Schoolyard daze
Boyhood memories from 1990s smalltown Canada
When I was nine years old, there were a handful of words that’d usually break through the fog of my near-constant daydreaming and shift my attention to the outside world:
“macaroni and cheese”
“computer games”
“action figure”
There was only one word I was always tuned into though, one word that ranked high above the rest, one word that was the sweetest two-syllable combination in English:
“recess”
We had two 15-minute recesses in elementary school each day. There was a mid-morning recess and a recess just before last period.
Those recesses were good, but true recess-lovers knew that lunch recess was best.
We had 60 minutes to eat and whatever time was left became “lunch recess.”
My friend Rory O’Reilly taught me his beautiful 4-step plan to maximize lunch recess:
cram food into your sandwich-hole as fast as possible
get up and sprint to the lunch-duty teacher
wave your empty brown paper bag at her
get sent outside
No lunch-duty teacher could keep pace with two chocolate milk-guzzling nine-year-olds, so, for a solid 10 minutes, we were the only two souls on the entire schoolyard.
This was completely unsupervised play.
Time to do the most reckless things Rory could think of:
bark at “the Cat Lady”, an elderly eccentric who acted feline and often walked by our school, until she hissed back at us through the chain link fence
leap off the top of the twisty red plastic slide, 15 feet in the air, doing “the running man” all the way down and laughing into the sand below
clamber into neighboring yards to rescue errant balls and toys
Admittedly, I’ve always been a scaredy cat, so I stood by watching while Rory pulled off these shenanigans. That worked fine for him because he loved an audience.
Three other recess incidents stick out in my memory:
Guns
I was a lazy kid.
Some boys played Cops and Robbers.
When he was a kid, my dad played Cowboys and Indians.
I was too lazy to think of a catchy _________ and ________ name for the make-believe shoot-at-each-other game I played with my neighborhood friends, so I just named our game after the toy we used to play:
Guns
Here’s how we played Guns:
gather at least 4 neighborhood kids (preferably boys because girls would loudly complain after 17 seconds of Guns, give up, then make you play Barbies)
everyone gets a plastic toy pistol
frantically run around, crouch beside trees, hide behind fire hydrants, sight your weapon, and make “pew-pew” noises at each other
spend 6 minutes arguing about who shot who first and who should play dead on the grass and count to 10
Dad was a history teacher, and he knew World War 2 like I knew Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Every time he went to a conference, he’d bring back a couple toy pistols.
By age nine, we’d built up an armory in the basement.
Rory O’Reilly came to my house after school one day to play Guns. We spent a couple hours “pew-pew”-ing my neighborhood buddies, having red-faced screaming arguments, and using Rock, Paper, Scissors to decide who would play dead.
Then Rory convinced me we could play Guns at school recess.
The following morning, I stuffed a few of my choicest plastic pieces into my G.I. Joe backpack. At school, Rory discreetly spread the word that we’d be playing a totally awesome round of Guns at recess.
Everyone was welcome.
At the bell, Rory and I raced ungracefully, plastic pistols wedged in the elastic waistbands of our sweatpants, down the stairs and out into the schoolyard. Other boys joined us, trotting up with grins and gun-shaped sticks.
I explained the rules, set out the boundaries, answered questions, made teams.
Then, as I withdrew my WW2-era Luger, I heard the “toot-toot” of Ms. Albertson’s recess-duty whistle and saw her striding toward us.
She broke up the biggest and most promising game of Guns of my entire life, before I’d even had the chance to “pew-pew” a single schoolmate. Ms. Albertson confiscated my “weapons” and demanded that we “smash those sticks over your thighs.”
“No Rory, you’re not allowed to play with your hand shaped into a firearm,” Ms. Albertson warned us, “it’s the board’s new policy. ‘Zero Tolerance.’ Now run along!”
King of the Castle
The schoolyard highlight of each Canadian winter was the massive snow hill.
