BUFFALO UNBOUND
by Laura Pedersen
BUFFALO UNBOUND (Fall 2010), a follow up to the award-winning BUFFALO GAL.
BUFFALO UNBOUND excerpt
School Days─A Few Flakes Short of a Snowball
For kids, autumn in Western New York revolved around foliage and Halloween. Many joyous hours were spent raking leaves into a big pile, playing in them, re-raking them, leaping into them (and this time leaving the mess for Dad) and then taking the biggest and most brilliant ones and carefully pressing them between sheets of wax paper. These in turn would become bookmarks, placemats and collages. Parents took us on rides to gaze at the trees changing color and kept telling us to look, look how beautiful it is, stop hitting her, you’re not looking. And so now we hate hearing about how beautiful the leaves are and don’t care if we ever see another one.
Due to rampant inflation, candy prices tripled during my peak sugar years, so my friends and I not only loved Halloween but we needed it to stockpile the treats that would keep us alive until Christmas. Parents were struggling to pay for heat for the house and gas for the car so when it came to such childhood necessities as Gobstoppers, Razzles, Chuckles, Bottle Caps and Bubble Yum, they were tighter than the faux forest wallpaper glued to our dining room. Thus we spent months planning our costumes and trick-or-treat route for maximum efficiency. Back then girls did not dress as street walkers because 1) high heels would slow you down 2) our parents wouldn’t have allowed it (Catholic mothers knew that whatever clothes you died in were what you’d wear throughout eternity), and most importantly 3) it was already too cold by then. No one had heard of global warming and from where we were standing wearing parkas and overshoes in October, global freezing appeared to be of much greater concern.
For me, Halloween was merely a coin toss. My natural fright wig of unruly strawberry- blond hair left only The Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz or else Cousin Itt from The Addams Family as costume possibilities. Still, I was able to tell people that I was a model, since my mother’s good friend wrote nursing textbooks and used us for the accompanying photographs. I’m the one wearing the cervical collar.
In my local public school kids were separated by ability─smart, average, stupid, turnip. Only they tarted the hierarchy up a bit by giving our first grade reading groups cutesy inspirational names such as Cheetahs, Jaguars and Blue Jays. Still unable to form words using letters, I was classified as a Dinosaur. I tried not to read too much into it but since I couldn’t read at all that really wasn’t possible, aside from a vague feeling that I’d been marked for extinction. It was not unlike the day my teacher dropped the bomb that “y” could sometimes be used as a vowel and I was so discombobulated that I couldn’t remember more than one verse to “Kum-bi-yah” during the sing-along after lunch. And that was saying a lot since the neighborhood was 80% Catholic and everyone knew at least 18 verses and a really good elementary school teacher could do the deaf version too.
But Fortuna spun her mighty wheel and the fickle finger of placement fate rewrote destiny when my 7th grade homeroom teacher slumbered through the Otis-Lennon mental ability test and we treated it as a group project. Did they wonder why everyone with the last name starting with Ob–Pr had 150 IQs while the rest of the school averaged 113? A couple kids previously heading for careers at Midas Muffler were now on the fast track and suddenly MENSA was calling.
The area in which we all seemed to fall down, teachers and students alike, was the metric system. We were supposed to discard our demented method of measurement that involved the length of some old king’s foot, Egyptian forearms, and double-stepping Romans, and replace it with a system divisible by ten, as the sensible Canadians had done years earlier. Yet to this day Americans in hospitals and doctor’s offices across the country have the magnitude of their various lumps explained not in sensible scientific terms, but in the language of fruits, nuts and vegetables. Rather than be informed that some lump has a perimeter of two or twenty centimeters, we’re told the nodule is the size of a garbanzo bean, the tumor is the size of an acorn squash and the growth is larger than a macadamia but smaller than an apricot. American universities should offer a double major of oncology and horticulture.
In a similar fashion, grammar went out the schoolhouse window, evidenced by the fact that a bestselling children’s album of the era had the pronoun-challenged title Free to be…You and Me. Other recording artists were having lay vs. lie issues, as was the case with Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” and Eric Clapton’s “Lay Down Sally,” unless these were supposed to be clever double entendres or else not-so-sly references like the drug encrypted “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Subject-verb agreement was next in the syntax firing line with The Police singing, “Everything she do just turn me on.”
But make no mistake about it, school was important! There was no safety net, trust fund, or back-up plan in my neighborhood. It was before grade inflation, student self-esteem and protein shakes. If you decided not to study one night and did poorly on just a single test it could ruin your average and your chances of getting into a good college and you’d end up as riffraff living in a decrepit bungalow on the wrong side of the tracks with mean dogs and a rusty jalopy in the front yard on the slippery slope to becoming the Town Drunk with the Village Idiot as your only friend and a 25-year G.E.D. reunion the solitary invitation on your refrigerator.
At least this was true if you weren’t a candidate for a sports scholarship and I was no more likely to win one than I was a beauty pageant. Still, I enjoyed a 4-year career on the soccer team, one distinguished more by attendance than prowess, and largely a result of the fact that our Born Again Christian coach’s philosophy was more equal opportunity than go-for-the gold. Also, he told me the real locations of the games, which is more than I can say for the neighborhood kickball hooligans.
Title IX, the 1972 law which prohibited discrimination in federally financed activities, thereby declaring equal funding and facilities for girls’ sports, hadn’t quite taken hold yet. We were just crawling out of the primordial Crisco ooze of the home economics (or domestic sciences) wing and girls’ sports had only a 7% participation rate in 1972, compared to the 50% it is today. As a result, my girls’ varsity soccer team was issued the discarded uniforms of the boys’ junior varsity soccer team. The fabric was somewhere between tent canvas and silly putty, which despite causing a few strange rashes, didn’t shrink or wrinkle, or even really bend for that matter. And not having darts or extra room for the female figure, the jerseys acted as an early version of the as yet to be invented sports bra. This fabulous prison farm look was finished off with long white tube socks that when pulled all the way up resembled go-go boots. Before it was warm enough to practice outside (basically anywhere above freezing), we had to take a bus from our high school to an elementary school and back every day after school because the coaches didn’t want us scuffing up the floor of the boys’ gym. So whenever you see a woman over forty supporting a female presidential candidate it’s not that the voter agrees with all of the nominee’s policies so much as that she played sports at a public school prior to 1980 with wads of polyester chafing her armpits.
School is expensive nowadays and kids need all sorts of stuff like iPods, laptops, cell phones and prescription drugs. Instead of book bags they need not just backpacks, but backpacks on wheels, actual luggage that makes it look as if they’re going to catch the shuttle to the airport for a week of meetings in Chicago. When I was growing up we had windup toys, Etch A Sketch and glow in the dark yo-yos, but nothing with a fun factor that was deemed worthy to drag to class. The school banned slingshots and squirt guns. And there was not yet a need for an official policy statement on automatic weapons and Tasers. You were as likely to bring your father’s shotgun to middle school as you were a can of your mother’s Tab. Not happening.
Back then if we were jonesing for something it was usually a Snickers bar or a Slurpee, and so we went to the kitchen where everything reusable was kept─basically, paper plates, tea bags and butcher string─wet a piece of bloody butcher string, tied it around the loosest tooth in our mouth and attached it to the garage door. Voila. Next day the tooth fairy came and we had a dollar. What could be easier?
