I always did have an eye for fashion…
When people hear I spend a lot of time covering high school and middle school sports and don’t really get paid for it, they get an odd look in their eyes.
It’s a look that says, “Did you hit yourself on the head, son?” A look that says “Back away slowly, he might start drooling on himself … or us.”
Then I tell them about that magical dream where the booster club rewards my efforts with a house made entirely of freshly-baked brownies (the swimming pool out back is filled with coconut cream pie filling), and they really start backing up. Just not as slowly as before.
If they stuck around, I’d tell them my life has been a series of questionable choices. And it all started with the box full of plaid pants at an elementary school in Kelso, Washington.
These pants were handed out to young rapscallions such as myself, when they would do something which made it impossible to continue wearing their own clothes for the rest of the school day. Such as, oh I don’t know, starting a mud ball war at recess.
Which was preferable to the alternative of a bark chip battle, which left 42 kids lying sprawled on the Beacon Hill Elementary playground looking like they had just been involved in a World War II beach attack and caused at least one teacher to quit after having a nervous breakdown.
I coughed up bits of bark for three weeks and when the weather changes, it feels like two or three of the little buggers are still embedded in the back of my knee.
It’s not that I was stupid. I knew how gravity worked and I could read the warning labels just as well as the next kid. I just spent much of my childhood ignoring that buzzing in the back of your brain, the one that tells you to stop being an idiot because you’re about to light yourself on fire with the home-made flame thrower you and Ray Jacoby just built from your dad’s pump canister of carpet cleaning chemicals.
To which I would respond by singing that old Dusty Springfield classic, “You Don’t Own Me” and then wondering why I had just lost my hearing and was now sprawled on my back ten feet from where I had been a moment ago. And why was the ant pile (and half the lawn) now on fire?
So I got detention (and a nice cold) after refusing to stop playing basketball and come in from the playground during a driving rain storm.
I tempted fate (and lost) by grabbing my sister’s TV remote, changing the channel and running away while she was trying to watch a marathon of videos by The Cure. My only mistake — slowing down to look behind me, only to see my sister charging down the hallway like a raptor, fingernails already popped and mere moments from raking down my tender back like the wrath of God.
I stood up on a riding lawn mower once and nailed my head on a low-hanging branch, knocking myself off the moving mower. Since I also managed to later do the same thing on a motorcycle, it probably wasn’t an accident.
Why did I do it all? Probably because I’ve always been living on borrowed time.
I barely made it out of kindergarten, you see.
Washington Elementary was an old, imposing two-story structure which was mercifully shut down a year later, but not before one staggeringly inept new teacher tried, unsuccessfully, to kill off her entire class.
Apparently unaware that five-year-olds have no sense of direction, she sent us off to find our own way to the gym for picture day.
There were 23 of us at the start, straggling through long, dark hallways in a hopeless bid of finding our destination. The weak went first, in a hail of snot and tears. Then the pants-wetters fell, the mommies-boys, the daddy’s little princesses and the one kid who kept yelling “It’s pudding time!!”
Tragically, it wasn’t.
In the end, there was just two of us and we swore a blood oath that if we ever got out of this place, we’d live our life to the fullest and ignore all the rules. I last saw Sally Mae as she fell down an open elevator shaft (it was a dangerous school!) screaming, “Avenge me!”
They found me days later in the basement bathroom, living off of scavenged tator tots, more animal than boy. It took three of them, and several cartons of pudding, to lure me out of the stall.
And yes, I had to wear the plaid pants home.
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Oh, Canada…
