Posts Tagged ‘school’

The Syracuse City School District referred to grades 7 through 9 as junior high school. The feeble term “middle school” was reserved for those milquetoast suburban kids whose districts had sleek, modern buildings and full-fledged orchestras featuring fierce battles over who was going to get first chair. My desegregated and gritty junior high school was a scary, Hogwarts-looking building also featuring pitched battles over who was going to get first chair – at the lunch table. Heck, some 9^th graders were actually driving cars to school, but only because they were 17 and should’ve been in 11^th grade.

 

Eastwood Junior High School was more tightly structured than elementary school. In fact, Eastwood was more closely structured to a high school, but like a smaller version of a high school – more like a “junior” high school. Hmmm…I wonder if that’s how it got its name.

 

My 8^th grade school day ran from 8:15 to 2:06 and the lunch period was shoehorned into the day from 10:50-11:18. This left us ravenous and hormonal lunchers a mere 28 minutes to nosh and dash. But since school administrators had to squeeze 2 lunches into 6 educational periods, frittering away time was not on the menu.

 

In addition to truncated lunches, we were allotted only 3 miserly minutes between classes. Take more than 180 seconds to get to your next class and your tardiness would become part of your permanent record – egad, no, not the dreaded permanent record! The in-between-classes time was marked off for us in colorfully stark indicators. First the green light came on meaning that class was over and you had 2 minutes till the red light alerted you that you now had only one minute to be seated and ready to go in your next class.

 

This was not an easy task. Especially if you had to trek from gym class in the basement all the way to health class on the 2^nd floor on the opposite side of the building – all without benefit of GPS. Throw in a visit to your locker and a pee pitstop and you might not beat the countdown of the red light flicking off. When you arrived at health class, the door could be shut and you’d be a marooned studenaut floating freely out in the empty corridors of space – a truant teenager in no man’s land without the protection of a get-out-of-jail-free Hall Pass.

 

Maybe an understanding teacher would grant you entrance knowing how hard it is to organize your books, stop at your locker, get a drink or take a wiz and then double time it to your next class. And you can forget about pinching a loaf – there was no time for such necessary evacuations. Meeting this shipshape timetable was a big ask (a pain in the ask), but we complied and it generally worked out. From the school’s point of view, providing a scant 3 minutes between classes allowed little time for mischief like drawing a moustache on the Donnie Osmond picture taped to Kathy Kraushaar’s locker (“Crow” to her intimates).

 

In addition to these exacting time parameters, there was a cardinal rule that students were prohibited from dining off campus or from leaving the building during school hours. While that rule was binding on all the civilian students, it did not apply to me since I didn’t regard myself as a civilian. I saw myself more as a foreign exchange student visiting from Rigel-7. Furthermore, however well understood or well-meaning this rule might be, it was at odds with my own creed of circumventing ill-conceived regulations. And this regulation was illing me.

 

I was always scheming to make my time my own. So, by employing at least 6 of my limbic system brain cells, I decided to take the miserly 28 minutes administrators allotted for midday num-num and make a jail break for the cozy confines of my comfortable crib located a scant 2 blocks away.

 

By attempting such risky self-care and flouting the territorial strictures of scholastic mandarins, I’d replace a noisy lunch period in the godlessly chirpy cafeteria with a serene and restorative mini-spa day back at my personal ground zero. So when the green light flashed “Go Time” at 10:47, I bolted from Miss Patrick’s 4^th period algebra class and dashed home like a border collie with the zoomies. By 10:51 I had unlocked the kitchen door using the key hidden in the Batman box up in the green cabinet and entered my personal Shangri-la.

 

Once ensconced behind the walls of Fortress Hardiman, I’d thrill to the pleasure of bilocation whereby for all intents I was in 2 places at once. That is, I was at school (at least by dint of roster assignment and supposed residency), but simultaneously I was also at home (by dint of being at home). This magical ability to be two places at once, wasn’t an act of David Hardiman. Nope. This was more an act of David Copperfield’s. My God. What kind of mad funhouse did I live in? Damn I was good company.

 

I reveled in the temporal alchemy of taking worthless school district time, and converting it into valuable personal time to spend as I saw fit – and I spent it like a drunken neurotic. I was like a teenage sorcerer converting ordinary school district moments into Dave’s personally treasured time, and I measured these enriched units of time in Hardiminutes and Nanodaves. Maybe in zooming home from Miss Patrick’s class, I had warped the time space continuum and had become a critical mass. A critical mass of what, I’ll leave to the reader to decide.  

