The Revolution will not be plagiarized.
In the thirties balance-of-power thinking was still quite strong, the diplomats were all down with Balkanosis, spies with foreign hybrid names lurked in all the stations of the Ottoman rump, code messages in a dozen Slavic tongues were being tattooed on bare upper lips over which the operatives then grew mustaches, to be shaved off only by authorized crypto officers and skin then grafted over the messages by the Firms' plastic surgeons . . . their lips were palimpsests of secret flesh, scarred and unnaturally white, by which they all knew each other.
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For some reason there was a high ritual significance to getting to school 15 or 20, or better, 25 or 30 minutes before class started at 8. I have no idea why; today I better connect with myself in high school, when the goal was to roll out of bed at the very latest moment possible to still make it on time.
Anyway, at the time my best friends were Jim McCullom and Mark Pascoe and while it was still nice and fairly bright out -- September on into early October -- we'd stand in an open area. My junior high was shaped like the letter 'C' with the lower arc "the old school" fused to the upper "new school." The teacher's parking lot was in the middle, and kids took a shortcut from one building to the next by crossing between these two buildings. There was a cement handicap ramp alongside the stairs leading to the new building here and we'd hang off the bars and talk until the five minute bell rang.
Sometimes we'd wait a few minutes later, too.
At the junior high Christmas dance in seventh grade my friends herded me into the arms of my first crush - similarly corralled by her friends. As we box-stepped awkwardly around the gym floor the principal inserted his hands between us, palms together, and pushed us apart to some minimum approved distance for seventh grade dancers. I was simultaneously mortified and bursting with pride.
Curly
Hmmm, seventh grade, a time I try to forget....we had our class photos taken as individuals for the first time (we'd had group photos in el ed) and I wanted my hair to be f-r-eeeee!!! No matter how my mother tried to get me to corral it, I wanted it to blow in the wind....
On photo day I showed up with a too large blouse of my mom's, my wild hair two different lengths, and a huge grin highlighting the eighth inch gap in my front teeth. There must be a god because someone lost my whole section's photos and nobody from my homeroom ended up in the yearbook. My mother hit the roof when she saw the proofs, which resulted in my totally dweeby mom-styled 'do in my orchestra photo!
I should say that my mom was a single mom in the 60's and had gone to work leaving me to my own hair devices, and when I evaluated my look later, later, and much later, I became more mortified each time.... anonymom
Anna and I did not think very highly of our history teacher. It became a tradition that at the beginning of class on Wednesday afternoons, we would duck beneath or between the window guard bars, stick our bodies as far out of the window as we could, and see how long it took for our history teacher to call us back in and make us sit down. One Wednesday, for whatever reason, she never did so, and we leaned our torsos out the window and chatted for the full 45-minute period.
Okay. I've waited long enough for someone else to come up with this. It's from "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon. I actually had to look this up so it may be time for me to read Pynchon's opus again.
Curly
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