| Field Day
I dreaded it every year. Field Day. It was the day, near the end of the school year, when classes would end at noon and the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grades would take to the soccer field in our shorts to compete in various athletic events, while our parents and the school’s younger grades watched from the sidelines. It was like the Olympics, but much, much more stressful.
Each student had to participate in three events, like it or not. If you didn’t, I don’t know what they would have done, probably cut your hands and feet off and left you on the side of a mountain to die of exposure. If you didn’t like sports, you were not worth the carbon and water you were made of, so you might as well just give it back to the earth. I only liked hockey, but hockey wasn’t something that field day included, it wasn’t a field sport, at least not for boys. Girls’ field hockey, where they use those sticks that look like Stella Doro Breakfast Treats, wasn’t included either, though; there were very few team events.
I’ve never been a very athletic fellow. I mean, I didn’t join Little League or Pee Wee Football or anything, though I did play floor hockey for a year or so, but that was when I was around twelve. Up until then, no sport really interested me. And the intense pressure from other kids to win and get a hit or a basket or whatever, if it could be harnessed, could be used to condense biological matter into oil so quickly it would eliminate our dependence on the Middle East.
I rarely made it to first base in softball, let alone actually scored a run (I have a similar problem now with my love life). I remember Dennis Martino, who excelled at every sport, climbing a rope to the ceiling of the gym and touching the girders, and then climbing down. Ten years old and practically a navy SEAL. I could hold the rope in my hands and sort of sway back and forth with my feet on the bottom knot, something Dennis Martino never even attempted, I might add, but the gym teacher always gave Dennis the higher grade.
Dodgeball was a bitch. I usually followed one of two plans in dodgeball. The first, and more frequent, was that I’d just get “out” right away. You’ve already figured out that I didn’t have the greatest arm, and my aim was on par with Ray Charles’, so actually participating was a futile endeavor. In our version of dodgeball, if you threw a ball and someone caught it, you were the one who was “out.” And if you caught a ball, not only was the ball thrower out, but someone from your team got to come back in. So I’d usually just loft a ball to some jock who would catch it, and I’d go sit down for a while. Or I’d let myself get hit and then go sit down. That was hazardous, though, because, thanks in part to the fact that if a kid’s ball was caught they were out, and in part to the fact that kids are sadistic, evil little hell-spawn, everyone threw the ball really, really hard. Lord help the child who was playing for the first time, having just recovered from Scoliosis, because one shot would cause far more spinal damage than the disease ever could have.
My other option, which I rarely used, was to hang near the back wall and avoid getting hit. That was dumb, because I’d sometimes end up the last person out there on the team. But our rules stated that if you threw the ball from your side and got it into the basketball hoop on the opposing team’s side, your whole team was able to return from the “out” line. So my team would be shouting at me to get a basket to set them free, or at least to get myself hit so they could stop standing by the wall and could start a new game.
“Come on, Scott, get a basket!”
“Just catch a ball and then Jason will be out to help you!”
“Let one hit you so we can start a new game!”
Their instructions were contradictory, and confusing. Sooner or later, since I never threw anything back, all the dodgeballs would end up rolling around on my side of the gym, and the other team would just be standing there, blinking, waiting for me to do something. Eventually, I’d grab a ball and hurl it up toward the opposing basket to try to free my desperate, screaming teammates, but if you think I could get a basket from the other side of the gym, then you haven’t been paying attention.
So Field Day would roll around, and the participants would be divided into two teams: purple and gold, the Sayville schools’ colors. If it had just been “take part in three events” and you win or lose, it would have been bad enough, but no: we were given points if we made first, second, or third place, which were added to a team total. So if you didn’t do well in your events, your team would suffer by not gaining precious points. Therefore, knowing my skill level and the peer pressure level, I had to choose the easiest events I could, and hope that by sheer luck or a direct miracle from Heaven, I didn’t fuck it up too badly.
