Carnett: Life’s passages throw us, but we pick ourselves up and move on

I began public school at the age of 4.

I had to fight back tears that cruel morning in September 1949, my first day of kindergarten. Suddenly, my world was turned upside down and would never be the same again.

I was frightened and not quite ready to leave the security of my young mother’s side. Though we’d had talks about this parting for days, it still came as a shock.

I felt a bit like the late British author and poet Laurie Lee. Lee wrote in his beloved 1959 memoir, “Cider With Rosie,” that he was forcibly trundled by his older sisters at age 4 to the schoolhouse in his English village. He left home flailing and bawling.

I didn’t bawl. For me, it was more like tearing up in a stiff Santa Ana breeze.

Lee’s sisters prodded him with: “Boys who don’t go to school get put into boxes, and turn into rabbits, and get chopped up (on) Sundays.”

My mom tried to reassure me with something less apocalyptic: “Jimmy, the bus will bring you back home this afternoon. You’ll have a wonderful day at school, and you’ll meet lots of new friends.”

I wasn’t convinced I’d make new friends. Besides, I didn’t want any. I was quite content with my life.

But I hadn’t counted on meeting Dixie, a 5-year-old flaxen-haired beauty with eyes translucent as tide pools. Nascent male hormones were unleashed, and she became my life’s first crush. I was captivated by Dixie’s charms, but she scarcely knew I existed — for the entire year.

Get used to it, bub!

We lived on Balboa Island in September 1949. My mother put me on a giant yellow school bus at the designated pickup point at Marine and Park avenues. With quivering lower lip, I climbed aboard and took my un-seat-belted perch.

Mom returned the one block to our house carrying my 2-year-old brother, Billy, in her arms. Both were crying.

I didn’t dare cry aboard that bus as it made its way to Corona del Mar Elementary School, deep within the leafy confines of the Crown of the Sea. The school has long since been bulldozed to make room for expensive homes.

This was my first — and most traumatic — separation from my mother, but it wouldn’t be the last. Life would never again be the cozy nest I’d taken for granted.

Years later, I’d embrace my mother as I boarded a Greyhound bus taking me to Army basic training at Fort Ord; a packed troop ship bound for the far reaches of the Pacific; and a honeymoon flight to Hawaii with my beautiful new bride.

But boarding that yellow bus my first day of school as a shy 4-year-old had to be the bravest thing I’ve ever done. At 4, I knew I had to trust myself to the fates. Most importantly, I couldn’t let Mom down.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” my 91-year-old mother recently confided as we discussed our seminal moment together so long ago. It still brought tears to her eyes these many decades later.

“How could I let you, a 4-year-old, get on a bus and just drive away?” she anguished, berating herself for an innocent decision made long ago.

Bad things never happened in 1949. At least we didn’t think they did. The world was different then, despite the fact that it had only been four years since the Allies had crushed the head of the most contemptible evil imaginable.

Mercifully, in ‘49, there were no televised freeway chases.

I discovered that I liked school. Kindergarten wasn’t such a big deal. Life, though different, was still good.

Much water has since passed under the bridge. The world has rotated on its axis 20,000 times, and life has moved on.

I’ve since dropped my own children and grandchildren off at their classrooms and have been largely unsympathetic to their churning tummies.

Seems we humans imperfectly bungle our way through most of life’s challenges.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.