Them’s the breaks: Industrial arts and gym classes, London, Ontario 1964-1969
My father treated life as a series of random, unfortunate accidents. “Them’s the breaks,” he invariably intoned whenever some catastrophe would befall our little family. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”
One’s body is a graveyard for memories, a repository of good breaks, bad breaks, and break-ups galore. Cerebral memory is transitory, deficient, and deceiving. But scars and broken bones don’t lie.
All sorts of breaks have defined my life: Broken arms, broken noses, broken elbows, broken ankles, broken toes, broken teeth….and one severely broken marriage. Like my parents, who suffered multiple hernias and other assorted injuries during their lifetimes, I’ve blundered through my long years of existence like a demented junglefowl, showing little common sense or restraint.
Having absolutely no small muscle coordination hasn’t helped matters any. It was apparent from a very early age that I was endowed with about as much fine motor skill as a Triceratops.
As such, in elementary school I invariably got terrible grades from art teachers for my grotesque drawings and hideous plasticine aberrations.
Be that as it may, my mother insisted on keeping and showcasing my artistic creations, with the fruits of this poisoned labour accumulating like detritus from a vitiated sea among her hoarded prize possessions.
In 1964, at the age of 12, I moved with my family from a little town to uncharted territory, namely the “big city” of London, Ontario. London presented a radically new culture for a small-town kid. I arrived at Riverside Public School, buffeted by the maelstrom of adolescence and at a huge disadvantage in so many different ways, not the least of which being that I’d skipped a grade and was puny and uncool, an unmoored non-entity among the Grade Eight teens of Riverside, who smoked, dated, and had the various protuberances of adult existence, which they brazenly wagged and flaunted. In 1964, many of my classmate dudes still sported the Brylcreem (“a little dab’ll do ya”) greaser look, and the male dress code called for cheap extremely pointy black shoes (which tended to flake and peel), skin tight black pants, and a black shirt, with a white dickey (a sort of fake turtleneck) tucked underneath. I hectored my mother until she acquired this coveted attire, but peacocking the requisite trappings did not mean getting invited to any of the reputedly lascivious parties about which popular kids whispered and giggled.
London schools also had organized programs of physical education, i.e. gym classes, and of industrial arts, which we called shop or manual training. The genders – there were strictly two in those days – remained separated for these classes, with the (in my view extremely fortunate) girls doing home economics and the boys, shop. Now industrial arts became my worst nightmare, soon to be superseded by gym. I’d missed a whole year of shop and my small muscle challenges were such that I created the most gruesome ashtrays, end tables, and cutting boards in the shape of fish that any miserable student had ever produced in any institutional setting. And my mom kept every one of them until the day she died, prominently displayed in the living room and on bedroom shelves.
My father, for his part, purported to be something of a handy man and spent an inordinate amount of time in his basement “workshop” cobbling together various arcane home furnishings and other helpful creations, all of which were gluey and out of whack. We would hear him yelp and swear from the depths of his subterranean lair, as he sliced his fingers on the power saw, impaled himself on gigantic razor sharp nails, and hammered his thumbs black and blue. Sometimes he would enlist my assistance in these gory Stygian depths, whereupon he would get me to hold things and try to teach me to saw and drill, only to become enraged by my abject incompetence, which mirrored his own. My shop class debacle served to reinforce dad’s mortification with his male progeny.
Mercifully, industrial arts was not a mandatory part of the high school curriculum; but starting secondary education in grade nine meant moving from the humiliation of the shop frying pan into the nightmare of the physical education fire. For me, these classes were pure, unadulterated torture, especially tumbling and gymnastics. I was simply incapable of performing a somersault, let alone a back flip, or catapulting over a box horse. Even contemplating these feats filled me with a proverbial nameless dread.
My gym teachers, including a terrifying fiend known as “Madman,” had no patience with such paralysis. Contemptuous mockery and physical intimidation ruled their pedagogical waves. They used to routinely slam weaklings and ne’er-do-wells into lockers. So I quaked and quailed, spending sleepless nights before each gym class, in anticipation of absolute humiliation.
In Grade 10, I got my first big break. The fresh-faced boys of our homeroom class did gym with a group from the tech program, where the hard-bitten guys all looked about 30 years old, with whiskered countenances and rippling muscles. They drove vehicles adorned with oversized phallic fins to their daily encounter with higher learning where they were being primed for the workforce in a short couple of years. When wrestling was the gym flavour of the month, each student had a partner with whom to sweat and grunt. My counterpart, whom I secretly dubbed Gronk, was a tech guy built like a Mack truck. In our inaugural skirmish, he picked me up as if handling a wriggling crustacean and flung me to the cement-like mat, totally shattering my right elbow. In spite of the blinding pain, my eyes filled with tears of unadulterated gratitude. “Thank you! Thank you!” I stammered to disconsolate Gronk as I was led out of the gym by the school nurse. I already knew that the injury was so serious that I would never have to do tumbling and gymnastics again.
Your friend,
Robert
Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com
This story is an adapted excerpt from my book titled My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny
A Canadian musician, Andy McClelland, wrote a song based on the long version of the story:
The unhandy handyman’s lament: A song/La complainte du bricoleur malhabile – Robert McBryde
