COLUMN: Where Did 4th Grade Go?

Last week, I learned with some sadness of the passing of my third grade teacher's husband.

Memories of grade school are fuzzy, but they're warm fuzzies -- the warmest of which hail from third grade. My teacher that year was amazing, and I remember a classroom filled with music, laughter, encouragement, equality, and support. She was the real deal, and I'm happy we're still in touch.

If there's one thing my mother and I share, it's our mutual sense of caring and compassion. Well, and our mutual love of gossip. I wasted no time calling home to pass along the news to Mom.

"Oh, that's sad," my mom said. "She was your fourth grade teacher, right?"

"Nope," I replied, "she was third grade. Fourth grade was... umm..."

And then it hit me. Or, rather, it DIDN'T hit me. I had no earthly idea who my fourth grade teacher was. My mind drew a complete blank. I remember all my other teachers clearly. But FOURTH grade? It's like it didn't even exist. 

I am nothing without my noggin. My brain contains every essence of my personality, my life's precious memories, and a comprehensive database of what I'd reckon to be 134,704 different songs that get awkwardly stuck in my head for no particular reason. (Today's was "Obsession" by Animotion. You're welcome.) There's no way my brain could let me down and wipe all of fourth grade from my memory. But, alas, it has. My autobiography jumps from third grade directly to fifth.

Now, I SUPPOSE you could say I'm not exactly a spring chicken anymore, and the dimming of distant memories is perfectly natural. It might even be possible to think my brain just (gasp) isn't exceptional and perfect. 

Naw. That's silly talk. My brain's awesome and I'm a genius. This leaves only one rational explanation: Clearly, somewhere along the way, I have been abducted by aliens.

I've watched enough paranormal documentaries to know when my brain's been monkeyed with. I've watched countless testimony of people who claim to have been sucked out of bed and beamed aboard motherships where they were poked and prodded before being deposited back to Earth with strange gaps in their memory. Darn you, aliens!

Obviously some interstellar visitors must have been toodling past in their UFO, caught a load of me and my massive intellect, and wanted to study my tremendous brain and its wealth of human knowledge within. And they obviously must have kept my fourth grade memories as a souvenir. As the hard-hitting journalist I pretend to be, I needed answers.

I've lost touch with most classmates from those days, but I found three on Facebook, so I sent them identical messages. This wasn't awkward at all, considering I can count on one hand all the words I've said to them collectively since the 1970s. But that didn't stop me from greeting my long-lost friends with, "HELP! Who was our fourth grade teacher? DID WE HAVE ONE? WAS I ABDUCTED BY ALIENS?!" 

The first to respond was Dee, a fellow Galesburg ex-pat who also now calls the QC home. She couldn't remember, either. "But I just messaged Amy T. She'll know."

Amy Z. was the next to respond. "I think I remember his name," she said. "I can't picture his face, though. I just messaged Amy T. She'll know."

I don't ever fancy being a fly on a wall, but I would've liked to have seen Amy T.'s face when she innocently opened Facebook to be assaulted by three names from the distant past all urgently demanding the name of our fourth grade teacher. To her credit, she DID know, and it WAS the name Amy Z. remembered as well. The name sounds right, but I still can't picture the guy or anything that happened in his class.

Clearly he had an immense impact on my life. I'm not saying he was a bad teacher. He might have been a great teacher. He might have been a Martian. I have no conscious recall either way, and that's a bit alarming. But it's refreshing to know my classmates are fuzzy on it as well. Either memories fade over time, or the spaceship that abducted me was big enough for our whole class to fit.

Maybe it was just a forgettable class. Maybe I learned my 134,705th song, reached the capacity of my brain's hard drive, and something had to be deleted. Maybe I'm just a human being with flaws and forgetfulness.

Or maybe that's exactly what the aliens want us to believe.