Read an interesting article this week on Shine.com about research indicating high school gym class may make people so uncomfortable, it turns them off of exercising for life. Have you ever read something and instantly resonated with the conclusion, nodding your head at every sentence? That was SO me, when I read this article!

It didn’t take high school gym class to ruin it for me either – the deed was done in seventh grade. We moved from New York to Alabama and missed the start of school by two weeks. When my Dad took me to sign up for classes, I confidently selected chorus, only to be informed chorus was all full and I’d have to do girls’ PE. In Alabama, in the heat and humidity. At the time anyway, if you were in Chorus you never had to take PE. I was so jealous of my girl friends who escaped the dreaded Fate that caught me. They got to sing all these cool songs in dorky matching dresses and give concerts all over Northern Alabama, thus missing a lot of classtime. I had to dress out, get hot and sweaty and embarrassed daily and still get to the next class on time.

I also envied Carl F who fell out of his chair with appendicitis one day in fifth period English and missed six weeks of school but that’s another story…..

First of all, in Girls PE, we had hideous green shorts and white shirts which had to have your name and the school’s name embroidered by your mother. Already I’m failing because my mother couldn’t embroider and  neither could I. This was not a skill either of us had ever felt necessary to learn. After a week of demerits and much scorn heaped on me, my mother finally found a neighbor who  consented to do the needlework and saved me.

(And in eighth grade they allowed us to stamp our names on the clothes, which was still looked down upon but didn’t fetch you demerits.)

I am not physically gifted when it comes to your classic exercises such as sit ups; climbing a rope to the ceiling is enough to make me swoon…and running laps around the big field was going to kill me. I turned out to be good at the long jump, the standing broad jump, a fiasco at hurdles, fell off the balance beam regularly, couldn’t even address the pommel horse, was sure I’d break my neck doing tumbling….no good with anything to do with a ball …oh wait, except for volleyball! To everyone’s astonishment, including mine, I was amazing at volleyball. I had a killer serve. In the ninth grade, I captained the team that won the PE tournament. In those days there were no competitive intramural sports other than the ones the guys played and football, basketball, baseball and track were the total extent of the  extremely well funded athletic department. So my girls volleyball team victory wasn’t immortalized anywhere and was promptly forgotten by everyone except my teammates and me. I’ve hugged that victory to my heart EVER since. however. Not the least of the winners’ spoils was never having to run the dreaded laps again.

When we moved to high school, the buildings had just been constructed and the girls area of the gym wasn’t ready. I sat out the entire tenth grade, using gym class as an extra study hall. Except for the days the head coach and the head PE teacher would deliver semi mysterious lectures about how boys were like cars and we young ladies had to be the brakes and something about never letting them lure us into the bushes…okayyyy, still scratching my head over that one.

In the 11th grade I safely transitioned to working on the school paper and thus escaped PE, and in my senior year I stayed on the paper and became a teacher’s aide, co-wrote the senior class play and just generally did things that came a whole lot more naturally to me than any of the PE stuff ever did. I think the PE teachers were just as relieved as I was.

I do love to take long walks – I grew up in the country and we walked everywhere. I enjoy a good bicycle ride and I adore swimming laps. I was  pretty darn good at archery too. None of those things helped me one bit in junior high school.

And the sight of a green and white PE uniform can still send me screaming into the night LOL!

What kind of memories do you have from gym class days?

All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.
Moliere

(VS sez: Wow, that’s intense!)

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
William James

Dancing is my obsession. My life.
Mikhail Baryshnikov

This Sunday’s excerpt is from an SFR , out on submission now, set in the same universe as my recently published WRECK of the NEBULA DREAM. Andrianda (Andi) Markriss, a planetary representative for Loxton Galactic Trading, has been spending a lazy summer with her best friend in the highly exclusive summer compound of the planet Zulaire’s ruling nobility, networking. On a day when a number of strange  and disturbing things have already happened, Captain Tom Deverane, Sectors Special Forces, unexpectedly shows up with a troop of soldiers and demands she leave with him. Immediately.

Andi doesn’t take this very well….in fact, she refuses to go. Later in the evening, all hell has broken loose, as the captain predicted.
Trying to avoid spoilers here, after certain “events”, she and the soldiers are on the run. Coming across a deserted village, they risk a stop to search for food and a communications link…

“You don’t go alone,” Deverane said as he came to her side.

“I don’t need a guard, I know how to use this,” She waved the blaster. “And I can take care of myself. Surely checking out the com room at the shrine is more pressing than escorting me?”

 “You’re stubborn at all times, aren’t you?”

“Better believe it.”

Go to http://sixsunday.com/ to find all the other great excerpts!

We’re probably going to move later this year, so I’ve been thinking about all the stuff that sits in the garage, in bins and boxes, never unpacked from the last move. Obviously some of what’s out there has meaning to someone in the family (I HOPE!) or we wouldn’t have carted it around various times…but on the other hand, we don’t often go out there and look at anything in the boxes. And I have a feeling a few of those boxes just glide through move after move because no one takes the time to open them and figure out what’s inside.

While I was contemplating this subject, realizing I’m going to have to go through that stuff before we move this time, I thought about four of my favorite, oldest possessions. They’re not in the garage – they reside on or in my bureau and I’ve had them since I was a kid. Not much intrinsic value here, but the sentimental quotient is sky high!

The little black velvet heart pillow was a souvenir from the New York State Fair, no idea what year, somewhere around the time I was eight or nine. We loaded into our big old car and drove the forty miles in the summer heat from dairy farm country where we lived, to the fairgrounds, and spent the day there. I don’t remember much about the Fair itself, other than my insistence on buying this pillow as a gift for my mother. Hand beaded by an Iroquois lady, filled with potpourri, I was sure my mother would love it as much I did.  (Whether she enjoyed the pillow as much as I’d hoped, she never let on but she did keep it till she died.)

My Dad brought the wooden box back from Europe for me, after one of his rare business trips abroad for General  Electric. I think I must have been about ten.  I loved the way the wood inlays are patterned. Lined with red felt, the box has a tiny mirror and inside I’m still preserving one tail feather from a baby bird that we raised by hand that Spring – Cedar Waxwing was his name.

The red turtle pin was my first EVER piece of jewelry, a gift from my Aunt Barbara when I was eight. She also gave me a red leather purse – who knows where that went – but the pin started me on a long life of costume jewelry collection. I like the modern name – fashion jewelry – much better, sounds higher class somehow. If you read my blog, you know I adore jewelry, especially long earrings. But the red turtle started the whole thing – thanks, Aunt B!

The black horse, Devil, symbolizes my extensive collection of plastic animals, people and doll houses when I was a kid. He’s the last survivor, at one time ruler over all the vast herds and wow – did we have adventures! I had a very active imagination…well, I still do, obviously, since I write science fiction and paranormal romance!  I think I still have his spouse, Ivy, in a scrapbook box somewhere. She’s a souvenir from one summer at my relatives’ island home in Maine.

Yup, those four items will go with me through the next move…! Do you have any mementoes from your childhood that you’ve kept safe in a jewelry box or bureau drawer?

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

Sweet spring is your
time is my time is our
time for springtime is lovetime
and viva sweet love”
― E.E. Cummings

Break open a cherry tree and there are no flowers, but the spring breeze brings forth myriad blossoms.
Ikkyu Sojun