Too Shy To Ask? Take 1

Becoming adult can be defined, in a way, as the loss of childhood shyness in asking.  Well, it seems although I am in my seventieth decade, I haven’t completely lost my childhood shyness in asking which is creating all sorts of havoc since I now need to approach the high and the mighty in business and the law asking them for help in grounding my school in good business practice and sound legal foundation. But then since I was an early teen I’ve had this push-pull about asking, that is, a push to ask and a pull away from asking, which can be well illustrated with what happened in eighth grade, for starters. 

Eighth grade held two very powerful attractions:  football and dancing.

Pete, slender, athletic and fast, teased me unmercifully on as many occasions as he could but one, on the football field, whether the field was the concrete of our public schoolyard hang-out or the grass of the near-by Leif Erickson Park.  He always outran me when he was carrying the ball, that is, when and if he could get around me.  But, way too frequently for his liking I would hit him hard with my bulk taking him to the hard concrete or the slightly softer grass. Yep, hitting hard and taking opponents to the ground was my talent.  A tempo moved my body, 1-2-3-Hike, hit, wrap, drive, down. 

There was this one time in Leif Erickson, where Pete was running with the ball and somehow I caught him, taking him down, where upon everyone piled on top of us.  As we slowly unpacked our tied-up arms, shoulders, legs and torsos, I began laughing.  I was laughing so hard I was having that much fun.  But Pete was all sorts of upset.  He got up yelling and screaming at me, the words I couldn’t hear from my laughter.  He took his helmet off, grabbed it by the face mask with two hands, brought it sharply over his head and smashed it down on my helmeted head as hard as he could.  I laughed even deeper when his hard hat broke in two and mine was hardly scratched!

Pete while being the same age and in the same grade went to a different elementary school than most of us in the group of boys I called neighborhood friends.  We went to the local parish school, Our Lady of Angels, which at grade six separated boys and girls.  The boys were taught by the Franciscan Brothers, an order of religious men.  The order ran a sleep-away summer camp, Camp Alvernia, in Centerport on Long Island, which I had been attending for a while prior to my coming to the parish school.  My parents had transferred me from St. Angela Hall after I completed fifth grade into Our Lady of Angels for the start of sixth.  When I arrived in the school yard of my new school on the first day of sixth grade, I was surprised to find several Brothers I knew from the camp, including the man who would turn out to be our eighth grade teacher.  Knowing religious men well did not mean there was a lessening of severe deference.  Indeed, one remained in awe of their piety whether they were dressed in their habit or in their tee-shirt and shorts.  And I held my eighth grade teacher in as great awe as the other religious men I knew.

The Franciscan Brothers also had one of the football powerhouses of New York City Catholic High School sports, St. Francis Prep, a school and a football program in which I wanted to be in the worst way.   On a rather bright spring eighth grade afternoon, my teacher was making the daily announcements.  I paid little attention to these messages as they almost always had nothing to do with me.  But, then my ears opened, my eyes widened, but my wit, unfortunately, left me:  I was hearing that St. Francis Prep was having football try-outs for prospective incoming freshmen, but I missed hearing the crucial day, time and place of the event!  All I needed to do to make my dreams come true was to ask this man who knew me as well as I knew him to repeat the day, the time and the place!  But, I remained silent, SILENT!!!  The day and the opportunity past into history without me!

Eighth grade was, also, the time at Gregory’s Dance Studio.  I was introduced to social dancing in the first grade at St. Angela Hall.  At the time I had no idea that dancing was a great way to be in very close contact with girls. Instead, I felt dancing was just a great way of moving the body to the rhythm of music.  For quite a while I gave no thought to there being an opposite gender, until I woke up one morning and discovered Judy O’Hare, A GIRL, and a girl with whom I’d been sharing the same class for over three years!   And then I really understood the meaning of moving the body in time.  But, by then, for whatever the school’s reason, social dancing was not part of our studies.   

I would very occasionally complain to my parents over not having opportunities to dance. These were not subtle ways of asking, just statements of complaint.   However, I suspect my constant mimicking of what I saw on American Bandstand, along with the history of complaints, propelled my mother to sign me up for lessons in social dancing at Gregory’s.   It took a long time, but I finally got to move the body in time with girls. 

At Gregory’s we were as much being taught to be socially graceful as to be technically precise.  The boys would line up shoulder to shoulder with sufficient spacing between so we didn’t crash into each other when we were moving.  The girls likewise lined up.  Each line faced the other separated by about ten feet or so. The instructor in the middle between the two lines would model a step for the boys which we would then follow for a few rounds.  Then, the instructor would model a step for the girls which they would follow for a few rounds.  Next, on cue the line of boys moved to the girls and, under instruction, the boy and the girl opposite would take the proper social dance position and again on cue execute the movements we just individually practiced with the instructor going around to each couple correcting the performance. We would be dancing for a few rounds without music, just the words of the instructor in our ears.  Then, he, and it was always a he, would put on a record and we would dance for the duration of the record, again with the instructor’s corrective words in our ears.

However, there were times during the lessons for all of us to dance without instruction or direction.  In the beginning of the dance course just prior to these free dance moments we had been instructed on how a gentleman is to request a lady’s participation.  So, when the instructor would put on a record and stand back, if a boy was interested in dancing, he would go to a girl of his choosing and ask the young lady for a dance.  Here, the girl could refuse, and some actually did.  For me, a chubby kind of a guy, unfortunately, too often the girl I asked refused, which hurt, more than I ever wanted to admit.  But then those who accepted were surprised when they saw I really knew what I was doing and led them around the floor as born to the art. 

Which brings me to our eighth grade graduation dance. Our parish along with the two neighboring ones, St. Anselm’s and St. Patrick’s, held teen dances each Friday or Saturday evenings.  So, they had the music, the sound systems, the lights and all the security.  And what they also had was the custom of the boys standing by themselves looking intently at the girls who were dancing with each other having given up waiting for the boys to come over to ask anyone of them to dance.  Well, our graduation dance had all the teen dance music, the sound system, the lights and some security-we were not at all prone to fighting the way the older boys were so there was much less need for security.  And, we boys did what the older boys did:  we stood in groups looking at the girls dancing with each other.  Finally, I got tired of standing around and boldly went to a girl I knew and asked her for a dance.  She agreed and we rocked the house.  As it turned out, and unknown to me at the time, my act of defiance of “manly custom” was credited with breaking the ice as more and more boys then began asking more and more of the girls to dance.  And the topper of the evening for me and my partner was that we came in second in the dance’s Twist contest.

But, then, there was that summer and Camp Alvernia.  I was assigned to a cabin called the Dugout which rested at the bottom of a small hill along the path to the baseball field.  In the Dugout were kids I had been with other summers, some I discovered were new freshmen at St. Frances and, to my surprise, some of them had been already placed on the junior varsity squad.  In fact, all new JV players in Camp were in my cabin. 

The head varsity football coach became a regular there.  He was getting a head-start on his JV season by holding drills in available times, usually before lunch and before dinner.  He chose his center, his quarterback, offensive line and running backs.  They learned the techniques of their positions, the play calls and what each was suppose to do when a specific play was called.  I sat at the cabin’s picnic table looking on quite envious of my bunk mates. 

The coach was with us most days of the week, and for the entire summer.  But, I never talked with him, not a syllable.  I never asked if I could join in.  I never asked for a try-out…I never asked…