Mary Ellen and Isha had remained friends since High School. They were known as the “Dynamic Duo” on their field hockey team. A center forward and right forward respectively. Isha would ‘feed’ the ball to Mary Ellen and she’d score. Their timing was extraordinary. They often wondered if the seasonal scoring record that they had attained had been broken yet. After 15 years of text correspondence and phone calls, the ladies decided to meet in their old hometown to have a much overdue personal get-together. As they sat outside of a pub, that they once snuck into as under-aged seniors, they reminisced about their ‘glory days’. A young lady who overheard them, introduced herself as the current High School Field Hockey captain at their alma mater. That’s when the conversation got really interesting. The young lady told the ‘duo’ that the make-up of the team had dramatically changed since, even she, had been a freshman. Two transgender persons and one identifying as a cat, were on the current roster.
Mary Ellen and Isha weren’t exactly sure how to respond until ‘the senior’ laughed out loud. Her laid-back attitude surprised them by putting them immediately at ease.
She explained that the season for this year had thankfully just ended.
“That woke stuff isn’t going to last, you know. As soon as I graduate, I’m starting my own local “girls only” league. My dad is rich, and my mom is a lawyer. All of the ‘up and coming’ female athletes have vowed not to ‘try out’ at school next year and instead play for us. The only “game” they’re interested in is field hockey.”
It’s alarming to me how many people clap like seals for all the “firsts” happening in the political realm. The first female Vice President. The first openly gay Transportation Secretary … and so on.
Our culture has become so obsessed with celebrity and its own self-satisfying ‘virtue signaling’ that we’re in BIG trouble. Americans (in their naive arrogance) have come to vote and behave according to their own ‘tastes’ and sadly, our general population doesn’t even have a clue what “good” leadership looks like. Heck, many don’t even know how our Constitutional Republic is supposed to work. Those people are far more dangerous to our country than the CCP.
The uninformed and/or the ‘superficial’ voter reminds me of people who like to play football pools but know nothing about the game. They choose teams because of the color of their uniforms or their mascots. Once in a while, they actually win the pool but that’s a rare occurrence. The people running the pool love those people because they add to the ‘pot’ and in throwing their money away ignorantly advantage those who are determined to increase their own odds of a bigger win.
We all know that ‘merit’ carries far less weight these days than superficial “feel good” attributes. Anybody who still remains ‘giddy’ over the first female Vice President is a fool. Sorry, foolish people are called “fools”.
Now that the primaries for President are on the horizon, I hear a lot of chatter. Many political junkies are wondering which candidate will say the ‘right’ words or have the best trending intersectionality.
Running the country is NOT a game people. Take my word for it, the World is far less impressed with us than we are with ourselves these days. (Wake up!) It’s not senior year and we’re not about to be watching candidates who are vying to be prom king and queen. Each candidate needs sober consideration.
As a final thought, I want to ask would the gender, race, sexuality or the charisma of your heart transplant surgeon carry as much consideration as the surgeon’s skill set and record? Would those former superficial things even matter? I dearly hope our country is worth the same pragmatic merit-based consideration in voting from each citizen as he/she would use for themselves.
Meanwhile, I’ll never understand why something as important as our political leadership became a game.
My elementary school has long been torn down and been replaced by a single level ‘efficient’ structure. Above is a photo of it as I remember it. Children’s ‘comings and goings’ were much more relaxed in the 1960s. Locking doors and other security protocols were not even imagined then. What a marvelous time to be a kid!
That three-story building held beautiful 8′ wide hardwood stairways worn with slight ‘dips’ from years of energized foot traffic. Eventually that school became a Middle School (Junior High) and I got to tread those stairways even longer.
The hill that Brayton School sat upon was my small city’s winter sliding spot. Families and kids who weren’t even enrolled there and from all over gathered to slide on that perfect slope with toboggans, jumpers, saucers and sleds, on weekends and evenings throughout our snowy winters. I imagine that area may be forever haunted by the laughter and squeals of carefree happy families.
When I close my eyes, I hear enchanted echoes from our activities inside that sturdy structure. Like being inside an old Cadillac- built to last with sturdy materials and a classical design- there was a rich audio experience that cannot be reproduced in modern schools or cars.
As sentimental as I am about the building, a specific experience also reverberates with me. It was something I did as a Junior High School student.
I’ll explain: We students moved from classroom to classroom for each subject. A bell rang to end the class giving us about three and a half minutes to find our way to our next classroom before another bell rang. If you didn’t get into the next class by the second bell, you were late and subject to detention unless you had a good excuse.
I don’t, to this day, know why but I made a decision that those three and a half minutes were mine to use as I pleased as long as I wasn’t late to class. On a warm spring day, I challenged myself to run to the trees (in the photo foreground) at the bottom of the hill and back to my second-floor classroom before the second bell. My heart pounded in anticipation and when the first bell rang, I was off! It was exhilarating and ‘dangerous’. My feet had wings! I got to the door of my class as the second bell rang and as the teacher was beginning to close the door. I slipped through that narrowing opening and made it!
I would do this several more times throughout my studentship there. Never would I be late.
Funny how I never included anyone else in my testing (challenging) of the ‘system’. A few kids caught on, but I never really brought it to anyone’s attention on purpose. The only adult who became aware of my personal ‘Olympics’ was our gym teacher. She held class at the bottom of the hill and when she saw me racing across the field one day, asked me what I was doing. Once onboard with my stunt (Why wouldn’t she be? It was great exercise.), she was a cheerleader who clapped and cheered when she’d see me coming. Of course, she must have told the other teachers. I was probably a teacher’s lounge topic a few times too. No one bothered me about it, though. I wasn’t breaking any written rule. That’s the difference between ‘good teachers’ and ‘tyrant teachers’, by the way.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more appreciative of that childhood ‘game’. It makes me proud. I believe it also explains to me that my independent, non-conformist, nature has always been there. It also suggests that pushing myself to better myself, on my own terms, was another intrinsic character trait.
I woke up this morning needing to document this in my blogging journal. I hope you enjoyed my nostalgic tale.
Since so many other online writers have blogs dedicated to their writings, I’ve decided to jump onto the bandwagon. All posts published here will be either fiction or poetry, some new, and some previously published on various places on the Internet. Some of my works are conventional, and some are quirky. All fiction posted here, except for fan fiction, will include the letters "rose" somewhere, as a tribute to my Baba.
Sillyfrog's Blog 