The author Robert Fulghum wrote of learning everything he needed to know in kindergarten – a process that certainly must have produced one ignorant person. The essence of life is not bound within finger paints, afternoon naps, the ABC’s song or picture books boasting barnyard animals frolicking amidst pastoral settings. It’s just not that easy.
Life is survival. Recognizing evil, confronting it, and eventually, painfully, inuring ourselves to its awful presence. Each of us will at some point experience a unique crises, moment, or event that precipitates a transformation into adulthood, an acclimation to the vulgarities of society.
I was fourteen. And I survived dodge ball.
The game itself is straightforward; a class of boys – I never known girls to participate in this spectacle – is divided into two teams facing each other from opposite ends of a basketball court. Red rubber balls of various sizes are placed at half court, enough for each player to have at least one. The prized ones are the small hard spheres slightly larger than a softball, capable of being fast pitched into your opponents face, head, or back of the legs. The object of the game was to tag your enemy; the WAY they were tagged was what won bragging rights.
My gym teacher was also the football coach – a small, angry man that saw the larger class of students broken into two distinct groups; athletes, and kids he really didn’t like. I was not an athlete.
He was omnipotent, the ruler and the rule. He chose the teams. He alone decided our fate.
He could divide up the class evenly, placing equal number of thug football players into each team. He could. Instead he preferred to separate the jocks from the non-jocks, creating team A with ten boys looking like the front line of the Pittsburgh Stealers facing team B comprised of all ten members of the chess club. We huddled in a corner and bleated “Bahhhh.”
The whistle blows and the air is filled with the mad rush of squeaking rubber soles scrambling across the boards for the loose cache of weapons – with any luck my puny group may snatch a fourth of the balls, typically the half inflated flabby ones that are hard to throw and easy to catch. Back at the edge of the court we’ll lob our balls in long graceful arches, since none of us have the power to drive one the full length of the gym.
A second whistle sounds and each team advances to their own free throw line; Team A storming the court with arms cocked back in search of blood, while the lambs step up gingerly, halting several feet short of the line. More down and another whistle signals the move to half court.
Life would be easy if winning was all the emotions experienced, if everyone in class received A’s. But the world isn’t a sterile environment, the answer isn’t lying ready to be memorized and regurgitated; sometimes you just get the crap beat out of you because that’s one stinking big dog in the fight. We learn to survive.
The last whistle shrills and coach screams “ANYWHERE!” Complete pandemonium. The gym erupts into a sort of frenzied, perverted Easter egg hunt as junior sized psychos attack the court searching for the few remaining prizes.
I have no aspiration of winning, merely exiting the game with some semblance of dignity. I want to lose with grace. One of the cretins will pump his arm once in a mock throw to see if I’ll cower and duck. Do and he’ll have a clear and easy shot at all my vulnerable parts. Instead I stand my ground and look adversity in the eye – I can’t defeat him, but I can defeat fear.
You’re still going to take a shot to the head, possibly a thump in the groin, a black eye, occasionally a bloody nose; but you have to push through the muck, wipe off the stink, and say…That’s one more bad section of road I learned to cross.
Because in the end life seems to be full of two hundred and fifty pound fourteen year old boys, and the sooner we learn to survive them, the sooner we’re ready for the really tough problems. Kindergarten never prepared us for evil.