Musings by Tsai

My childhood was...a bit interesting. In retrospect it was pretty depressing at times (but don't tell eight year old Darren that, he thought he was the coolest). For a solid five years my best friends were probably my parents, but honestly back then I didn't mind. My childhood was camp outs near Lake George. My childhood was playing basketball and video games with my brother. My childhood was simple. It was a time when being happy didn't require anyone but you to like you.When dressing up in accordance with my mother's sense of fashion (which was decades behind, just check out my vest in the third grade yearbook) didn't bring any embarrassment. When the cracks in relationships between the people around you go by unnoticed.



Alas, I'm getting off track, I was supposed to tell you guys a story. Hmm... oh got it. I think people will enjoy this one. Here's how I almost got detention.

So, back in first grade, I had these two friends (this was prior to the aforementioned five year solitude) named Ben and Edward (or Eddie, depending on his mood). We probably spent every second of the school day with each other, laughing about something or other. I'll be honest, we were way, way too braggadocios for first graders, but that's beyond the point. Anyways, one day, sitting at recess we were bored out of our minds, so the three of us had this idea: a very stupid, reckless, idea, but an idea.

See, at Duzine Elementary School in this wonderful district of New Paltz there is an abundance of one thing in the playground. Want to guess? It's not monkey bars, jump ropes, or anything of the sort. It's pavement. I don't know if most of you remember this, but a good half of the area we were allowed to roam in our few minutes of freedom was just a blocked off section of old parking lot. We didn't even have a real basketball court, we had these weird plastic "hoops" which were just buckets on poles with four holes on the sides so basketballs that made it in wouldn't even find their way back.

Anyways, this parking lot is huge, which is what I was getting at. Big enough that the two or three monitors couldn't keep track of it all. They watched the busy sections and let the rest of us seven-year-olds wander around on our own volition. Ben. Eddie. and I enjoyed trying to find the areas out of sight, and in the back we found these white circles on the ground probably about eight to ten feet in diameter. We saw these and immediately turned to each other. "Wrestling pits," we all said. It just seemed so glaringly obvious. So we started it up. We'd get in, two at a time, and fight our hardest to pin the other or push them out of the ring.

What started as three kids, became five kids on day two, and eight kids on day three. There's a lot of pent up aggression in elementary school apparently. We were just loving that we made "a thing." Our own little fight club, without the rules. Of course, nothing gold can stay and we came to a crashing halt on day three. Looking back, inviting more people was a really poor decision, as the extra crowd brought the monitors. Let me tell you, a first grade classroom is just a sea of snitches, so very predictably when the adults came the three of us were ratted out in mere seconds.

We were scared. Knees trembling, brink of wetting our pants, tearing up scared. The three of us, we talked big but we were good kids more or less. No problems. Clean record in our whole two years of public school education. We'd never been in trouble. It was only made worse by the monitor's stone cold silence. She grabbed the three of us by our collars and dragged us inside, then made us stand outside our first grade teacher's room (Mrs. Dodd, bless her). For a few minutes all we heard were hushed whispers from inside the almost empty room. Possibilities ran through my head. My mother had told me all these horror stories from her schooling (probably in an attempt to scare me more than anything), rulers on the knuckles, paddles, standing for hours holding a chair over your head, these all seemed like very real possibilities to me.

Luckily, all we got was an order to stand outside and "reflect on what we had done." Our teacher made sure to tell us we were very close to going to the principal but she reconsidered. I don't think I'd ever been that glad. We all took a deep breathe and five minutes later we were already grinning at each other ear to ear.

The whistle rang and the halls began to fill. Our class passed the three of us, standing at attention outside the door. I had the decency to at least blush and look down but Eddie was eating it up. High-fives, winks, he was giving his best celebrity impression, and in the process making us look like the biggest bad asses in the first grade.

A week later we were already joking about it. Eddie kept on stretching it more and more every retelling, never missing a chance to made sure everybody knew about it. At the last version I heard, I believe he was beating up some six foot second grader when the monitor pulled him off, and he swears "if she didn't pull me off, oh man, he would have had a bad time." I was just glad it was over and we got away scot-free. Ben and I would never say anything except nod whenever Eddie asked us to confirm the story to someone, we figured Eddie deserved his moment in the spotlight.

The next year Eddie was halfway across the country, and Ben was in a new class with new friends. Friendships then are so flimsy, born more from proximity than anything. I came over to his house once the next year, but it wasn't the same. The three amigos were no more.

I don't really know if you got any indirect characterization from that, but I hope you enjoyed it. Moral of the story...uh, I guess bad things aren't always punished? Don't do drugs kids.

-Darren