These were events like the Three-Legged Race, which required a partner, of course, unless you were lucky enough to be born deformed, or the Softball Toss, in which you…well, tossed a softball into a garbage pail from a set distance. I never even considered the really hard events, like the High Jump, which Dennis Martino won every year by jumping 74 feet straight up with no assistance, or the shot put, which required one to throw a little ball that weighed more than the planet Jupiter (which may be a gaseous planet, but it’s still pretty damn hefty for a 10-year-old).
A typical year’s choices for me would be the Softball Toss, the Hop, Skip, and Jump, and maybe the Long Jump. At least these things gave me a chance. There was a chance that some inner ear infection would race through the school on field day, sparing me, but throwing off the balance of everyone else who tried the Hop, Skip, and Jump event. And that was a wussy event, I’ll admit. You had to run up to the starting line, then take a hop, do a skip, and then jump as far as you could. It was like the long jump, but with a clumsy, gay beginning. I don’t think I ever once did it correctly. It’s hard to go from a hop to a skip. They’re different entities, the two just collide with each other when you combine them. This was mostly a girls’ event, except for those guys who were afraid to try one of the more skilled athletic events, meaning me. I never won the Hop, Skip, and Jump.
I tried my hand at the Long Jump too, which as mentioned, was the same as the Hop, Skip, and Jump, only without the hopping and skipping prerequisites. It was hard to screw this one up, and I guess I never did, but I had the leg muscles of a flea, so my jumps were less than record-breaking (yes, a flea has incredible jumping legs in proportion to its body, but a hundred-pound boy with tiny flea muscles doesn’t get much “hang time”). Actually – I may have broken the record for shortest jump. I never won the Long Jump.
Then there was the Softball Toss. So easy that carnivals bait people with rigged versions of it on the midways and rake in the dough because people know that, in a fair softball toss, they simply…can’t…lose.
I’d have to stand a certain distance from the garbage pail, I don’t remember exactly how far, but it wasn’t too distant, and just underhand the ball into the pail. You got three balls. Toss ‘em – one, two, three. Then slink away while the event coordinator walked around picking the balls up off the dirt. I’ve never had very big hands, and throwing a softball at age ten was like asking a Lilliputian to toss around one of Gulliver’s testicles. I never won the Softball Toss.
I never won anything, in fact. My younger sister, who watched me “compete” from the sidelines, must have learned more from the experience than I did, because when she eventually competed in Field Day, she ended up bringing home a slew of blue ribbons, so many that, plastered all over her walls, her room began to look like it was decorated in binary code, except without the zeroes: it was all 111111111111111111111111111111111…
I mentioned that there were very few team events at Field Day, but there were two: the Tug-of-War and The Great Nut Hunt.
In the Tug-of-War, of course, everyone from both teams took up a position on their team’s side of the rope and we all dug in and got ready. The rope wasn’t the kind of rope a kid could just grab and pull, it was the thick, braided kind on which Dennis Martino climbed to the gym ceiling…more like something that would hold a battleship at dock. Sometimes, there were so many of us competing that many of us only were able to reach in and touch the rope between all the other kids. A piece of cloth or a ribbon was tied to the rope’s center, and Mr. Fitz, the gym teacher, would put his hands out over the top of the rope, palms facing each other, eight inches to either side of the ribbon. He’d yell “GO!” and we’d all start pulling, leaning backward, ruining the grass beneath us. Sometimes, the ribbon would bob back and forth a bit, but in every case, I can remember the feeling of being hauled forward, sliding along the grass, as the other team pulled us to defeat. Once the ribbon had passed Mr. Fitz’s hand, one way or the other, he would blow his whistle, and the winners would drop the rope immediately, cheering, so the losers, pulling passionately and desperately with our eyes squeezed tightly shut in a last-ditch attempt to try to regain ground, suddenly had no opposing force, and we learned a little physics lesson that involved momentum, velocity, and gravity. Einstein started his career after losing a tug-of-war, you know.
