All the Other Weeks

In first grade we had art on Fridays. A traveling art teacher would come to our classroom, wheeling a magical cart full of paint or clay or markers and paper, and the afternoon would unfold into marvelousness. It took me a few weeks to realize that she did not come every week, and years to understand how often she did come.

“Do we have art this week?” I asked, probably apprehensively, on a Monday. I loved art.

“Not this week,” my teacher, Ms. Lemon said. (Cynthia Lemon. Do you know her? She is blonde and dresses up as nothing scarier than a jogger for Halloween so that we will not be frightened.) “Not this week. All the other weeks.”

Her answer was satisfactory. That week there was no art, but the following week the traveling teacher returned with her cart, and I was content; we would have art every week now.

But then…we didn’t. No art teacher came the week after that, and I was confused. Ms. Lemon had said we would have art all the other weeks, and yet here was a week without art.

“Do we have art this week?” I asked, certainly baffled, on the Monday after the Friday without art.

“Yes, we have it this week,” Ms. Lemon assured me. “We have it all the other weeks.”

Order had returned. We had skipped a week, but art was back, and we would have it every week now.

That didn’t end up being true. Some weeks we had art, and some weeks we did not. How often we had it, I could not have told you, but it was certainly not “all the other weeks,” as I had been promised.

It wasn’t until years later, perhaps even as late as junior high, that I understood my first grade art schedule. Ms. Lemon had not said all the other weeks; I use that utterance here to convey to you my confusion as a six-year-old. She had said every other week — but those two phrases meant the same thing to my six-year-old self. When I finally learned the meaning of every other week, my second thought was how funny language is — how odd a phrase, how easy to misunderstand, yet how commonly used. That was my second thought. My first thought was of Ms. Lemon and that at last I understood what she had meant every week, all those weeks, when I asked if we would have art.