"Do you speak English?"
A question from Clint Coughlin, a Phys Ed teacher. My fourth grade class was in the middle of playing some tag-oriented game when Clint came over to me to make his inquiry. It is the only piece of dialogue I can retrieve from that first day of school.
Clearly, I wasn't following a rule pertaining to his game, but why would that mean I didn't know my own language? Thanks to Clint, I wasn't just new now--I was a foreigner; an illegal alien from Monmouth County. The run-in with him was the first in a series of large-scale humiliations in gym class.
It felt like getting shots after a while. I could anticipate them all as they came at me, like watching a nurse test the serum before administering your injection. Another showcase for my athletic ineptness was fast on its way when hearing the words used--"football," "soccer," "baseball." That's when I knew it was all over. There was nothing I could do. The embarrassing moment would come, and the best thing was just to look away while I took the shot, its pain being only for the moment.
It wasn't that I didn't enjoy competition. Just not team sport competition. Every one of the major sports in which my ten-year-old contemporaries were engaged was a sprawling tour de force of how much I truly, undoubtedly sucked. It wouldn't be until I started running track some years later when I could finally channel my love for competition. I still sucked then, too--it just got handled differently.
Before track there were the Wednesdays at Medford Lanes. Mike and I combined forces with bowling virtuoso Sam Anderson. This kid shelled out scores of two-hundred plus points a game while I struggled to keep my head above water at the triple digit line.
These Wednesday afternoons at the Lanes became something like cousin reunions. Thirty-two nine to thirteen-year-olds trying to relate to one another, the bowling game coming to serve as a backdrop for gossip, crushes, bickering. Old ladies sat in the back at high-top tables, watching the young people figure it all out while smoking their butts. The scene wasn't much, but to nonathletic wonders like me, a world away from Haines Elementary, with its institution of hierarchical agenda taking root.