(or, A Childhood Cheat Repents At Leisure)
At the age of twelve I committed my first wilfully dishonest act. I do not mean to suggest that up until that point I had been a shining example of childlike virtue and purity because this was certainly not the case – I had lied to stay out of trouble, perfected an innocent “who me?” look and learned to carefully replace my step-fathers orange jockey shorts back in the drawer after putting them on the dog for the afternoon. What I did that year, however, was deliberate premeditated fraud for personal gain – I cheated during the Canada Fitness Award testing to win the Award of Excellence.
Grade 7 was a weird year all around. We were the oldest kids at the school and we had the best teacher most of us would ever have. Mr. Reese was fun and relaxed and he somehow managed to make us fit together as a group as we never had before. The carefully established pecking order my classmates and I had been working on for six years was suddenly suspended. Further evidence that hell had frozen over was the fact that I joined every single sports team. I have never been a joiner and to my recollection at that age I did not really excel at anything other than reading. This demented joining of teams found me playing basketball and volleyball, running track and long distance and executing a diffident triple jump. My performance in these activities can only be described as consistently inconsistent – some days I drew on a sort of magnificent mania and found I could run and score with ease, other days I was floppy and actually kind of spastic.
At some point that strange year we performed the then annual rite of all Canadian children - the Canada Fitness Award testing. We trooped down to the gym day after day during “Fitness Week” to confront again the activity stations with their humiliating companion posters that specified, with nifty graphics and statistics, what was normal and what was exceptional. Marching in orderly lines in our gym strip to be timed and measured seems to me now to be the misplaced memory of some Soviet child. I remember the events in strange flash memories like after a car accident: the murderous Flexed Arm Hang that was the downfall of many a fat child, the Standing Long Jump that unintentionally prepared me for the large puddles caused by the eternally leaf-clogged Vancouver drains, the Shuttle Run performed with little home made bean bags that smelled compellingly of floor dust, hellish feeble bum-sagging attempts at Push-ups, the Endurance Run with its lap after lap of the gym dodging classmates and old Christmas decorations, the 50 Metre Dash in the rain in the playground, and that exercise that pains and eludes into adulthood - the Sit-up. And just in case fitness was not reward enough in itself there were the awards – the humiliating participation pin, the badges of bronze, silver, and gold and that holiest of holies – the AWARD OF EXCELLENCE. By Grade 7 I had at least one of each except the elusive Award of Excellence with its distinguishing extra crest on top of the ordinary circular badge that, in my memory at least, had stars and spelled out the name of the award in embroidered letters.
I was twelve, in the last gasps of childhood, in the last days of that manic age of collecting trading cards, stickers, badges and pins. As a non-joiner I had missed out on Brownies and Girl Guides. Badges representing achievement outside of those clubs were hard to come by and this one represented achievement in a universally experienced hell. I wanted to sew the whole progression from Bronze to Excellence on the sleeve of my satin roller skating jacket to demonstrate my manifest athletic prowess to the world. I wanted it very badly.
Grade 7 was my last chance and when all of the stars aligned and I took advantage. Our wonderful, trusting teacher foolishly put my classmates and me on a sort of honour system to keep each other’s scores. I practically killed myself with subterfuge and childish intrigue to get the scores I needed. When necessary I repeated events over and over. I worked so hard that in the end I felt no guilt at all - I felt my efforts alone were worthy of the award. And I reassured myself that as I was on every team it was the first and only year where it might potentially be believable that I could be “excellent” enough to actually merit the award. I cheated my ass off and was granted the Award of Excellence.
In retrospect I cannot fully explain this lapse of ethics, my parents certainly taught me better, but I learned then that whatever your parents do not manage to drum into you the universe inevitably will. The year I cheated was the year they changed the award. At the presentation ceremony in front of the whole school I was handed something that I did not recognize. My coveted Award of Excellence looked like exactly like a gold and was distinguished only by a different background colour– no more crest, no more stars, no more embroidered writing. I had my first experience of karma before I knew the word. I learned the lesson early and well and have taken it to heart. I no longer try to mess with fate because I have learned that fate messes back.
Happy Canada Day
