There is a small park in Queens, New York, on the site of the borough’s last one room schoolhouse. Built in 1879, just five years after citywide compulsory education had been established, the small building held six rows of nine desks, with each row being a different grade level, starting with the youngest. The students were mostly farmer’s kids from the area. There was a blackboard and a US flag and a potbellied stove to keep the kids warm in winter. There was not a bathroom.
Only ten miles away from One Room Schoolhouse Park sits the nation’s largest high school, Brooklyn Tech, serving over six thousand children. I’m not sure how many rooms it has but a lot of them must be bathrooms.
Schools aren’t a collection of rooms, they are a collective of teachers, yet while I remember many teachers fondly, there is one school room that I can’t quite shake the experience of: the gym. If you know me well, or even at all, you’ve already realized that my time in the gym was that of a stranger in a strange land, spindly and not entirely committed to the concept… let’s call it unenthused.
My grade school gym was an indoor basketball court, sunken into a sub-basement with one door for access. There was a small row of built-in bleachers a floor above it that looked down into it like an auction pit at a rodeo.
While a myriad of slight to significant humiliations occurred to us all there, my most memorable involved the gym’s basic design, where the line designating the edge of the play space was less than three feet away from the concrete walls surrounding it.
I won the race. I don’t want to burden you with suspense. Our team won the relay race, and it wasn’t an “in the cards” sort of win; Beth was never the strongest sprinter and the other team had Lester on it… let’s just say he grew up to be an award winning coach, this was in his blood. And putting me as anchor was not a decision, it was the result of the order of selection of the teams, and I’m not wingeing about being picked last, I’d have done it too, it wasn’t a situation where they needed Star Trek facts or magic tricks.
But I ran. I won’t waste time explaining it in a “slow motion you can only hear my heartbeat as we cut between my feet and eyes” kind of way, but I am 45 years from the event and I still remember that particular instance of running. And it wasn’t just the run (not to brag), it was the TURN, the perfect number of harried steps to the opposite line, the touch of the tennis shoe (as we called all athletic footwear back then) that served as both tag and the ideal transfer of velocity and weight in the complete opposite direction to propel me back to the other side of the room.
Kids had gathered on the floor above and were looking down at us. Encouraging shouts reflected from every inch of the entirely non-acoustic space. I didn’t even see my opponent, my focus was the dash to that other red line on the floor, this was my chance, this was All There Was. When I hit the finish line, there were cheers.
For one second. I didn’t stop at the finish line,
I hit the concrete wall with my entire body.
It was like falling off a building sideways.
The space became silent. I lay on the floor, that familiar high pitched sine wave sound in my ears, eyes watering. Due to my particular physical architecture, my forehead had taken the most damage.
A teacher asked if I was ok.
“What?” I kind of replied.
“Are you going to be ok?” she said slower.
She took a closer look. It must not have been very encouraging.
“Let’s get you to the nurse’s office.”
I wore the egg sized lump on my forehead like an Olympic medal. It was there for three weeks.
That was about as good as it got for me and gyms. Though, to be more specific, my main problem was the locker room. School is supposed to prepare you for life as an adult, but there are very few work situations that require disrobing, barring those where the job itself is focused on disrobing. I suppose that nurse and doctors put on their scrubs, or beekeepers change into that spacesuit thing, but other than Superman I didn’t have an inspiring example of a reason to take my clothes off outside of my house.
And gym clothes were disappointing. The socks and shorts utilized The World’s Worst Elastic; the web-like white strands seeming to melt before our very eyes each week until every knee sock became a leg warmer. Putting it on was the very opposite of a super-hero suit.
For Lester, it must have felt amazing to shed that light blue short sleeve button down and put on that t-shirt, because he knew deep inside somewhere that this was part of his destiny, his legacy, who he was always going to be. The experience also signaled truths about myself to me, but every one of them was entirely less impressive.
My high school gym was much larger, and had fancy wooden seating that extended from the wall if you turned a key. You had to be careful while it was closing as it was all engineered before they invented “safeguards”.
My experiences there, also somewhat socially awkward, were not athletic, but best summed up by the words “Pep Rally”. Somehow I got tapped to do loads of presentations to the entire school at that strange part before they introduced the teams and the cheerleaders; the warm up acts, an awkwardness compounded by my role in these events as the president of our school’s Latin and French clubs.
For the Latin club, we presented “Tres Porcus Parvus”, a dramatic interpretation of “The Three Little Pigs”. At least I was the narrator, so this event holds a bit of subtle dignity - it went over well with the confused Midwestern parents waiting to cheer for the athletes.
But for one of the French club presentations, I translated “Every Breath You Take” by The Police and performed it on acoustic guitar, and by the time I got to “Je criais ‘bebe s’il vous plait!’ ” the place went totally wild. The nice part about both these events was that I got to wear my regular clothes.
I spent most of my high school time in our theatre, where, come to think of it, we changed clothes all the time, but those costumes proved much more aspirational since I was never cast in the role of a spindly out of breath kid wearing leg warmers. Perhaps that is a gap in American theatre that’s ripe for a Tony™ award winning play.
One School Room.