It was traumatic. The yelling, “Pull! Pull! Keep pulling!”, the groaning, the rope that you couldn’t fit your whole hand around, the feeling of powerlessness you got from hauling back with all your might as you slid along helplessly in the opposite direction toward shame. The steaks of dirt that ended up on your nice, white socks with the blue stripes at the top that you had pulled up nearly to your knees (hey, it was the ‘80s).
The last event of the day was The Great Nut Hunt. At least, that’s what I called it. We would all sit on the sidelines, waiting tensely as the teachers took big burlap bags of peanuts (still in their shells) and tossed handfuls out onto the soccer field, aaaaaalllll over the field. We were tense because we knew what was coming, and all of us peered closely as each handful flew through the air, trying to see if we could make out a black peanut. We knew that, if we found one of the four black peanuts scattered amongst the thousands of other, useless peanuts in the field, our team would get twenty points…or maybe it was a hundred points. Either way, it was the most points you could get for any event. Finding one of those black beauties could put your team over the top – it could be a Cinderella story if you found all four, your team down by dozens of points, coming back to win the day. Even I was excited, because I knew that at least in this event, I was as randomly equal as someone like Dennis Martino. I might stumble on one of those nuts, and actually gain points for my team.
I’m totally serious when I say we would all watch the peanuts in the air, trying to see a black one to get an edge before the hunt started. It was ridiculous, you’d never be able to tell a black one in all the fast-flying shells from a hundred feet away, but we all tried. Well, I did, anyway. Sometimes I even thought I saw a black nut and would mark the spot to run to later.
Finally, after the peanut spreading was complete, after all our anxious waiting, Mr. Fitz would blow his whistle, and hundreds of us would charge onto the field. I would scan the ground furiously, like a robot, picking out nuts with my eyes, eliminating them as not black, and moving on with precision in nanoseconds. The spots I had marked as potential black-nut resting areas never were. It was like the search for the Titanic, minus the sonar equipment. And the potential for finding Leonardo DiCaprio’s bones in a peanut shell was also pretty slim…although you should never say never.
I never found a black peanut.
Had I been a smarter child, after the first year, when I knew the deal, I’d have bought a bag of peanuts ahead of time, colored one black with a marker, which was all Mr. Fitz had done anyway, taken it to Field Day, and pretended to find it right away. Once the four black nuts were tallied, everyone stopped looking for them, so if I’d turned in my faux-nut right away, within the first three real nuts, that fourth genuine blackey would never be found…and no one would ever know that I’d rigged Field Day with a counterfeit nut. But I wasn’t that smart. You could only pull that one so many times, too; finding a black peanut three consecutive years might tip people off that you were creating mock nuts.
We were supposed to clean up the field as we searched; apparently the teachers thought that we regarded in-shell peanuts like gold, and would eat our way across the grass like herd animals. But it was hot and we were sweaty, and peanuts aren’t exactly thirst quenchers. And so, somewhere in the South, a peanut farmer wept himself to sleep because all his hard-earned harvest was left on a soccer field on Long Island to wither and turn to dust.
After the points were all tallied and the other team was declared the winner, we would all get a slice of watermelon, and sit in a huge circle on the peanut-laden grass, and I would end up a target for watermelon seeds. Seedless watermelons presumably cost too much, and so, because my parents had probably voted against raising the school’s budget, I was peppered with sticky seeds.
I’ve often thought about going back to see Field Day now, as an adult. To see the kids thinking that this is such an important event, that something actually depends on whether they win a ribbon for hopping, skipping, and jumping, like I used to think. I believe this year I probably will go back to see it all happen, knowing how awful and stressful it was for me to take part in, how useless and bad it made me feel. And as I watch, I’ll feel better, I’ll feel that going back again has helped me to somehow look it in the eye and make it feel as stressed and panicked and harassed as it made me feel. I’m bringing a bag full of black peanuts.
© 2005 Scott Teel
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