School Daze
Fondly remembering school daze today….remembering a time when kids used to really play and there was all kinds of sort of dangerous stuff for us to do. Like “King of the Hill”. Every winter at James A. McGee Public School in Hanover, the snow plow would build up this giant pile of snow in one corner of the school yard….and every day before school, at recess, at lunch and after school, every boy in the school was trying to be King of the Hill….got tossed off the “Hill” quite a few times myself.
Every young boy I knew when I was a kid had a BB or pellet gun. It was just sort of the way of the world back then…..and I’m amazed there are any frogs or small birds left in the Hanover area and I’m also a bit ashamed to admit that I was once a mighty hunter and murdered a bunch of these tiny creatures….was kind of a dumb kid, I guess….not too smart….
In today’s world, everyone is afraid of hurting children’s self esteem or of them being hurt physically…..so, when I was ready to learn how to ride a bike, my Dad picked the most logical spot in town…..out near an old train station on a cinder-track roadway….cinders, by the way, are spent coal and are enormously sharp and pointy and to fall on them would mean almost certain death – or at least some nasty cuts and scrapes…..and my Dad was an honest-to-goodness nice guy who never raised his voice to his kids, let alone his hand….
My wife gets angry with me these days when I tell folks that I really sort of believe that when I was a kid it was every adult’s job in life to humiliate and degrade every child they met. I mean, that’s what it seemed like to me when I was a kid. There was this belief around in those days – and it still lingers a bit today – that enduring tough circumstances when you were a kid helped “build character”…..I tell people today that if that’s the case, I have one helluva lot of character….
Not being particularly athletic as a young boy was a huge disadvantage because boys did large amount of sports in those days. Not usually organized sports, like today, but sandlot baseball and road hockey or hockey on a frozen river or pond – that type of stuff…..I was usually always the last kid picked for the team – after both teams admitting that they’d really rather not have me at all….it was sort of brutal stuff…..I was getting massive marks in school and could blow a mean clarinet, but that stuff didn’t really matter if you couldn’t play very good hockey.
And then, of course, there was the junior choir at James A. McGee…..in those days, when you entered grade 4, you were compelled to sing in the school’s junior choir. All of us were marched down to the school auditorium one by one to “audition” for the choir and so Mrs. Holland, our music teacher, could decide where to put us in the choir – what section. And Mrs. Holland named the various sections of the choir after popular song birds……so, one section would be called robins and another would be canaries and there were bluebirds, I remember….
Well, then there was this other category or section – and it was for kids who basically couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket…..and this was where I ended up. And our section was called, “blackbirds”……and don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but blackbirds really can’t “sing”….they sort of just make noise. And so we couldn’t have our blackbird section in our choir making some sort of gawdawful noise in the middle of the excellent singing of the robins, canaries and bluebirds….so…..the kids in the blackbird section just mouthed the words….that’s right, we sort of lip synced…..imagine that happening to children in today’s world.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that incident traumatized me for life and was at the root cause of why I never became a billionaire….apparently, my old music teacher, Mrs. Holland, is still alive and kicking in her 90’s….and I’ve thought about bringing some type of emotional abuse case against both her and the Grey County Board of Education…..but, hey, such is life….and like I said…..I’ve got character to burn…in fact, a lot of people in my life tell me I am a “character”…..
“Hew to the line; let the chips fall where they may.”