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rhymes with ronny rest
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i blathed a lot of stupid shit as a teenager. i even got some of the lyrics for i_am_the_cosmos wrong, which is almost unforgivable. this right here may be the worst offender of them all, though.
my grade school was not a dreadful place. i knew that then, but it took years and a bit of distance for me to see how special it really was. that i would think there might be someone else i went to school with lurking on blather just shows you how clueless i was thirteen years ago.
when people find out i went to a catholic grade school, they think of uniforms, jesus overload, rules rigidly enforced, rulers stinging outstretched hands. it was nothing like that. the religious angle was there, sometimes, sort of, but it wasn't overt. we were treated with respect and left to make up our own minds. when we did have to go to church, our priest sang harmonies to the hymns instead of singing the melodies straight. he had solid melodic sense. he was a baritone. lamb of god, he would sing, you take away the sins of the world, and while he was harmonizing my friend pete would sing-shout the hymn like it was a metallica song and i'd hold my breath to keep from laughing.
pete's still my friend. he'd probably still sing it that way. it's part of what makes him pete.
the high school i went to had a celebrated arts program. it was supposed to be a great atmosphere for musicians, actors, writers, artists in any medium. next to the catholic grade school it was a joke. grade school was more like what high school was supposed to be. we were encouraged to be ourselves, to be creative, to think outside the box. in high school we were expected to live inside the box, with nothing but a few holes for air and the occasional muffled sound of someone walking by to remind us there was life outside of the cardboard.
my sixth grade class got to write our own play about decision-making, without any input from our teacher. we came up with a riff on "the_twilight_zone". we called it "the decision zone". there were two performances. one was during the day, for the rest of the school. the other was an evening show for our parents, where we improvised and stretched things out, took more chances, got a little more "adult". somewhere someone has a decaying VHS tape of me doing my faux-rod serling narrator bit in suit and tie, sucking on a lollipop, ranting about taking my kids to the lollipop factory and being appalled by the mediocrity of the modern lollipop and its desecration at the hands of consumerism. the year after that i was mr. glowerpuss, the evil toy store owner in our christmas play, with a cane and a fake moustache and baby powder in my hair to make it grey. i loved playing the villain and chewing scenery, until the high school box took my love away and i stopped acting in plays and starting using my teeth to eat through the box from the inside.
my grade school was also an escape. things at home were not good then. school let me forget about that for a while. in grade eight i showed up for class every day dressed like a thirteen-year-old stock broker, because the way i looked was just about the only thing in my life i had some control over. most of those days i walked around carrying a bulky old cassette tape recorder, documenting snatches of conversation and random ideas. no one ever told me to put the tape recorder away. no one ever made fun of me for the way i dressed. "you look nice today" was about as much as anyone ever said about it. one girl did write in my yearbook: "johnny, don't wear dress pants and a suit in ninety degree weather! please! you'll get sunstroke!"
her name was brandie. she was always smiling. she's a yoga instructor now.
i showed up in the same kind of clothes for my first day of high school. before the end of lunch period someone had whipped a glass bottle at my head and called me a fucking fag.
there you go.
more than anything, it was the teachers. the teachers made my grade school the place it was. aside from one who seemed to have been born without a sense of humour and didn't have so much as a molecule of sympathy living in a calcium deposit on a single bone in her body, i don't think any of them followed the curriculum. almost every teacher i had felt like a friend, and the feeling hung around long after they'd stopped teaching me. they were interested in who we were and who we were going to be. they wanted to do whatever they could to help us grow in whatever direction we wanted to grow. we were taught about the political climate of the time and asked what we thought of it all (in the third grade), allowed to listen to the o.j. simpson verdict being read on the radio and asked what we made of that whole mess (in the sixth grade), and from grades six to eight, once or twice a year, our gymnasium became a darkened place of magic where dances happened, sweaty bodies pressed against one other, and the guys kept track of how many girls they'd danced with and felt like movie stars.
i made good friends, and scared one of the few bullies stupid when i slammed his head against a brick wall after he stole my winter hat one time too many. i learned how to snap my fingers but not how to whistle. i cheated on a test once, and the look of disappointment on my french teacher's face when she caught me was all the punishment i needed. i never cheated again. i learned CPR and quickly forgot most of the salient bits. i said something dirty to a girl who was going through a mean phase in front of my entire class and won the student of the month award for politeness a week or two later. i sang "evil woman" at a talent show and everyone went apeshit and i felt like i was one of the beatles. i bought tampons for a polish girl when she needed them and felt my heart kiss my throat when she gave me a hug.
none of the teachers i had are there anymore. they've either retired or transferred to other schools. the principal who gave me a ride home once when i missed the bus died of cancer a decade ago. i probably wouldn't recognize the place if i set foot in it today. but in the time i was there, it was never dreadful. i don't know if there's a word for what it was, but if there is, it's as far away from dreadful as a word can get.
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