Raising your hand in class! I had actually seen other people do this in my third-grade class. I could not understand what compelled them to jump off such a cliff, but they did. Some like Lacy Scanlon jumped all the time. Lacy, clearly more deserving of existence than any other child I knew, knew everything. All that she did was perfect. I became convinced of this one recess when Stevie Bogard, my neighbor, best friend, and classmate came up with an extraordinary idea.
Until Stevie’s brilliance burst forth, we had been resigned to recess games involving spitting, making fart sounds, or just about anything we could do in the dirt. His idea would require courage, athleticism, cunning and some exhilarating aspects of which we were not quite old enough to grasp but were very exciting nonetheless.
He called his game “The Panties Report.”
Understand that this was the 50s and schoolgirls still wore flouncy dresses. The basic idea was to chase each other around, one at a time and at the key moment push or trip whoever’s turn it was and have them roll under some unsuspecting girl. With that you were able to return to the group with the “Panties Report.” The reports were almost always of white panties, color was a rarity, but on one fabulously triumphant occasion I excitedly reported back, “purple polka dots!!” It was so rare as to be unbelieved by my classmates. I was immediately tackled and piled on by every giggling boy in the group. In the dirt and spitting out dust I looked out from under the pile of classmates and across the field, there was Lacy. She was standing with her friends in a crisp clean yellow dress with a satin bow around the waist. All of them were quietly ignoring us and playing a game of hopscotch. As I looked at her from the grit and grime, I knew, as I have known ever since, that Lacy Scanlon and all her kind were of a different, more advanced sort.
Richard Kimball
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