[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring of 1956, when I was 6 "going on 7". The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
The night of Aunt Alta's arrival, I woke up as Alex after everyone else was in bed -- around 1 AM. Alex went out looking for a jumping-off place.
I talked about these before in Heavens and Heavens, July 7, 2007. They are special places from which the soul of a deceased person can leap and, provided they leap in the right direction, land in a heaven.
Alex/Alaka'i decided to try and speed things up. He would skip the requirement that the soul be of the recently deceased variety. The thinking was, the kind of heavens that you could enter into by leaping from a jumping-off place would not be the Christian kind. Let the Christians go to their cold heaven in the sky and congregate amongst themselves. Alex would go to a Hawaiian heaven where there would presumably be no Christians, and therefore no one like Alta, no one like my Mother, no one like my Father, and no one like the dozens of jerks who told me when I complained about my parents' abuse that I was evil because I wasn't honoring my Mother and Father.
So it was a way of going to Hawaii without a plane or a boat. Just jump off a suitable high perch and with luck you land in the temporary abode of dead Hawaiians. You'll be reincarnated eventually, but meanwhile you're in good company.
As Alex I wondered around Fort Devens in the middle of the night looking for a jumping-off place. The only thing I had to go on was that it should be a tree or a cliff, and I should expect to find the spirits of children about it.
I couldn't find the spirits of children around any of the actual trees I looked at. They were just trees. There were no cliffs, per se. So it was looking desperate after a couple of hours of searching.
But suddenly, unexpectedly, I came into my school's playground. I hadn't realized I was in the neighborhood of the school. I just stepped out of of some woods and was there. And I saw the jungle gym in the middle of it, and I saw (or felt) the spirits of children.
I had a flash of insight. "Of course!" I thought, "This is America! In America everything is made of metal and plastic! Why shouldn't the jumping-off trees be metal?"
So I climbed up to the top of the jungle gym. It was awkward because my right arm was in the sling. At the top I tried to guess which way I should jump in order for the earth to open up and let me fall into my heaven.
I'm not entirely sure what happened next. Did I jump? Or did I lose my hold with my left hand and fall by accident? It might have been a combination of the two. I may have started to jump, leaned into it, changed my mind in mid-execution, and lost my hold because of the leaning.
Anyway, I fell. I landed on my head, and became unconscious. It was about 3 AM on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. I would have died, probably, if the school janitor hadn't come to take care of some off-time business that morning. He arrived around dawn having some stuff to do that he wanted to get out of the way before the start of the school week, and he happened to notice me lying in the gravel at the foot of the jungle gym and called for an ambulance.
Showing posts with label jungle gym. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jungle gym. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Lessons For The Growing Body
In 1st grade PE was called PT, Physical Training. There was no need for it. Every day on the playground I worked up a gallon of sweat.
At first I favored the see-saw with my wife-to-be Kathy at the other end. This didn't work out, as Kathy, as gifted as she was, couldn't grasp the fact that if the bell rings when she's at the bottom and she jumps off suddenly to go running in to class, I would come crashing down and probably suffer a new concussion.
The swings didn't work out because of swing bandits. Bigger kids would stop you, before you could get up to speed, and throw you off the swing so they could have it. A similar thing went on at the slide.
The do-it-yourself merry-go-round was only fun until you up-chucked.
So my favorite playground attraction, besides watching girls cartwheel, came to be the jungle gym. We had a lovely heavy-duty triple-decker with a kind of mini jungle gym on top. I'd climb up one side right-side-up, then keep going and climb down the other side up-side-down. There were kids who wanted to hog the jungle gym, like everything else, but they could only control the top of it. It was that big. It was so big, in fact, that it wouldn't be allowed today, because the danger from falling was so great. I'll have more to say about that as we near the end of the school year with these memoirs.
[Above: Ours was round, had thicker pipes, gravel rather than sand at the bottom, no rubber coating, and a pole from the top down the center to slide down Batman-style. Other than that, this is the basic kind of triple-decker with upper mini-gym structure I'm talking about. By the way, in the winter they had to warn us not to lick it.]
In addition to recess work our teachers also led us in physically active games. We were taken outside and taught games to do with A Tisket, A Tasket, and Ring Around The Rosie. Indoors we were led to play games like musical chairs that weren't supposed to be very physical but became so when kids got rough.
Anyway, all that sweaty exercise we were getting on the playground and in organized games wasn't enough. Our ignorant child bodies had to also be trained in a course of instruction. So we had PT classes.
