I don’t remember much from kindergarten. We lived on Tobey Road in Belmont, Massachusetts, a little town next to Cambridge and just a mile from Boston, in an old house my parents, Uncle John, and their friends had spent months renovating. My mother had grown up here and we knew good people who would help out on the weekend for cold beer, subs, and a project.
I remember our dog Cullen, a young Irish Setter, chasing our school bus all the way to Winn Brook Elementary School. I didn’t see him and he didn’t manage to find me before I shuffled indoors, but he passed the morning playfully knocking toddlers over in Joey’s Park until my mortified mother got a phone call to please pick up her pup.
I remember not long before, my dad had volunteered to help build Joey’s Park, the sprawling and beautiful school playground designed by the children who missed Joey O’Donnell, a little Winn Brook boy who lost his battle with Cystic Fibrosis. If I’d been looking the day Cullen went on an adventure, I’d have seen him jumping up and sniffing every terrified little kid’s face until he found his kid, and sometimes my imagination pretends I did watch the chaos, giggling on my tip-toes in the second-story classroom window.
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