Juvenile stunts can make school a lot more fun
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- August 31, 2024
- 605
My academic career, such as it was, can be divided into three parts: eight years in parochial grade school, four years in public high school and four years in Catholic university.
There’s a nice cadence to that rhythm, a certain symmetry I appreciate, especially because I didn’t see it as it was happening.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’m not going to count kindergarten, not because it wasn’t important, but, in all honesty, I don’t remember a whole lot about it. I do recall my teacher’s name and the location of the building — directly across the street in our tidy suburban neighborhood — but being the oldest of three children, I went there without my siblings, who got to stay home and watch “Captain Kangaroo” while I learned how to paint, how to build stuff with blocks, and how to win often at tetherball and foursquare.
Didn’t much care for games of red rover — a few kids got hurt — but I was fond of afternoon nap time, which involved folding my arms on top of my desk and laying my head down for a quick snooze.
I didn’t sleep much, though — too busy wanting the school day to be over so I could watch “The Edge of Night,” Mom’s favorite “daytime serial,” aka soap opera, as she cooked supper. It was my job to wheel the black-and-white TV set from the living room into the kitchen so she could keep an eye on what was going on in Mary Fickett’s world. In about 10 years, she’d play Ruth Martin in “All My Children,” a soap that I got hooked on while a freshman in college and then brought home to infect my family.
Not intentionally, really … it just sort of spread, like a video virus.
Allow me one more “AMC” tangent. When they killed off Jenny Gardner — played by the gorgeous, delightful Kim Delaney — in a jet ski accident, I swore off the show and never really went back.
Can’t believe that was 40 summers ago. Where does the time go?
Speaking of sand through the hourglass, I wanted to revisit the subject of last week’s column, the one that dealt with the recent demise of the high school newspaper for which I wrote as a senior.
I referred, rather obliquely, to the admirable patience showed by our faculty adviser but didn’t share much in the way of the rather lurid details of the antics we pulled on pretty much a daily basis.
Were I an attorney defending me and my partners in idiocy, I’d start by blaming whoever thought it was a good idea to split the journalism class into two distinct parts, divided by a lunch period.
It didn’t take much in the way of mischievous imagination for us to conjure various ways to disrupt the second half of the proceedings.
For one thing the cafeteria itself offered no shortage of comestibles that could be used as props in whatever silliness we came up with as we conspired at our usual table. Trust me when I tell you we did stupid stuff, but we were creative to a fault.
For example, students left their textbooks in a series of shelves outside the lunch room, offering easy access when we decided that so-and-so’s journalism notebook might be a good place to secret a piece of fried chicken or dissolving a crushed-up Ex-Lax pill into someone’s bowl of vegetable soup. That assured digestive distress.
But the apex of our shenanigans might have been the Great Grasshopper Caper when, after lunch, a bunch of us slipped outside and captured as many of the flying insects, with incredibly strong hind legs, as we could find and smuggled them into class.
It’s still surprising to me just how much chaos that stunt caused.
I’m not particularly proud of playing a part in that juvenile charade, and I sometimes feel ashamed of abetting those sophomoric hijinks; then again, I kind of liked applying a layer of chalk dust to the seat and back of the teacher’s desk chair or agreeing with one or more of my confederates that at high noon we’d all fall to the floor.
One thing we did, though, turned out to be kind of cruel.
A substitute teacher filled in for class and, as a way of passing the period quickly, had us each stand and read from the textbook. It didn’t take long for us to agree to read every other paragraph, simulating a learning disability. Sure enough, we were kicked out of class — even the sub saw through the subterfuge — and we had to drag our desks into the hallway, making our expulsion public.
But then something unforeseeable happened. A guy who we all knew had some kind of vision/cognitive problem was called upon to read and, through no fault of his own, botched it pretty badly.
When he shambled out to join us, pulling his desk forlornly behind him, we realized he’d gotten caught in the undertow of our nonsense and petitioned the teacher to reverse her decision.
But our reputation as disrupters had preceded us, apparently, meaning we had to live with the consequences of our actions.
In the years that have flown by since those days of inestimable imbecility, I’ve made an uneasy peace with myself, citing the high school climate as one of occasional and temporary lapses of judgment, liable to create — in hindsight — profound embarrassment.
To quote Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher in the Rye,” “It’s really too bad that so much crummy stuff is a lot of fun sometimes,” a rationalization that makes more sense than it actually ought to.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or at 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on his Facebook page, where there is a statute of limitations on stupidity.