Of Childhood Memories

My first memories of school in the U.S. include:

(1) Paint by numbers. What images, what colors, I do not know. But they were there, those pages of black and white design waiting for me to fill in with colors, as if in filling them I could pour in the words and meaning in lieu of numbers and space.

(2) Painting with water. It was so easy. A brush, and color-infusing water that made the pages blush into pastels of blue, red, yellow, green. Painting outside the lines with clear water was different than speaking outside the boundaries in a foreign tongue. Each brush stroke was ten times easier than one syllable of sound.

(3) Paper money. A perfect quiz or a completed homework assignment earned paper dollars, and wads of currency were distributed like free consonants in the English alphabet. Eventually, for a bit of paint by numbers, or a sheet of stickers, I siphoned my treasure back into the vaults of the ESL instructor but my sister hoarded them like collecting vocabularies.