The all-school picnic was Wednesday. It's basically a way to coerce the school to "unity" by cancelling classes and requiring that everyone go to Kanapolis Lake to get really sunburnt together.
I guess it's not enough for us to stand around getting sunburnt though, so they hold this all-day competition consisting of events like water balloon volleyball, egg toss, spin around and run relay races, and of course the ever-popular tug of war. Teams are divided up by dorm wings, and at the end of the day the champion team from each gender is crowned with... uh.... glory, riches, and honor? Something like that. The off-campus men and I were just there for free food though.
Some of the more gung-ho members of my classification (unmarried, i'm sure. bastards) roped the rest of us into helping out the team. Apparently the best that any off-campus team had ever done was third place overall, and this was evidently a source of shame or underdogism or something similar. The first event I pitched in on was the tug of war. I put my 6' 0", 270 lb. frame into dominating the opponents. Unfortunately, our second round was against the baseball team's wing. Keep in mind that Central doesn't have a football team, so baseball boys are the biggest boys in the school. I was probably the biggest guy on our team, but to go one on one with the baseball team's champion, I would've been calling him "Sir" in a hurry. 6' 5" and 300 lb., with a pair of those full-faced Oakleys and a scowl that would've made even Superman shiver a little. We fought valiantly, but to no avail. The entire ordeal lasted under fifteen seconds and ended up with me feeling slightly foolish for hollering my warcry.
Somehow though, through the rest of the sunburning and egg-splattering (which went particularly well for me, by the way. I became the first in school history to break the egg on the first toss when I impaled it on my middle finger in a feeble attempt at "soft hands"), we came out tied with the baseball team for first in points. The competition authority looked at our team as we pushed up our glasses and straightened our pocket protectors, looked at the other team as they shot up steroids and traded brass knuckled punches with each other, and announced that we would settle this one with the old tug o' war. Surely the team worthiest of school spirit would come out on top (read: rah rah sports team).
Our nerdiest strategists went to work straightaway and came up with what we thought would be the least shameful alternative to the general concensus, which was peeing our pants and running away. We would put up our best five on the rope, limiting the baseballahs to five and evening things up a bit. Past the top five on either team, their members tripled or quadrupled ours in size rather than just doubling us. We talked it over with their de facto team captain, and being a decent sort of guy, he agreed.
What we didn't count on was the fact that his de facto status meant his team could disagree with him. Instead of five, they put ten on the rope when the time came to pit testosterone against creatine. Being the reasonable competition authority they were though, our staff made sure to even things up. "Get ten people on that rope, or you're gonna forfeit!" wailed some member of the faculty through a megaphone from ten feet away. It's not bad enough that virtually the whole school is pulling against us. The faculty has taken sides with the big guys, too.
At this point my memory goes a bit blurry. As my scrawnier comrades grabbed the rope and hollered strategy back and forth, I felt the blood rushing to my head. My muscles flexed and tensed. What ripple is in me went down my calves. I breathed harder with every breath. I was downright pissed. As Mrs. Megaphone shouted "go!" after what seemed like an eternity of head counts and recounts, my primal side pretty well had complete hold over me. The rope moved about six inches initially -- in our direction.
I realized we actually had a chance. I dug into the sandy beach a little further, tightened my grip, and began labored steps backward. The whole team was low, making around a forty-five degree angle with the ground, and several of us fell over more than once. My whole body was into it now, employing muscles that have never seen such strenuous use before. My vision went red, and all I remember was the endless fight between excruciating progress and humiliating defeat. With our wives and the off-campus girls' screams of support spurring us on, we couldn't give up; but more so I think it was the feeling that those cocky jerks on the other end of the rope had wanted not only to beat us, but to destroy us, to castrate and sissify us that gave us strength. All the struggles of ten lifetimes against favoritism and cliques and injustice and the oppression of popularity welled up within us, giving tangible strength to our unit, an almost solid strength radiating through us and tying our bodies together in uniform motion against the enemy. This was much more than tug of war. It was a revolution. It was the men who'd chosen their wives and families over debauchery and a shot at fame, rising up against their oppressors. It was war.
I don't know how long our war lasted. It may still be going on, for its impact on others is yet unknown to me. But I do know that when the competition was finished, though I could not lift my head, much less stand up, I was laying five feet further back than when I had begun. Some members of the baseball team were livid, while others simply shook their heads in disbelief. The underdogs had done what underdogs do best. We had won.
When I finally stood up, it was time for us to leave. And I, leaning on my daughter's stroller as I walked my (red-hot smoking) wife back to the car, had to smile at the baseball team's Goliath as his big, jacked-up pickup tore out of the parking lot past us. There would be no congratulations for us the next day, no write-up in the school newspaper. But we who know what really matters in life had already won the war, before we ever even thought of a tug o' war or a school picnic. We'd won it when we met Jesus, started families, pursued our own interests rather than the cool things, been liberated from cliques and peer pressure and partying. We'd won it before we'd even met one another.
With a little help, maybe some of those baseball players will win it too.
Ack. I've been working my butt off on Hayley's car. It was leaking water out the radiator, then the water pump went kaput, so I changed those along with the drive belt and a battery cable a couple weekends ago. It was still leaking water, and i finally figured out that it was the radiator cap. Problem solved, right? Wrong. I had to replace the coolant temperature sensor, and when I did, I went all stupid torquing the new one in.
Crack really does kill. In this case, it killed my intake manifold. All you non-mechanics out there, that means I've got a lot more work to do and a lot more money invested in the bleepity-bleeping piece of bleep.
Oh well. I'm sure God's teaching me a lot through this. I mean, I actually laughed about it all on the way home from work tonight, and I find myself inexplicably happy about the challenge of my greatest mechanic task yet, even excited. Thank you, Lord, for trials such as these. Thank you more for Your guidance through them.
Yeehaw.
Just got done with:
And No, Hayley and I are NOT thinking about splitting up. Dang, people. Read the book.
