Isn't it funny how a sight or a sound or a smell can suddenly bring up a memory when we least expect it?
So, I'm at the Pompidou last week, enjoying all the funky, quirky sculptures (we didn't even get to the galleries with the paintings) and having an otherwise lovely day, when I turn around and see THIS.
Oh. My. God. I'm time-traveling...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's 1975. Junior-high gymnasium. Ugly royal blue gym suit with "bloomers". Standing around with the other kids in this co-ed school, so boys are watching, too. We're doing "fitness testing".
And we are being told we have to... I can't even say it... CLIMB A ROPE 25 FEET HIGH.
Are they freaking kidding me? Someone tell me they're joking. It might as well be a mile high for all I care.
I am a short girl with zero upper body strength. Fitness testing is my annual nightmare. I am never good enough at physical things and I don't ever play sports. I am always picked last or near-last when choosing up sides. It's been this way my whole life. And I've hit puberty and grown some not-too-shabby breasts for a girl my age, I'm already being bullied by a bunch of snotty classmates, and NOW they want me to try and climb a rope in front of God and the cute boys and the snotty girls and everything.
I am in hell before I even try it. And it only gets worse. It's my turn at the rope. Is it too late to fake sick and get sent to the nurse?
Because of course, I can't do it. I only manage to climb about 2 feet higher than the gym teacher's head. She is a teacher I dislike to begin with, and as I am dangling there, stuck less than a third of the way up, I envision what it would be like to kick her in the teeth "by accident" while she is urging me to just "go a little higher!" in that slightly exasperated tone of voice that lets me know I'm hopeless.
I want to go higher, desperately want to get at least halfway up which would be at least a respectable achievement... not everyone gets all the way to the top, especially among the girls. But I just can't do it. I want to run. I want to hide. I want to cry. My face is red, not from the physical effort but from the sheer embarrassment of not being good enough, and knowing that everyone else knows, too.
I slowly slide back down the rope. Defeated again. Trying to act like it doesn't bother me. Am I fooling anyone, I wonder?
I pass gym class that year, and every year, always aware it's sort of a "mercy pass" that they kind of have to give you just for showing up and participating, even when you suck at it. Along the way I end up in the emergency room at least 3 times for the stupidest gym-class related injuries, including wrenching my neck attempting a simple backward roll on a mat, and having my nose broken when Janet Codis, a very nice but very tall girl, hits me with her elbow after she jumped to catch a basketball. I still have a lump on my nose and a deviated septum as a souvenir.
I develop other talents since sports is clearly not in the cards for me, mainly writing, music, and socializing. Those three things turn school from a nightmare to tolerable to a whole lot of fun by the time I reach my junior year. I join the marching band, the one physical thing I ever enjoyed doing because I actually have good rhythm and can tell my left from my right foot. It was the only "team" activity I ever did that I liked, and I make a lot of good friends and develop quite a nice social life for myself. I wasn't a "jock" but in our school the band wasn't for nerds, so I felt "cool" enough for the most part and was no longer being picked on by the snotty girls (we had taken to pretty much ignoring each other). Except for gym class where I still felt "less than".
In 11th grade, I dislocate both kneecaps doing -- can you believe it -- YOGA in gym class (something I was actually enjoying until I got hurt), and get exempt from gym class for 3/4 of the school year... best thing that ever happened to me and well worth the pain I had then, and sometimes since. I stayed in marching band anyway, with ugly knee braces for support, as another testament to my natural clutziness.
My senior year, in gymnastics class (another nightmare), for our "final" we have to pick one apparatus and choreograph our own routine. I figure my safest bet was to do some interpretive dance/tumbling routine on the mats because I couldn't fall off the mat and crack my head, and I was terrified of all the other apparatus in that class (again, just couldn't do it). I do NO advance preparation whatsoever, because I'm still trying to act like none of this bothers me, my complete lack of physical grace and strength, and I show up to do my routine with a recording of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds*", and manage to score a B for my totally lame performance. Once again, a "mercy pass" strikes again. And no more gym class for the rest of my life.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When I saw this rope in the museum, I was right back there all over again. Knowing I never could and never will climb that stupid, damn rope. Reliving every gym class humiliation and injury. Never feeling "good enough" to compete physically on anything.
Everyone can't be good at everything, and I suppose I could just say that sports just wasn't my gift in life. That would be putting it kindly. I do think that as a result of these adolescent traumas, I developed a real "I don't give a shit" attitude about physical activity, and I daresay that attitude has informed my ongoing resistance to working out as an adult. It is occurring to me even as I am writing this, that I can probably trace my bad self-care habits (overeating the wrong things and lack of activity) to disconnecting emotionally from my body in high school. I mean, why try and connect with something that is a source of embarrassment for you, a means of feeling badly about your self-image?
I will have to sit with this new awareness for a while. But what I CAN tell you is that after snapping this picture of the rope, I got the hell OUT of that room, and fast.
Too many ghosts. And none of them can climb a rope, either.
