School Daze blogfest

Blogfest Participants - please skip the first two paragraphs - my story is below.

This week, I'm participating in a blogfest thrown by Roh Morgon from Musings of a Moonlight Writer. For those who don't know, a blogfest is a mixture of writing contest and party. The Host sets the contest parameters: subject, length, required attributes, and length. Participants sign up, committing to write, then everyone posts their stories on the designated date. We'll all go around to all of the blogs of the participants and.....then I don't really know what happens! This is my first one. My understanding is that a third party judges the stories and selects a winner, and they get the prize offered by the Host, our dear Roh Morgon.

So, why don't you go around and check out the other submissions, too? The theme is School Daze: a story that happens on a school campus. Even if you don't read them all, you should read Roh's. She's got a great book completed and is busily collecting rejection notices from agents/publishers who are going to be kicking themselves later. You'll be able to say, "Yeah, I read Roh back before she was famous!"



SCHOOL DAZE

I’m not a morning person. I’m cheerful in the morning, because I don’t like grumpy people and I refuse to be one, but it’s all an act, really.

I got into college on a voice scholarship, everything paid: tuition, housing, food, everything. This meant that they owned me, and all of my time. I carried 24 or 25 credit hours every semester, toured with the Chorale three months every summer, and went on two-week-long singing tours twice a year. It was busy—crazy busy—but I loved it!

The real problem, other than not being able to have any kind of regular job—hence, no money—was that Chorale practice had to be at 6:00 every morning because there was no time the rest of the day. Six o’clock in the morning. Did I make that clear? An hour before 7:00 am. To sing. And classes started at 7:00, so I couldn’t go in my jammies with messy hair. No. I had to get up at 4:45 to shower, dress, do the hair and makeup, and get to the auditorium to sing. It was hell.

My college was on the old Voorhis Campus in San Dimas, California. It was an old, beautiful place originally built as a School for Boys, with large individual houses set among fragrant orange orchards in steeply rolling hills. Each of those houses became dorms when the campus was bought by my college, all different, and all very home-like.

As an upper classman, I was finally housed in one of the smaller dorms, probably sixteen rooms, total, and bunked with only one roommate. It was heaven. But that 6:00 practice every morning was still the bane of my existence.

Every morning, every stinking morning, my alarm would go off at 4:45 and I’d grab my clock, wind up to throw it—and remember that I couldn’t have regular work, so I couldn’t buy another. Gritting my teeth, I’d carefully return it to its place, climb down off my upper bunk, and go muzzily to the shower.

My roommate was a wonderfully perceptive person, who really appreciated my generally cheerful outlook and my morning restraint. So she bought me the perfect gift at Christmas: an alarm clock encased in a thick rubber ball—designed to be thrown at the wall to turn off the buzzer in the morning! No one, ever, has given me a better, more timely gift!

So, every morning, every delightful morning, my alarm would go off at 4:45, and I’d grab my clock and fling it at the wall! We’d both laugh hilariously, and I’d go off to the shower chuckling. Except one morning….

It was a day like any other. The alarm went off. I grabbed the clock and flung it at the wall. But this day, I must have held onto it a little too long, or perhaps I twisted a bit, or I was just a little too eager, but, for whatever reason, the clock didn’t smack into the wall like usual. Instead, it zipped off into the corner and ricocheted right back at me and smacked me right in the middle of my forehead! Like Goliath, I measured my length on the ground—from the top bunk. Boink. And bounce. Uhhhhhhh….

I’m pretty sure my roommate had a heart attack, because when I came to, she was lying there on the floor next to me. I had a huge knot on the top of my head, and she already had a black-eye. To this day, neither one of us knows what happened.

That’s not the best part, though. Our neighboring dorm-mates were used to my morning routine: the alarm, the bonk, the laughter. So this morning, when they heard the alarm, the bonk, a scream, things falling, and then silence, they came rushing to our room. I believe it was their screams that brought me to consciousness. When, slack-jawed, I turned my head to look toward the door, I watched both girls—both—roll their eyes up under their eyelids and fall, face first, in a dead faint.

I missed practice that morning; I believe for the very first time. But I made all of my classes--in the company of three girls...each of whom had great, big, glorious black-eyes. Man! I loved that alarm clock!