Well now, how was my time in school?
First: it started one year late.
Waldorf school has a test all children have to perform, to see if they are ready for school.
My Dad had already told me that it involved drawing, which made me real happy. I liked to draw, and was better at it than everybody else I knew. So, for sure I would pass with flying colors.
When I was at the school doctor's office, I certainly was intimidated, and not happy that I had to answer the questions, instead of letting my parents do the conversation, as usual.
But then came the test.
The doctor handed me a sheet with one circle, one square, and one triangle, and told me to copy the shapes.
Great! I'm real great at copying shapes.
In my mind the test was how good I am at drawing. How much alike I was able to draw my own shapes.
Very very carefully I drew my lines, and was real pleased by how they came out. Just the same like the doctor's shapes.
And it caught me by biggest surprise that nobody praised my skills.
In the opposite. It was judged that I was still way too immature to go to school, and my parents seemed embarrassed.
    But the good thing was, due to my coming in late, I got the better teacher.
Waldorf school places great value on continuance, and so classes stay together as a class from the first to the twelfth grade. And every morning during the first eight years, the class teacher, or form teacher or master, I'm not sure about the proper term, teaches the first two hours. Like that the teacher nearly becomes a third parent. And things can get real awkward when one doesn't like ones form teacher.
I liked mine, despite all his shortcomings, of which I sure will tell more. But all in all I was lucky to be in his class. Schooltime always was an adventure with him, with going on long hikes, trading classes for an hour in the pool in summer, or ice skating on the lake at the school's door step in winter. Plus he was very keen on arts, and I always delivered good in that department, and we sang so many beautiful camp fire songs.
Pretty much all other students envied us our teacher.
My sister for instance had a female teacher, a spinsterish slightly elderly lady who never did any hiking, and for sure she wouldn't play the guitar to accompany camp fire songs. She was a real bore.
My teacher taught sports too, and there my sister had him as her teacher too. And because my teacher really liked wild tomboy girls, he really liked my sister. All over the years he told me to be a little bit more like my sister.
It wasn't like I never was tomboyish at all. When we, my sister and I were playing outdoors with our friends, I certainly was tomboyish too. But there I wasn't so puzzled like in school.

Waldorf school takes great pride in the fact that they cherish all children, and take them just like they are. They don't do the spooky thing like regular schools, to let slower children stay down a year. If children are a little bit slow, they try extra care to help them along. And they claim that every child is allowed to develop in just its own way.
- Maybe they have temporarily lost their manual when I was in school. Because it seems only children who act like textbook children, who like bright colors and running around and be loud, are allowed to be just like that. Others have to be pushed into the proper direction.
In first grade we learned knitting.
I actually had learned it at home already. My sister had to teach me, after she had told me about it.
I was absolutely thrilled, and to this day knitting is still a favorite pastime of mine.
And my teacher  (a lady teacher for handcrafts, not my form teacher) was full of praise, because my knitting was so neat.
Our first project was to knit a ball. And we were allowed to use every color we liked.
I liked green and white.
So I started out: two rows green, two rows white. Two rows green...
I had about a quarter of my ball done, when my teacher chided me for being a bore. "What? Only two colors? And white isn't even a color really. Look, all the other balls look so merry with all those mingled colors." And she put down her foot and forbade me to use green or white again.
My ball looked dreadful, and I never again took any pride in it.

Colors are extremely important to me.
I always loved blue, but of course blue isn't blue. One nuance off, and it looks dreadful to me.
And not only looks. It kind of feels dreadful.
The first years in school we only painted with a handful of colors: lemon-yellow, golden-yellow, cinnabar-red, carmine-red, yellow-green, dark-green, ultramarine-blue, and prussic blue. At times we were allowed to also use brown, and very rarely black.
So, when we had to use prussic blue in our copy books, the day was rotten for me. I didn't want to have that in my book. Why not take the ultramarine?
But the worst was when we used brown.
Brown is a color that is necessary to depict earth, or the stems of trees. Brown is no color one uses for ones pleasure!
But when we learned writing, we started out with writing all the names of everybody in our class. And the child whose name was being written, was allowed to select the color we all had to use.
And Lars-Christian ruled we had to use brown for his name.
It nearly made me sick. I didn't want to use it.
And because Lars-Christian was one of the children who were really mean to me, plus also had a real like for brown clothes, brown stayed a no-no all through my life. I didn't even want to touch it.
And when I had to wear brown garments for a theater, I nearly suffocated.
Only recently I made my peace with the color. I actually realized that because I have brown eyes, the color goes way better for my clothes than blue.
But it might help that Lars-Christian turned out to be a nice guy after school, when we had met for our first reunion.

The good thing is: because I was in a class that never let anything weird I did slide, but rather reacted with laughing at me, teacher included, I learned from very early on to never act on my feelings.
If I didn't understand what was going on, never show the tiniest hint! Just act like everything is perfectly normal! I even was mean enough to laugh with the class when one of my fellow weirdos had said/done something weird.
But in the end that saved me a great deal of trouble.

What also helped me big time, was that I come from a home where figures of speech were in constant use.
Our father had a very colorful way of speaking, saying things like "It's just a tiny village. They flip up the sidewalks at eight in the evening."  Or "They push the moon on with a long stick."
But I must say, when we had misbehaved, and Dad proposed that if we ever did that again, he would go tobogganing with us, I was nearly thrilled out of my head. Because our parents never did those things with us. My sister took me. So I was a bit disappointed that Dad never made good of that promise. (Well a good thing, because in reality that would have meant a good spanking.)
But well, thanks to my Dad, I can not only understand many figures of speech, I also can use them myself pretty good.
The only thing I notice: in English I have massive troubles detecting figures of speech, or things said in earnest, but meant as jokes.
I have a friend in Texas I Skype with pretty much every night for five years now, and I still find myself awed by things he mentions like in earnest, but that actually are funny exaggerations.
I think I have torpedoed 90% of his jokes, by simply not getting them.
But again, I learned to maintain a low profile. Of course my sister always caught all the meanings. And when she saw my awed expressions, she always blew my cover: "Did you actually believe that?"
So I learned to shake my head, and say in consternation: "Sure not!"

It didn't take long until I had found a first friend in school.
Natalie. She was a real sweet girl. And scintillatingly funny. But she had club feet, and so nobody wanted to be friends with her. We were having a great time.
And what is more, we both slowly evolved do be the funny guys of the class.
We both were fans of a german comedian, and, unlike most of the other children, were exposed to him, first on records and tapes, and later on TV. TV is quite frowned upon in Waldorf worlds, so the other children had little other means coming by the jokes than by us.
I was exceptionally good at reciting the jokes, because acting like other people had become my way of life.
I still give myself the appearance of a normal person, by speaking in a very jokeful way.
I have over the last thirty years collected every sentence or word I thought that was funny, and have learned them all by heart.

But anyway, I have a feeling that this post is very unstructured, and I can't seem to make one big point here, so I better come to an end, and try it better with the next post.