May. 21, 2004 - 21:03 MST

THE WONDERING JEW

Assembly

Odd moments through today I began to think back to when I was in Junior High School, and how things were to my eyes and managed to jot a few thoughts about those days.

Asssembly in Junior High School was a kind of orchesrated hysteria it seemed to me.

A bunch of classes, herded by teachers going into the Auditorium, the boys barely under control and the girls busy jabbering to each other following the herd.

Emphatic teachers would insist we sit together in our classes. Then would come the scramble wherein whoever was at one end of a row decided to sit at the other end with friends, which led to a gridlock of boys and girls trying to pass each other somewhere in the middle.

The cut-up boys would be perpetrating mischief in various ways, the girls not missing a word busy doing their thing. By the time the teachers got us settled, under the threat of death by dismemberment, perhaps, quiet would ensue.

Most of the time the program seemed to be a hodge-podge of blah-blah-blah, which usually seemed to be things of interest to the teachers, not us kids.

Once in a while though there would be an assembly that held our attention to the the very end. One assembly we attended had a Yo-Yo expert who went through an amazing set of Yo-Yo tricks (This was at a time Yo-Yos were the rave). Another time there was a personable Australian of good humor who compared differences of customs, routines and language between the U.S. and more or less the rest of the English speaking world. There were things the same that had different names such as elevator/lift, I think he told us that the first floor on a building was the storey above street level rather than the first being on street level, then the same words having different meaning -- one was "homely" In our part of the world that meant an ugly girl, there it meant a sociable, polite girl.

Along with that was comparisons between flora there and here and fauna also. Those were two half-hours happily spent by us kids, it was easy to tell too, kids rapt, still, no noise, no shifting about in the crowd.

We would get bored to tears with the blah-blah-blahs and had no escape, squirm and jab each each other in the ribs or tease girls.

Unfortunately that very thing followed us into our working life when we had grown up as much as we could. These things of the devil were called meetings and took up an entire "paid" hour. Most of the time there would be little meat in the meeting to profit anyone. Sometimes they would deal on the need to increase production. We would comment to each other afterward that we could have put out a bunch of work in the hour we spent sitting in a meeting.

I am sure that some meetings in the business world actually accomplish something other than trying to brainwash any of the lower echelon. But the now and then meetings we went to were times when friends would sit together, the awake one would elbow their mate when they nodded off, it was a no-no to go to sleep in one of the darn things.

We eventually became classified as adults if only by physical age but we still remember the times of torture called Assembly . . . . . . . . . . �

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