 

So what does a wizardly time-junkie do in 27 cherished Hardiminutes to intensify his temporal larceny? Well I might start by removing my chicken loaf sandwich from the refrigerator. The sandwich I strategically assembled the previous night in preparation for this off the reservation event. I’d allow the sandwich to breathe – that is, to come to room temperature in the manner of decanting a fine wine. But instead of softening bitter tannins or developing a pleasing bouquet, I’d be enhancing the processed tang of compressed chicken loaf and intensifying the flavorless savor of Hellman’s Mayonnaise. Turns out I was doing sous vide before that cooking technique had even crossed the pond.

 

By adroitly structuring my time I’d synergize the moment and telescope the event. More prosaically, I might then proceed to the familiar family oval (the toilet) and decant something of a personal nature right through the oval and into the waiting waters of the family throne – there’s your original streaming service right there. This would be followed by various ablutions: a hot washcloth luxuriantly applied to the face followed by a warm wipe of the neck and hands. And because I was aware the hot water heater was directly below the sink, I knew there’d be a very short wait for the hot water to stream from the faucet. Understanding my domicile’s intimate infrastructure made me feel I had the advantage over my enemies – even though I really didn’t have any enemies and even though no advantage was gained. Maybe this whole thing was just happening in my head. Well, that was good enough for me. By now my Wonder Bread “chicken” sandwich had been properly decanted. It had lost all its chill and was ready for onboarding.

 

So I tossed my amalgamated chicken parts sandwich onto a plate with some pretzels, poured a tall glass of milk into my favorite ARCO gas station mug (the one with the handle and the New York Giants logo etching) and, lap towel in hand, brought it all into the living room where I turn on the TV and watch the last 5 minutes of Tattletales (which by 10:56 was mostly credits and commercials). At 11 I was happy to start a Let’s Make a Deal. By now I’m deep into the experience, very far away and completely immersed in my own private Idaho. My junior high school might as well be in Boise right now.

 

I finish lunch and watch as Monty Hall asks a lady dressed as a pickle if she’d like to take the curtain superintended by slim Carol Merril or the small box presented by chunky Jay Stewart. The pickle lady opts for the box and is rewarded with a $300 gift certificate to Spiegel Catalogue. Monty reminds us of the company’s location, “Spiegel, Chicago 6-oh-6-oh-9.” She chose wisely because behind the curtain was a gag gift of a rickety Beverly Hillbillies-looking jalopy.

 

It’s now 11:07 and I’m very deep into the experience and far removed from algebra class. I wonder if I can even make it back to the civilians students awaiting me at some place called Eastwood Junior High School. Where was that again? This mini-spa day in my hometown oasis had projected me out of this world. I’d become a studenaut – tethered to this world only by the knowledge that I had to be back at school by 11:21 or I’d besmirch my permanent record.

 

Taking a quick catnap crosses my mind, but I decide against anything remotely feline for fear of waking up in a no-kill shelter. No, there was only one honorable thing to do: return to Spaceship Earth and get my ass back to school. So I activated my heat shields and began reentry. I didn’t want to be late for Miss Patrick’s class and have this youthful blunder give prospective employers pause for hiring me in the years to come – “Mr. Hardiman we’d really like to hire you, but it appears you returned 3 minutes late to an algebra class in 1974. How do you account for this?” I couldn’t risk that. Besides, stern Miss Patrick would be expecting me since her class bookended the lunch period.

 

At 11:10 I lay me down on the bed and pretend to meditate (which is the same as actually meditating). By 11:11 I had put in almost a complete 1 minute of intermittent meditation and I was either enlightened or unchanged – I couldn’t tell the difference. So I cleaned up the lunch dishes and hoped the phone wouldn’t ring with Principal Dolan or more likely, his nosey secretary Mrs. DeSantis wondering why I’m not at school. I grab a Chips Ahoy! cookie as I enter earth’s atmosphere and stealthily make my way back to school, unseen by administrative patrols. At 11:20 Miss Patrick’s door is thankfully still open and I settle in to my seat at 11:21 ready to go and fully restored from my larcenous escapade. Before cracking open my algebra book I think to myself, “Damn, I am good company and I’m glad to have made my acquaintance.”  

 

So yeah, maybe this stitch in time wasn’t exactly Ferris Bueller’s day off, but it was a gratifying, time bending and swashbuckling caper. And as Miss Patrick began discussing binomial expressions, I wondered if any of the civilian students could sense that my buckle had been recently swashed. As things stood, there’d be no post-prandial regret from this erstwhile extra-terrestrial, non-civilian pupil. As the teachers’ would say to each other about my behavior, “I think we better keep an eye on that pupil.” 

 

 

The Punny Bonus

 

Because I dined at home and didn’t have to pay for a cafeteria lunch, I fulfilled another goal of mine – to Buy No Meal if I could avoid it. Which, if you think about it, is just a fittingly algebraic way of solving a binomial expression – also known as a “Buy No Meal” expression.   

