Pre-Teen Pleasures

As a pre-teen, my favorite place to play was at my friend Judy's house. District changes forced us to move schools. Though we knew each other by sight, we were not yet friends.

We were standing with our mothers in the hallway of the new school on the first day of third grade. All the other kids were reacquainting themselves with friends from the previous year, but we knew no one. That was all it took for us to become best friends.

We both loved to play and make up games, so after school and on weekends, Judy and I would ride bikes and give parking tickets to passengerless cars. Several times we talked one of the young neighborhood kids into coming into Judy’s garage which we claimed was really a space ship heading for a new planet. She would pretend to be brave and then begin to cry, so with a condescending declaration we would say we didn’t want whiny, sniveling cretins on our planet and send her home. I wonder what her memories of that are, and if she had to deal with it in therapy.

Judy’s basement was a magical place with many faces and functions. For some reason, we always pretended to be men. I was Mr. Delmaro and she was Mr. Goldberg, two of our favorite elementary school teachers. As teachers, we would lecture and make up tests for our students who were, in truth, our school mates. Their names were neatly printed in our roll books, and lines of checks and circles marked attendance. Grades, likeability dependent, were carefully penned into the perfect small squares.

Our imaginations rarely faltered, and we could always come up with a new game, or a new scenario for an old game. We did watch our fair share of television between bouts of martin, cops, teachers, chemists, magicians, and turning the living room into Barbie's mansion. Saturday mornings were for watching the Million Dollar Movie with its gladiators and monsters. We relished the classics such as The Giant Behemoth, Mothra, Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and Jason and the Argonauts, but I especially loved one gladiator movie about a scheming wife who helped to kill off her husband the king so that she could live with the new king, his brother, only to learn in the 11th hour that the queen of a dead king gets buried in the tomb with her husband and his "other" servants. I clearly remember images of the slaves breaking the ceramic nodes which caused sand to fill the echoing room sealing it off from the outside. As the servants stood stoically at attention calmly awaiting their fate, the deceptive queen cried and desperately begged for help while large stones were noisily sliding into place in other parts of the pyramid sealing her fate. Little did I know at the time that I would one day teach that story to high school students; only it was about a maudlin and articulate prince whose mother didn’t get buried with her husband, but maybe should have.

Those were fun days. Later in life Judy became a special education teacher, and I only started teaching in my 50s. It was only recently that I put two and two together realizing that we had intended ourselves into teacherhood through the enthusiasm of our youth. I still like grading, and sometimes, though I hate to admit it, it is still based on likeability.

copyright 2009