My parents moved our family from Maryland to Central Florida in the summer after I completed sixth grade.
That fall, after a few traumatic weeks finding my way around my new school, it was
becoming clear to me that none of the friends I had recently formed during one year at Old Post Road Elementary in Abingdon, Maryland had been promoted to the seventh grade; or if they had been,
clearly none had been assigned to Glenridge
Junior High in Orlando. Every living
being in the school was a complete
stranger to me; and if there were dead beings there, they were even stranger, although perhaps less complete.
The campus was sprawling, covering several
acres, and just a single story high, as are most Florida schools. That way, if a building or two is swallowed
by a sinkhole, or lost in a hurricane, it’s just a single story loss. For
some reason I had chosen Band as my
seventh period elective, although I had two relevant problems; I couldn’t play
an instrument, and I couldn’t read music.
Even today the smell of a clarinet reed strikes me with terror. You would be terrified too if you were
expected to play selections from Scheherazade
with the aforementioned handicaps. The
Persian bride Scheherazade faced beheading if the king decided he wanted to hear no more from her. I experienced a similar dread every time the
teacher asked me to play. I grew to hate
Rimsky; and truth be told, I wasn’t that fond of Korsakov.
The alternative courses available during seventh period must
have been really horrid---“Sinkhole Filling for Newcomers,” or “Sandspur
Picking, 101.” Sandspurs, for the
uninitiated, are sharp spiny things, like three-dimensional asterisks, about
the size of pencil erasers, and they’re as common in Florida as moss on trees.
They stick to your socks, find a way to your skin and can’t be removed without
drawing blood from your fingers. Their
primary function, it seems, is to keep Floridians from overdosing on Vitamins C and D by releasing a healthy bit of their blood each day. Their secondary function is to make Phys. Ed
class in the heat and humidity even more unpleasant than it would otherwise be,
and make no mistake, it would otherwise be unpleasant enough.
The worst thing about PE, of course, was showering with a
slew of other boys, some of whom had so perfected the art of snapping a towel
against an unsuspecting posterior that it would leave a welt. The other
worst thing (yes, there were two
worst things about PE) was when, once every eight or ten days, presumably because
the coach was in a foul mood, the dreaded words began to filter through the
school from the earlier periods, “Happy Hour Today.” Happy
Hour was the name coined by the Marquis de Sade for an entire PE period
devoted to jumping jacks, sit-ups, pull-ups, and laps around the track. I believe he called it "l’heure joyeux." Some of the
kids blamed Happy Hour on the fitness initiative of President Kennedy (whose French
wife, it was rumored, was related to the Marquis). But I have come into possession of an old
reel-to-reel tape recording from a closed-door session in Tallahassee. The following is an exact transcript, with expletives deleted:
