Physical Education

Sometimes a rope frightens me.

It’s not that odd and no, a lariat didn’t frighten my mother while she was pregnant with me.

When I was in junior high school, I took a class called phy ed or gym. Physical education was a class meant to provide exercise for boys who spent their off-school time doing chores like splitting wood, stacking hay bales and carrying huge cans filled with milk.

The class was held in the big gymnasium. Our school was well equipped gymnasiumally with both a big and a small gymnasium. The gym was divided in half so that the girls’ phy ed class could take place simultaneously with the boys’ class.

It was a gymnasium half-full of beautiful girls in ugly gym clothing. The planets had aligned perfectly. We loved to watch the girls pretend that we weren’t watching them. We tried to look without looking like we were looking because the girls had a guardian to protect them from rabble like us. The girl’s gym teacher growled, “What are you boys looking at?”

I guess no one had ever answered her question before—at least with so much enthusiasm and honesty. I’ve just about completed my detention hours.

We played games in phy ed. The games were supposed to make us physically educated. I’m not sure what the games were because eventually, they all degenerated into a brutal game of dodgeball. Dodgeball is a game where the object is to hit your opponent with a ball in the most embarrassing and vulnerable spots possible.

After the dodgeball game was complete, the few survivors were faced with one more daunting test before hitting the showers. The showers provided only cold water. If we wanted hot water, we went to the drinking fountain. Many a boy longed to retain the manly scent of sweat and unwashed gym clothes, but our keepers were adamant that frigid water should hit our skin. They’d check for goose bumps the size of bowling balls before letting us return to our studies.

The tribulation that we faced before freezing in the showers was the rope. The thick rope was descended from the clouds in the ceiling of the gym. Our task was to climb that dreaded rope.

I knew there was no reason for fear. A thin red mat below the rope protected me. The mat was red so that it wouldn’t show the blood. That was reassuring.

I climbed that rope with visions of chalked body outlines dancing in what passed as my brain. I hoped that I was the kind who would bounce.

I’d heard stories of inept rope climbers who had disappeared. Their parents had been told that the boys had joined the French Foreign Legion in an attempt to forget their mid-term grades.

I suspect that if any of us had fallen, our gym teacher would have saved the day. Not by any miraculous knowledge of first aid, but by those magical words that every coach and gym teacher lived by.

“Walk it off."