Eraser Hockey, 1969

Wildwood School was a vast, underutilized building with several empty classrooms. The teachers, all of them middle-aged women, kept at best a loose rein on the students, especially the 7th and 8th graders who could sign themselves out of class for all kinds of school duties -- hall patrol service, safety patrol business, preparing for school events, etc. The most trusted among us 7th and 8th graders spent, it seems, as much time out of class as in it and I can hardly recall a teacher coming looking for us.

The empty classrooms were ideal for hiding out from class and recreations such as eraser hockey, which was played in socks (so you could "skate" across the linolium floors) with two schooldesks defining each goal. One day, in 8th Grade, I was doing hall patrol duty during what would have been math class -- I was in charge of the scheduling, so I just made sure my hall patrol times coincided exactly with math class, my least favorite subject (as opposed to Ed, who did things like try to calculate pi to several decimal points). The hall patrol desks were outside the Boys Room and (I think I'm remembering this right) Harry Temple came trotting down the hall to say I should go to room 105 -- once Mrs. Sundberg's room, but now empty. I abandoned my "post" outside the Boys Room immediately.

When I got there, there was a furious eraser hockey game going and one detail I remember is that Mel Anderson's pants were just covered in chalk dust from all the "slapshots" he was making into the goal. The game went on for at least twenty more minutes after I got there. No one ever interrupted, even though we must have been making a lot of noise. No one ever mentioned my dereliction of duty for abandoning my Hall Patrol post. No one even mentioned that all of went back to class with chalk dust all over us.