 

 

In Praise of Those I Didn’t Get Then, But Do Now

 

Fortyish-year old math teacher Miss Patrick was a very rational and exacting math teacher (maybe that’s why she gravitated to the very rational and exacting field of numbers). So steeped in algebra, she always seemed to have a binomial expression on her face. We kids weren’t quite sure what her sexual proclivities were, but the consensus was she probably spoke heterosexuality as a second language. Our revered Miss Patrick commanded respect. You just didn’t talk out of turn in her class like you did in every other class. You didn’t even want to. She was a next level caliber educator.

 

Yes she may have been a no nonsense teacher, but on St. Patrick’s Day she let down her close-cropped hair and transformed into a kind of Impish Irishwoman. On St. Patrick’s Day, instead of the usual orderly use of the black chalkboard with white chalk, Miss Patrick would turn her back to the students and begin writing a quadratic equation on the blackboard in green chalk. The usually silent class would begin to giggle. She’d then turn slowly around and deadpan to us students, “What’s the matter, haven’t you ever seen green chalk before,” to which we’d all bust out laughing like little leprechauns.  

In 1975 at the tender and horny age of 14 I spied with my little eyes a glimpse of 2 glorious female breasts. At the time they were heaving provocatively and bathed in the pink smoky light of the Palace-a-Go-Go Lounge on James Street in my hometown of Syracuse, NY. These breasts possessed my ideal demographic – human, female, and naked. Through the eyes of a lovelorn 14 year-old, these priceless ornaments were like 2 Crown Jewels perched regally on the chest of a royal subject. I took one breathless glance at those twin charms and sighed “God Save the Queen.”

 

You may wonder what circumstances gave birth to a callow 14 year-old finding himself in a position to ogle a stripper gyrating onstage at midnight? Well the real story behind this wormhole into a forbidden dimension begins at the intersection of lust and wanderlust. Actually it began at the intersection of Wolf Street and 7^th North Street where my sister Gail had an apartment.

 

And that’s where our story truly begins. But before we pick up things at the Danforth Arms Apartments, some background is needed so you may understand my journey from being a student with plenty of homework and chores to do on a quiet Sunday evening at home, to an outlaw truant drinking in a salacious eyeful of Gypsy Rose Lee strutting her fleshy stuff across a smoky stage. I don’t want to tell the story too quickly or you won’t appreciate the journey. Now that I’m 60 I know how to pace myself in elucidating a story so you’ll better appreciate it. No longer am I an excitable 14 year-old prone to premature elucidation. Read the rest of this entry »

“Holy holiday on ice, Batman,” exclaimed 9-year old David Hardiman, upon hearing the jolliest words of the holiday season. It was 6:30 in the morning and I’d waited breathlessly in paralytic anticipation next to the radio for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably about the time it takes for a snowflake to fall lazily to earth. This unexpected Snow Day electrified my body with ripples of sheer joy, causing me to shimmy down the hallway in a funky celebratory gyration – like the way Steph Curry does after swishing a spectacular trey.

 

Ode to Joy for this Snow Day – Well at Least Owed to Somebody I Suppose

For my snow day good fortune I felt a great debt of gratitude to somebody or something. This bonus day, this meteorological windfall, this unexpected gift of the Magi was way better than frankincense, myrrh or gold. It was the pinnacle of pre-pubescent happiness. And when I think of the small world I inhabited in the early 1970’s, I’m surprised I even fit into it. But fit I did, and some experiences were tailor made for me. Case in point: a sweet and dearly unearned school “snow day” – or as we called them back in the days of the Ice Capades, a “Holiday on Ice.”

 

When those cheery words “All Syracuse public schools are closed” were broadcast over the airwaves from on high, all public school pupils were elated, and all the pupils’ pupils were dilated. This eye-opening experience allowed us to see our way clear to a sensuous morning of deep, cozy hibernation nestled in our beds, followed by a strenuous afternoon of deep, snowy celebration sledding with our friends.

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As it was, we were already knee-deep in juvenile joy because the brawny forces of nature had defeated the bureaucratic powers of mandatory school attendance. Truant officers would have to find someone else to hassle today, because when afternoon came we’d be chest deep in snow drifts – and that’s no drift. I mean, and that snow drift was huge.

 

In my little 9-year-old way I realized that when mounds of the white stuff triggered a school closing, it was a kind of “white privilege” that everyone could share in equally. Snow: the equal opportunity precipitate.

 

My early Christmas present was given me by WNDR’s “Dandy” Dan Leonard – 1260 AM on your radio dial. His unctuous radio inflections are imprinted on me like a tattoo I can’t remove. The larger point however, was that there’d be no school on this fiercely-snowing, traffic-snarling Tuesday in the arctic tundra masquerading as the city of Syracuse, NY, and I couldn’t have been any happier if Marcia Brady had asked me to a sleepover. Read the rest of this entry »