If you were lucky, a snowplow-man would come the night after a snowstorm and push everything up into a glittering mound.
God bless snowplow-men!
They brought more joy to my boyhood than He-Man, Disney movies, and grilled cheese sandwiches combined.
I can only hope the snowplow-man had a fine appreciation for his craft.
I imagine him pounding classic rock in his truck cab while working away, clearing off the entire pavement around the school, then exiting his vehicle for a well-deserved cigarette, looking at the white hill he created from nothing, and saying aloud in the dark to no one but himself, “Well. Ain’t that a beaut.”
Once there was a snow hill, it was King of the Castle time.
Guns required a few minutes of explanation and negotiation, but King of the Castle was the most basic game of all-time.
At recess, the first boy up the top of the hill was “king.” We’d all then ascend and battle him one-on-one, trying to throw each other into the soft snow below.
But King of the Castle had a shelf life.
It could be played for multiple recesses, until the snow hill got all churned up, the temperature dropped, and the mound froze so that it became treacherous to go up and down. When it became an icy slope, it wasn’t fun to get chucked down anymore.
Ms. Albertson learned this the hard way.
She’d broken up the coolest game of Guns ever in the fall, and now she’d set her Terminator-like sights on King of the Castle.
Ms. Albertson was our vice-principal, newly hired that school year.
She was a nice enough lady with a shock of graying-white hair she kept cut short and that familiar educator’s vigor to “make a difference” in the lives of her students.
She thought our schoolyard was too rough, and she wanted to make it safer.
Unfortunately for her, she was on yard-duty 48 hours after the snow hill had been built, so it was now a frozen mass that was concrete-hard. Only a handful of kids were playing a half-spirited game of King of the Castle on the ice bank. Rory O’Reilly and the rest of our gang had migrated to a different part of the schoolyard.
No matter: Ms. Albertson was determined to break up King of the Castle.
She struggled to the top of the frozen hill, “toot-toot”-ed her whistle at a few boys, got entangled with them, and promptly fell, breaking her leg.
We didn’t see Ms. Albertson again until the following September. When she came back, she was a much quieter and subdued vice-principal.
Mr. Tyler on the gym roof
While some kids scanned skeletal trees for robins, I knew the surest sign of spring was when Mr. Tyler, our school custodian, went up on the gym roof during recess time.
He’d be out there once a year on the completely flat surface, waiting for us to all gather round 40 feet below. Mr. Tyler didn’t have the secretary make a morning announcement on the classroom PA system or shout anything from the rooftop.
Once he was spotted, word spread quick.
We all knew what was about to happen.
Playthings of all shapes and sizes had been hibernating on the flat roof since Halloween, frozen in layers of ice and snow. Stuff had ended up there either through mistake, over-excited play, or a particularly spiteful bully who’d cruelly hucked what you were playing with up there for no real reason.
Mr. Tyler was young-ish.
He had a dirty blond mullet and was always outfitted in a Canadian tuxedo of blue jeans and blue jean jacket. He’d pick up a few choice items from the flat gym roof, shaking them at us, making sure we saw what he was holding, then take a couple slow steps towards the edge, getting us good and greased up with excitement down below.
It was a deferred Christmas featuring a slightly deranged Santa Claus.
Then it was chaos.
It all came down in one go: frisbees, half-inflated dodgeballs, tennis balls of all colors.
Whizzing at our heads.
It ended as soon as it began. Mr. Tyler unceremoniously exited the rooftop and banged shut the black metal fire escape door behind him.
Rory O’Reilly walked away with a pink metal hula hoop.
Years later, Mr. Tyler ran for town council.
My parents didn’t think he’d get elected.
I voted for him because I recognized his name from that yearly rooftop recess work.
He ended up on council and served a couple terms, so there must have been a whole whack of kids who, like me, had grown into young adulthood and had good memories of Mr. Tyler and his role in our collective schoolyard daze.