Out Of Box Memory
Once I questioned if anyone read what I wrote here, now I wonder who might read it.
Once during first grade recess the teacher (sub) looked up from her needlepoint and threatened to tell my mother if I didn't stop. I was climbing the slide the only way that I was unafraid to climb it. I wasn't trying to be bad. Going straight up the ladder frightened me. Climbing up the slide itself and then turning around on top and sliding back down seemed sensible. So that's how I always did it. Except this one day T.R. wouldn't let me climb the slide the only way I knew how.
( I also used to flip my jacket on like a cape and put my arms through both sleeves at once. And I used to [still do] prefer sitting what we used to call Indian style, or half lotus than any other way. )
I wonder sometimes about things that I (we?) in the way most comfortable for me, and a way that feels innocuous, but ends up drawing more attention.
posted by rabbi neil fleischmann @ 3:25 PM
6 Comments:
I used to sit half-lotus style all the time. Eventually i stopped... maybe when i got out of shape. I miss it.
I'm sad for the little boy. What fearful things children absorb, all the time. Being a teacher and being a doctor are so dangerous. . .
thanks s & l.
I don't think it's about being in shape.
Amazing the effect teachers, doctors, and Indian Chiefs, can have. But the little boy's doing pretty good, thank G-d.
Neil, I love these "out-of-box" random ruminations. These are small glimpses that tell us a whole lot.
Keep interjecting them every now and again.
OK Pearl, here's one - "graffiti style": I was a little kid. Day camp. Walking. The counselor trips me. I scrape my knees. Big laughs from counselor and her cronies. I must have been 5. The whole way walking (limping) back the counselor told me to repeat that I would tell my parents that I fell. Did I get that? I fell. I didn't trip. I fell. Got it? I was scared, felt helpless, so I got it.
That memory comes back to me every now and again when I feel that someone who has hurt me/wronged me is trying to manipulate me to protect them. I felt that way in a social work agency when a sub par supervisor of my internship pushed me to submit an evaluation for her. I remembered to forget (just like she told me early on that we'd have to "agree to disagree.")
What's sad, Neil, about memories such as your day camp one (and believe me, I have rather similar ones, too) is that you (I hate to use the term, but it is "victim" in this case) remember this episode so clearly, and if you were to ask that camp counselor if she recalls the episode, the likelihood is not. Perhaps that is how she went through life--tripping people up, so to speak, and laughing about it afterwards.
And Neil, no matter how hard you might try to cover up that "graffiti," it always remains with you...
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