A Guilty Pleasure

I probably should have done something about it. But forty years later, I’m still glad I didn’t.

During class change at the middle school, I stood at my post outside my classroom door.

At best class change is three minutes of happy, noisy, jostling, when the energy and words quashed by forty-three minutes of class find release.

But class change also crams too many middle schoolers, who haven’t yet learned the rules of the road, into too small a space. Some clog the hall by looking cool as they walked three or four abreast. Others plow through, knocking people over and sending books flying. Still others trip over their own recently-grown feet.

No wonder that, at worst, class change morphs into hot words and flying fists.

On the morning I should have done something but didn’t, I happened to notice an unlikely pair at the far end of the hall—Andy, who towered over me from his nearly six feet and Eric who looked as if he had been plucked from a third-grade classroom.  Andy, the quarterback on his football team, had a temper, but, lucky for Eric, not one easily aroused. This morning Eric pestered Andy all the way down the hall—yanking a book from under his arm, kicking at his feet, elbowing him to get ahead and then blocking his way.

Eric reminded me of a sparrow harassing a hawk. My husband and I like to watch dive-bombing sparrows take on hawks, maybe eight times their size. And we love how the hawks fly steadily on, as if they haven’t noticed anything at all.

Andy seemed to be playing the hawk. But just outside the office door, he reached his limit. Dropping his books, he grabbed Eric under the arms like you’d grab a toddler. Andy lifted Eric up and stuffed him into a nearby trashcan.

It was a good fit. The out-door style can was as high as Eric’s chest. And Eric was stuck. Andy gave him a look, picked up his books, and continued down the hall.

I pulled my door shut. And started class.

“The art of being wise,” said William James, the father of American psychology, “is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

Given the chance, I’d overlook this again. Still, I remember feeling more guilty than wise.