Sherpe's Sluggers and other slackers.

[parasitegirl]

I have barely any work to do and I don't even want to do that. My thoughts return to elementary school and the other Kate.

 

In our Brownie troop graduation picture there are four girls who are not wearing the same light blue 100% Brownies t-shirt that was our uniform: Denise, who doesn't seem bothered at all that she is wearing a turtleneck and corduroys. Denise was more of a freak than the rest of us (and this is saying a lot, as I used talent show days to lip sync "Look at me I'm Sandra Dee" in a blonde wig, and to give a similar, orange hair-sprayed and dressed-up rendition to "Girls Just Want to Have Fun"). I remember Denise angry and a little unclean, but she is the most timeless and hip looking kid in the photo now. Claire, who seems downright pissed not to be wearing the same shirt, despite her cute little dress. Elena, who is wearing a very cute frock and seems to be posing .Last I heard, Elena had fled the country. She went to Italy. I heard this from her father who I used to work with. I didn't connect him to Elena for over a year despite the same last name and his prideful talk about his daughter Elena, because the Elena's dad of my childhood wasn't out-of-the-closet. I hesitated about mentioning this, but he is out now and that's certainly one of the places times takes some parents. The last Brownie without a T-shirt was Doralynn.

 

Doralynn, unlike the rest of us, was wearing a full brown and tan Brownie uniform. Doralynn sold hundreds of cookies each year and probably earned badges. Freak! I remember not liking Doralynn and being envious of this uniform, not because I aspired to be a better Brownie than I was, but because my love of costumes was pronounced at an early age and never went away. I sometimes dressed up for school on non-costume days. I know I wore a baby-blue graduation gown, apropos of nothing, to elementary school once in my 4th year.

 

Kate recalls herself to have been the anti-Doralynn, because she didn't earn a single badge, and those that she had were the ones given to her but earned by the work of other people, like Sarah's mom, who sewed her Junior Scouts vest for her. I recall the same lack of badges earned on my part, but I think Elena's mom was the seamstress involved in making my vest...because I know my mother wasn't sewing. Kate was a bad brownie, like me, and it is a wonder that we ever went to scout camp together...of which I remember nothing but a wooden-based tent and rain... I even have vague memories of having a troupe meeting where the troupe mothers addressed the fact that we were earning so few badges that we might be discredited as a troupe, I think they figured out a badge we could fudge our experiences on and get.

 

Our troupe mothers forgot to bring the keys to the Girl Scout Cabin and had to break into it. We learned, by watching, to check all windows and doors, even on the second floor...but we didn't get a badge for it.

 

In Brownies and as young boat-makers in the Dairy Carton Regatta, Kate and I were slackers...which seems to have been the norm for our group of friends. We were fairly voracious readers, and our imaginations were fertile and cultivated by unstructured playtime at our houses and at after-school daycare. Goodness knows our parents worked to encourage us scholastically, but there wasn't too much stress placed on achieving goals in our early extra circular activities. It was about the journey and the social skills.

 

Kate probably got a bit of pressure from her dad, who wanted us to appreciate opera, read more classics in school, and eat all our vegetables. Her father's belief that every child should eat all her broccoli was somewhat dampened by the day I refused broccoli, was pushed into eating it by him, and promptly vomited it all back up onto my plate.

 

I think that Kate also had piano lessons, which I would ask her to pass onto me but I never progressed beyond the first few pages in her easiest piano book. She may have also played tennis.

 

But, the underachiever thread of our extracurricular activities is best seen in our softball team years.

 

Toward the end of our elementary school years our first team was formed. It was a T-ball team and I remember it to have been formed as our troupe started to crumble. T-ball is softball with training wheels and involves hitting a ball off a stationary ball-holder. It is simple. It should have been simple. We only won one game and were the worst team in the league. Our first year we were sponsored by a local tavern and our yellow shirts proclaimed us to be Tony Frank's Little Darlings we were. The daughters of feminists, the lot of us, we rankled at the idea of being anyone's little darlings. 

 

The next year was when t-ball became softball and we went from being Tony Frank's Little Darlings to The Sherpe Sluggers. Amy Sherpe's father ran a printing company, I think, and the shirts were blue with a black logo in the shape of a viking boat. I think this is also when we graduated elementary school and started middle school. It is also when we stopped being coached by well meaning mothers.

 

Our new coaches were slackers, like us. Somehow the team fell to Heather Certain's older brother, Andrew, and his friend, Nate Montgomery. The duo probably had just graduated high school, and perhaps Andrew had done something bad and gotten saddled with us as a punishment, to this day I don't know. I hope someone gave them money for putting up with us.

