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| reléd. | 02.25.2004 | |
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 when i was in the fourth grade, after our first recess... we would have “rotation.” for each day of the week, we had a different activity for rotation: tuesdays we had choir, another day it was art, and one of the days was “political roundtable.” and although i enjoyed most of the different rotating activities... my favorite was on mondays and wednesdays: gym. gym (or “jim,” as some of us accidentally called it in our nine year-old foolish naivety) was my favorite part of the fourth grade. every “gym day,” we would walk across the parking lot to the junior high, change into our required orange and black gym clothes, and make it up to modest basketball court where we would play: dodge ball, kick ball, whiffle ball, or even (since this particular gym was equipped to handle it...) basketball. ms. boris, the gym teacher, wasn’t your typical butch-woman-gym-teacher: enough muscles to make any fourth grade boy jealous, a mullet, that peeks down over broad shoulders that help accentuate an absolutely SICK six pack, and a whistle. ms. boris was different. she didn’t believe in whistles. i’ve never seen someone dislike whistles as much as ms. boris. she claimed that they were the “shrieking cries of fallen angels.” then, the whistle blew on gym. (also, in fourth grade... irony started unsheathing it’s phallic double-sided sword. and nothing seemed as cut and dry as it was in earlier elementary years.) days after we learned that we were going to be having gym twice a week—a nine year-old boy’s wet dream (yes, more irony)—we learned of a small bi-weekly... annoyance. now, i live in a small town. and one of the concessions of going to a small, country school is that there isn’t much in the way of concessions at high school sporting events. soda... candy... and maybe chips. another one of the concessions is that all of the teachers double-up to teach you several different “subjects.” unfortunately, ms. boris was also devoutly religious. so... every other wednesday—roughly twenty-five percent of the time (or “a lot of the time” as some of us accidentally called it in our nine-year old naivety)—we would have to switch gears from physical education to religious education (or “reléd” as ms. boris, for whatever reason, called it). this is another thing about going to small, country schools. religious education is taught at public schools such as mine because: (a) ninety-nine percent of the kids are from the same religious sect, which in my case was mennonite; (b) the government will never know, because let’s face it... there has got to be more important things than the loss of our elementary gym class every other wednesday; and (c) small town people are nuts. so on those days, instead of having gym, we would have to walk to a nearby church basement to learn about the bible and stuff. still required to change into our gym clothes, we would then have to walk through a dense wooded area to a somewhat adjacent mennonite church. and, man, was that wooded area a bitch. i always thought that at some point we would make a path, and every inch of our skin wouldn’t get covered in poison ivy anymore. but, each time we went we would cut a new path through. when someone asked, ms. boris said that this was so that we wouldn’t “strip mine god’s edens with our reeboks.” then, after we argued that no one wears reeboks anymore... ms. boris snapped, “rule one of religious education: don’t. f[beep]. with. god.” after we descended into the church’s basement, ms. boris would sit us down, turn out all of the lights, and disappear. she’d say “pray or something for a few minutes.” we had figured out that this was just so that she could cue-up the music and change into her pittsburgh steelers jersey, so we’d take the time to secretly pass around some contraband caladryl and cotton balls (for gentle application). finally, one of those “arena anthems” (that the band queen somehow made a career out of) would start blaring out of all of the church speakers. the first time we’d been through this routine, we all got super excited because we thought that this meant that whole religious-ed-thing was all a sham and that we were going to get to watch the mighty ducks. but, sure enough ms. boris’s voice—booming and masculine—came over the speakers: “aaaaare yoooou reeeeady.... for reléd?” oh, god... here we go... TO BE CONTINUED... |
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| 11:42 pm | xander said this. | |
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