Fortunately for me, my Mom once did kindergarten teaching herself, and, needing aids, made use of her connections with the lady who’d ran the nursery school I’d gone to to borrow the Children’s Record Guild records long enough to tape them to reel-to-reel; and, at some point a decade or so later, transferred them to cassette tape.
So now and then I get in a mood and cue up the .mp3 playlist of nursery school tunes that were already kind of old in 1963 when our nursery school teacher rolled out the cots and cued up the records and said “Nap time!”
“Carrots grow from carrot seeds” —
…and “I went for a walk in the forest” and “It’s spring again, time to plant the garden” and “Muffin in the city” and “Muffin in the country” and “My pigeon house I open wide” and the song about all the farm animals (and eventually the children) going into the pond on the farm (“Ducks in the pond, quack, quack”). And the story of the Eensie Beensie Spider and all the things the little spider heard in the slow process of climbing back up the waterspout. Oh, and the man who bought his daughers the “Hot Cross Buns” record and they played it until it drove him nuts, heh heh…
I can listen to this stuff and still remember being 4 years old and fidgeting on my cot and listening to the stories and music they cued up for us.
Sometimes it’s weird to rediscover that I’m still the same person I was so many many years ago, a me with no permanent teeth and prior to literacy. Sometimes it’s a happy comfort. Remembering 1963 