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| "AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HUMOR"TM
SHOWCASE
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August /
September 2006 Contest Results |
What I
Learned
By John
Strother,
Arkansas
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.
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