I attended Catholic school as a child at what I can only assume was at the insistence of my father's mother who was a needlessly surly individual with a love of tacky horse statues, the bible, and poorly applied lipstick, in that order. The school was a large and unwelcoming brick building with an attached church and a playground made of concrete and donated railroad ties. The classrooms were equally unwelcoming and some equally concrete. Being in those classrooms felt like being in a box, and despite the love that I have for giant empty boxes that can easily be made into rocketships and caverns to explore, I hated being in school. My teachers never opened the windows which made the rooms stuffy and overly warm. Lessons were constantly peppered with thinly veiled scripture delivered in a way that wasn't fooling anyone and only succeeded in reminding me that before I could eat lunch I had to go to Mass, which was the most horrible thing I had experienced so far In Life. Being a standardly produced seven year old, it was hard for me to sit still and be quiet while a man in a dress swung a foul smelling ball around his head and spoke about things I didn't quite comprehend in a voice that sounded like nothing I'd heard on TV, and so was not worthy of my attention. As a result I was constantly talking and fidgeting and getting in trouble.
Standard Catholic school punishment for one of my age was Beating The Erasers. I'm not sure if you've done this before, but its wonderful. I couldn't fathom how people of apparent authority and education could view this as something to avoid. For those unfamiliar, Beating The Erasers would happen directly after lunch, when freedom and playtime were still fresh in my mind, and entailed taking a wicker basket full of chalk-dust covered board erasers that had been used all morning outside, which is exactly where I wanted to be. I was then required by biblical law to clean these erasers. To do this, one would hold an eraser firmly in each hand and smash them together with all the delight that a child who is knowingly about to be covered in dirt can muster. Each time I would bang the black rectangles together a plume of white dust would shoot out the sides inevitably clinging to my Jesus endorsed wool uniform. After several solid whacks the dust cloud would settle leaving me pale and ghostly with a white haze in my hair and on my face. The second stage of the sacred process would be to hit the erasers on the brick wall of the school, which would leave behind a white eraser shaped print that, thanks to my natural talent for Legos, had its potential realized and the side of the school quickly became the canvass for cityscapes, letters, and oddly boxy animals. The final phase would involve me wandering around the pavement kicking rocks and using my Giant Ghost Monster Talent to smash the newly discovered White Rectangle City until someone would realize I was missing and come to collect me. I was always careful to keep one dirty eraser in reserve so I could claim the job was not yet done. After all, Jesus doesn't like liars.
Perhaps a more appropriate punishment would have been to send me to the playground, which killed no fewer than two dozen children a year. The playground's outer perimeter was a chain link fence in a state of magnificent disrepair. Bits of sharpened metal jutted out at odd angles ready to skewer the next inattentive recess goer. Rather than tend to the inevitable bald spot that would occur in a playground lawn the school opted to bury the whole thing in loose gravel several meters deep. Walking from one place to another was like walking across the surface of a too soft mattress. Children were constantly falling in an effort to move from one death trap to the next. The only thing that made moving easier and contained the mountains worth of loose gravel were the railroad ties which were rivaled in pokiness only by the fence. Splinters were commonplace and removed with grim determination. The stabbing got in the way of a good slide after all. The only thing not always sucked into the mass of gravel were the posts of the swing set, which as far as I remember remained delicately balanced on the brink of toppling over with the slightest amount of movement. While I don't recall them ever actually falling, I do remember the terror I would feel when I would be on the swings and look down to see the post lift itself from The Gravel. The one upside to The Gravel was that, when compared to the surrounding cement and large chunks of wood, it presented a relatively soft place to land when, at the apex of your swing and terror, you would hurl yourself into the sky and hope for the best. While this plan never failed me, one of my schoolmates was less than fortunate and in a swing jump that would be spoken of for hours to come, failed to clear the last giant splinter and fractured his skull on a railroad tie. That was the third time I saw an ambulance in person, and it was still much larger than the toy version I had at home, which made me rather disappointed in my trinket. My schoolmate returned to school some days later with a shaved part on his head and several thousand stitches. I like to think he was never the same afterwards, or could suddenly play the piano, but I don't actually remember either way. No one bother to replace the blood soaked railroad tie.
The only pleasant memory I have of that school (aside from Amy, which is another story) was the Halloween Festival. It took place in a large empty building, perhaps the gym, but to be honest I don't remember my school even having a gym. Supervised Calisthenics apparently would have gotten in the way of Supervised Prayer. Regardless of where it took place, the Halloween Festival allowed me two opportunities: The chance to not wear my uniform, and the chance to win cake.
If you wore a costume you were allowed to participate in the Cake Walk, which involved a series of numbered sheets of paper taped to the floor in a vaguely circular pattern and worked much like musical chairs, with the participants walking around the circle listening to Monster Mash. The music would stop and with all the enthusiasm of a nursing home cribbage game Someone In Charge would call out a number. If you were standing on that number, you won a cake. An entire cake. All to yourself. When you won a cake you left the circle of paper and went over to the cake table where all the poorly made cakes were arrayed. My mother made the same cake every year. It was a bundt cake, chocolate with chocolate frosting, with candy corn arranged in some design on top. It was lopsided despite the use of a cake pan and perhaps eighty percent frosting, which made it the most popular cake on the table. It was a brown donut shaped pile of diabetes and I was always crushed when I couldn't win back the cake I had brought. As for not wearing my uniform, the Festival allowed me to essentially dress myself in any kind of ridiculous pile of stuff I could scrounge from my house. I would often wear pants as sleeves, backwards shirts, too large hats, and the occasional garbage bag. This of course caused my mother to not let me leave the house for fear the neighbors would think I was retarded. Each year I would come down the stairs with my newest "costume" and she would stand up, shake her head and point back upstairs. In the time it took me to return to my room and take off my Mattress Strapped To My Back outfit my mother would have created a masterpiece in seasonal horror using common household goods. My favorite was the mummy, which was made from our only white set of bedsheets and all the toilet paper in the house. She also managed to produce a small pile of makeup to color my face and hands with. It had extra Stringy Bits that dragged out behind me and tripped up my fellow Cake Walkers, which pleased me greatly. Her most awkward, yet in retrospect her most creative, costume was the Mexican Jumping Bean. I had been in my room de-costuming for no more than a few minutes when she produced a large frame made of sticks and circles of styrofoam. When I asked what it was she told me to be quiet and do what she said, which is how a good amount of her parenting went. It was strict, but remarkably effective. She had me climb into the oddly shaped monstrosity and promptly wrapped me in her favorite costume crafting tool, the bed sheet. This one was brown, and fitted, and was just big enough to cover the whole frame, leaving my head and hands free. I looked like Violet Beauregarde from Willy Wonka, but was an unsettling shade of brown. I couldn't move my feet very well and had to shuffle everywhere, which was fine, because I was supposed to be jumping anyways. The also gave me the chance to trod on Cake Walkers toes in an effort to cripple them, thus ensuring I got my own cake back.
I only attended that particular school until the third grade, but it was enough time that, without even realizing it, I learned the artistic value of not being worried about being dirty, became fascinated by my first Massive Head Trauma and was surprised that my mother was good at something outside the field of momhood. But even more importantly, it was plenty of time for me to figure out that conforming to what others wanted of me wasn't something I enjoyed and the further I was from what they wanted, the more cake I got. Which I still think is a good bit of Science.
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