There were no grades for PT, but you wouldn't know it for the way the PT teacher acted. The guy would make all of us line up in the gym room. Boys and girls both, wearing their regular clothes, would have to line up together and stand at attention while he instructed us by telling us PT related facts. Then we had to touch our toes, do jumping jacks, deep knee bends, and the like.
One day his instruction was a long discourse on how important it was to obey him because if you horsed around you could end up like one kid he had years ago who got another kid's teeth embedding in his brain. Not only did he have brain damage, the teacher said, but the kid whose teeth they were lost them, and almost bled to death out of his mouth. This was the story he told us toward the end of his lecture, after we'd already been listening to the creep for 20 minutes, at attention.
I passed out and woke up on my back to smelling salts. Kathy was leaning in among a crowd of others bent over me, showing more concern for me than she ever showed on the see-saw, strengthening my love for her.
I was seen by a nurse who tried to get at the cause of the fainting. I told her right away about the long standing at attention and the PT teacher's gruesome lecture, but she wasn't satisfied with that. She kept pressing for another explanation. Finally she asked what I'd had for lunch that day, and I had to tell her I hadn't had any. I didn't tell her that my lunch was stolen, because that would have been snitching.
My parents were called. I was turned over to them to take me home early that day. The official explanation for my fainting spell was that I was not eating enough. The PT teacher's lecture and the standing at attention weren't even mentioned to my parents, who just wanted to know why I wasn't eating the food my Mother sent me to school with.
[Below: A do-it-yourself merry-go-round my Mother might have puked from, in her day.]
At first I favored the see-saw with my wife-to-be Kathy at the other end. This didn't work out, as Kathy, as gifted as she was, couldn't grasp the fact that if the bell rings when she's at the bottom and she jumps off suddenly to go running in to class, I would come crashing down and probably suffer a new concussion.
The swings didn't work out because of swing bandits. Bigger kids would stop you, before you could get up to speed, and throw you off the swing so they could have it. A similar thing went on at the slide.
The do-it-yourself merry-go-round was only fun until you up-chucked.
So my favorite playground attraction, besides watching girls cartwheel, came to be the jungle gym. We had a lovely heavy-duty triple-decker with a kind of mini jungle gym on top. I'd climb up one side right-side-up, then keep going and climb down the other side up-side-down. There were kids who wanted to hog the jungle gym, like everything else, but they could only control the top of it. It was that big. It was so big, in fact, that it wouldn't be allowed today, because the danger from falling was so great. I'll have more to say about that as we near the end of the school year with these memoirs.
[Above: Ours was round, had thicker pipes, gravel rather than sand at the bottom, no rubber coating, and a pole from the top down the center to slide down Batman-style. Other than that, this is the basic kind of triple-decker with upper mini-gym structure I'm talking about. By the way, in the winter they had to warn us not to lick it.]In addition to recess work our teachers also led us in physically active games. We were taken outside and taught games to do with A Tisket, A Tasket, and Ring Around The Rosie. Indoors we were led to play games like musical chairs that weren't supposed to be very physical but became so when kids got rough.
Anyway, all that sweaty exercise we were getting on the playground and in organized games wasn't enough. Our ignorant child bodies had to also be trained in a course of instruction. So we had PT classes.
There were no grades for PT, but you wouldn't know it for the way the PT teacher acted. The guy would make all of us line up in the gym room. Boys and girls both, wearing their regular clothes, would have to line up together and stand at attention while he instructed us by telling us PT related facts. Then we had to touch our toes, do jumping jacks, deep knee bends, and the like.
One day his instruction was a long discourse on how important it was to obey him because if you horsed around you could end up like one kid he had years ago who got another kid's teeth embedding in his brain. Not only did he have brain damage, the teacher said, but the kid whose teeth they were lost them, and almost bled to death out of his mouth. This was the story he told us toward the end of his lecture, after we'd already been listening to the creep for 20 minutes, at attention.
I passed out and woke up on my back to smelling salts. Kathy was leaning in among a crowd of others bent over me, showing more concern for me than she ever showed on the see-saw, strengthening my love for her.
I was seen by a nurse who tried to get at the cause of the fainting. I told her right away about the long standing at attention and the PT teacher's gruesome lecture, but she wasn't satisfied with that. She kept pressing for another explanation. Finally she asked what I'd had for lunch that day, and I had to tell her I hadn't had any. I didn't tell her that my lunch was stolen, because that would have been snitching.
My parents were called. I was turned over to them to take me home early that day. The official explanation for my fainting spell was that I was not eating enough. The PT teacher's lecture and the standing at attention weren't even mentioned to my parents, who just wanted to know why I wasn't eating the food my Mother sent me to school with.
[Below: A do-it-yourself merry-go-round my Mother might have puked from, in her day.]
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