Drink, a watery orange beverage in a small container. Understand that I would never let my daughter or grandchildren eat junk like that.

What I do remember is that the room parent for the trip was the mother of a tall kid with a really big head (both physically and metaphorically) named Peter Goodstein. She was a beautiful woman with professionally coiffed silver hair, perfect makeup, and nice jewelry, and she sat with her son on the way to Brooklyn. It seems to me that Peter, the son of a "prominent" attorney, went to private school after 6th grade.

I would have been ambivalent about my own mom being the room parent. For one thing, she had non-professionally coiffed grey hair that was unstylishly short in an era when the mom's of my classmates had teased hair styles in a multitude of colors. Plus she wore unstylish clothes in a neighborhood where style was everything.

My last memory of this trip to the Brooklyn Museum was the trip to the gift shop, and it was painful. I have to believe that I got a modest allowance at the age of 10, but it wasn't enough for me to purchase any more than a pencil or two. Unlike my more affluent classmates who bought expensive tchotkes they could show off. 

Perhaps this trip is so memorable because it memorializes the way I felt as a kid who had moved to upscale Forest Hills from downscale Jackson Heights in 4th grade and felt I never fit in.