Tales from the Dad Side Read Online Free PDF Page A

schoolhouse, where every student regardless of age or class was in the same room. Three first graders, two second graders, one third grader, three fourth graders, and two sixth graders, eleven in all—it was a multiclass casserole. I was the oldest boy student stuck in a room with a bunch of little kids just at the time I was starting to notice the ladies. There was only one girl my age, cute as a bug and smart as a whip (back when bugs and whips mattered), and she was certainly girlfriend material,except for the overarching fact that my potential dream date and I shared a classroom with two of my sisters, who’d hang on every one of my dreamy glances in the direction of the girl in the training bra.
    Flirty glances, however, were not allowed in the one-room schoolhouse. The staff made sure of that. We had a teacher, a principal, a nurse, a janitor, and a phys ed instructor, five people all jammed inside the five-foot two-inch frame of Mrs. Hazel Lloyd, a grandmotherly sixty-year-old career teacher who’d spend a portion of the morning with each student issuing various assignments, until 11:45 A.M ., at which time she’d disappear.
    â€œLet’s go, children,” she’d announce, and we’d file into another part of the school, where she’d be wearing an apron and a ridiculous hairnet so she could personally sling state-mandated starchy lunches. Before we’d adjourn for recess in the gym, where her high heels had left a thousand black scuff marks under the basketball hoop, she’d call us around the piano and we’d sing a song that the kids of all the ages knew, which meant it was usually about a dog or a cowboy, or the dog of a cowboy. Hazel Lloyd could do everything and knew everything in the world. She was like Parade magazine’s Marilyn vos Savant, in sensible shoes.
    She was the greatest educator I’d ever had, and I was sad to leave when it was time for junior high and high school. My only constant friend at both of those schools was my pal Alan Elsasser, a powerfully built athlete who convinced me after football to go out for the wrestling squad. The workouts were exhausting, and our opponents were literally bone breakers, but the traumatic part was that as a wrestler I was suddenly back in tights. A shade over six one, I wrestled in the 118-pound division. I was the boniest kid on the team. I was Kate Moss before Kate Moss.
    One night after practice I was the last one in the shower and completely alone as I got cleaned up.
    â€œHey, Slim.” I turned to see who was quietly standing behind me and was shocked to see not a teammate or coach, but a photographer from the school newspaper who an hour earlier had taken ourofficial team photo. Why was he in the shower aiming a camera at me? I was naked!
    Click .
    â€œDon’t worry, I don’t have film in it.” He grinned. Had I been wearing pants I might have walked over and inspected the camera, but I was bottomless and didn’t feel like frisking the photographer, so I took him at his word. The next day twenty-five eight-by-ten black-and-white glossies of a very surprised skinny boy were taped to a single row of lockers near the school entrance. The entire student body was able to see my entire student body.
    Rather than confronting the kid with the camera who took the shot—he was in fact twice my size—I pretended it never happened. I never told my family about being literally caught with my pants down. Of course if that happened today, if photos of a bare-naked minor were circulated at a public school, that place would be raided faster than you could say “Geraldo Rivera.”
    I sometimes wondered whether that episode was why I had a recurring dream of arriving for class amid a wail of laughter.
    â€œWhat’s so funny?” I’d demand to be let in on the joke.
    â€œYou came to school naked, again.”
    I had that dream for at least ten years after I graduated from college.