 

Andrew and Nate were computer geeks, but I didn't know that yet because I didn't really know what a computer geek was...despite the foray into Basic that i'd taken at one point. I knew that Andrew was not a morning person, because when I would go to Heather's home before we walked to middle school (when we would drink hot chocolate while watching a little bit of The Transformers on the Bozo Show) he would grunt at us over his cereal if he said anything. His room was full of computer parts and he was doing something with the phone lines that wasn't a voice call to learn how to pass computer game levels...like magiiiiic. Nate was also a geek, and I would later learn that he ran his own BBS, but what Nate was first and foremost to us was...a hottie. Nate studied martial arts, was bendy like hell, had dark eyes and always tanned skin due to some prim-genetic mixing. I am sure than many of us had major crushes on him. I know that I did, and that even though I know he's changed over the years, he's married to a wonderful woman and has two kids, I still get a silly grin on my face when I think about him. He was a sexy mother fucker and no-one's brother.

 

We continued to be a very bad team. We had a few strong players who deserved to be on better teams, like Sarah Sprague, the same way that Doralynn desrved better, but the rest of us were suited for other sports, solo sports, or no sports at all. Our very few victories were celebrated by cramming into their small cars, clown style, and going to Dairy Queen to chow down on flurries.

 

They didn't teach us much about softball, but they did get us addicted to Days of Our Lives. Nate went as far to bring a tv to some practices. Thanks to Andrew and Nate's guidance, Kate and I learned the back stories of the Days World. Our parents, not big fans of TV in the first place, would not have been keen on the idea that we were watching soaps, but there you go.

 

Eventually the team died, friendships grew more complex, we all took on other summer activities (summer theater and spanish camp for me) and high school was on us.

 

You know the story as well as I do. It's the story of high school and time...and college and time...and time itself. Some of the friendships grew stronger, there was shuffle and distance where no cause could be pinpointed. My ties to the old group sort of dissolved. Over time I would look over at Kate, sometimes with worry and sometimes with nostalgia, but things had changed. We'd joke, but we never were close again. I was enveloped by a new, primarily male, group of geeks and freaks and from there brought to computers, drama club, drama in general, and art. The summer before I reached high school is a topic for another time, but it was an ugly-duckling no-more, the temporary veil of shyness gone, sort of summer where everything changed between me and boys...and me and girls.

 

One of the earliest romances on in my first year of high school, that with Doug Thain, somehow brought me to on-line BBSs and early chat-lines. Doug and some friends brought me to a gathering of "Beeliners" members of a local chatline, at Vilas park. I was about to turn 15. The older boys were well into college and were drinking. I remember going over to a park bench where one guy was unpacking a six-pack of some sort and passing them out.

 

I didn't drink then, I didn't touch any alcohol until I was nearly 18, but I did loudly address the fact that this here beer passing man was none other than Nate, my coach! (AKA:  E.B)...who understandably asked my age and was a more than a little freaked out by coming face to face with a former Sherpe's Slugger. From the age of 16 on, many of my high school weekends, and college weekend trips home, and summer evenings were spent hanging out with Nate, Cappy, Craig and other older friends, including an older boyfriend or two. For summers and summers we'd end up at Craig's, or Cappy's, without any forethought, and watch movies, set off fireworks and pipe bombs, bike to get La Bamba's at 3am. In the summer sometimes we'd bike out and have beers on the Blackhawk golf course and run through the rain. Other times it was skinny dipping. Nate would be the one that I never got involved with, never even touched, but the one I cherished many an unclean thought unsullied by reality.

 

The team is a blip in the past. The glimpses I am getting of my old elementary schools friends now seem to be in keeping with my memories I had of them when we were young. Our high school years no doubt shaped us, but there is something about the early years that is hard not to romanticize as "us in a pure form that we return to" way.

 

Kate's father, for all of his broccoli forcing, opera listening, "kids today don't get enough of the classics/latin/whatever" blather did do at least one brilliant thing. He disregarded the R rating of Stand By Me and insisted on taking a group of us to see it because he felt it was the sort of coming-of-age movie we'd appreciate in time. As I write this, of course, I do. At the time we appreciated it more for River's dreaminess, the swearing. The shot of a dead man, and the leaches, haunted our nightmares. Despite Kate's father being the villain in m own personal puke-o-rama, I do appreciate it now. It would be a meta-mistake for me to write of the retrospectively simpler times and not acknowledge the kinship I feel to that film now. Duh.

 

 

 

Comments

[evilegg.livejournal.com]

A+ story telling!

[parasitegirl.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Slow day and I seem to be flooded with the past.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

Real Brownie jumpers (what do you call those in countries where jumpers are sweaters?) were very common in Carptown. I suspect there was a very effective small-town mom mafia hand-me-down system in place.

[parasitegirl.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've ever encountered a troop other than ours that went the simple t-shirt way.

When we became juniors there was some sewing to make a simple vest...to sew badges on...aahhh...badges, I didn't need no...

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

Most of us only had sashes for juniors, which reinforces my suspicions about mom-to-mom hand-me-down action.

I liked the whole badge thing but generally the stuff I wanted to work on (electronics, actual survival skills) was at odds with what the troop wanted to work on (quick and easy crafts).