I had to write this for my humor writing class which I just started today for work. (Pretty decent aspect of the old career, eh?) And seeing as I love humiliating myself, I thought I'd share it here. Hooray!Peeing on playground equipment is not an advisable way to spend an afternoon.
This is one of the first lessons I learned in life, and one that took the longest to live down.
As an awkward 4-year-old in kindergarten, over-riding the state system to inflict Miss McClean’s 1991 class with my pinching problem, unstructured laziness, and complete inability to tie shoes, I faced social obstacles on a daily basis. One of them was recess.
It was a rule at Monsignor McHugh Catholic Elementary that once students left the cafeteria for recess, they were not allowed back in to use the bathroom—a law, no doubt, laid down by God himself. My affinity for Ssips was a problem I had proudly mastered by taking a dutiful bathroom break at the end of every lunch. Up until one fateful March day, I had made it through the potty system unscathed.
Then I discovered “extended kindergarten recess.” It was a celebration of spring, a joyous occasion for all, as we embraced our extra 30 minutes of playtime and clamored around the lawn like a pack of wild dingoes.
About five minutes in, the great Battle of the Bladder began. At first, I tried to stay strong. I played tag, which mostly consisted of crossing my legs on “base” and trying to keep a low profile. When that got to be too much, I took to the swings, with one leg tucked up underneath me for comfort. It was a quiet refuge, until Sergeant McClean called the troops to line up and take one last sadistic ride down the slide.
I panicked. The only tactic I had in my back pocket was to keep avoiding the front of the line, so I could continue to wiggle in peace. But slowly the line grew ever shorter, and more and more of my classmates—34 in all—were forming a semi-circle around the base of the slide. In a tinkle-filled haze, I found myself at the top of the slide, about to go down, and little classmate Aitza Santiago’s puffy, pink, nylon ski jacket lingering at the bottom.
That’s when the bladder platoon captain gave the signal: Full Speed Ahead, and my daily dose of juice box went streaming down the slide, hurdling towards its absorbent, pink landing pad below.
It was the urination heard round the world. Time stood still. No one spoke. Not even Miss McClean.
Then my 5-year-old classroom compatriot Matthew Tribiani said, simply, poignantly, “Erika.”
Yes, I had done it. It was a war crime and there was no escaping. I had lost the battle, and so received my punishment. It was off to the nurse and into an old school uniform circa 1975, of an entirely different pattern and color than the current design in use—the only one that fit me in stock.
My day was spent in the lonely gallows of shame. It’s a loneliness that fills the heart of someone who knows, even as a simple toddler, that this will be the butt of a joke for many, many years to come.
