Our youngest daughter came home from school the other day with a funny story. Apparently the principal at her middle school broadcast a message to the entire school about an e-mail he had received: kids with drug-laced bags of candies were passing these around the courtyard to unsuspecting students. He warned everyone to be vigilant many times over.
The entire school was shocked and thrilled by this announcement. This is a small town, and although there have been drug-related incidents, they have generally been confined to a small but well-known minority.
Shortly after this, the principal came back on the intercom, apologizing for his previous announcement. The candy-drug story, he had since learned, had been a scam -- a prank started by someone with too much time on their hands.
My daughter and her friends are fairly savvy about drug and substance abuse. In some respects, perhaps they are savvier than the principal and his colleagues, who are forced to spend all their time doing things like managing budgets, dealing with academic issues, and going to meetings. They were rather amused by their principal's admission, but I gathered from the way they were talking that they thought he was a little foolish to fall for it.
My take on this was that he acted swiftly, if a little precipitously. And he had guts to admit that he'd been duped.
And I remembered Mr Bell.
Mr Bell was the principal of our elementary school my last year there. Some of the more physically advanced girls immediately noticed his classic good looks -- he was what could be described as a fine figure of a man with broad shoulders, an excellent physique, and wavy hair -- but I found him fussy and pompous. A church elder, he fairly oozed respectability and moral rectitude in his conservative suit and spiffily polished shoes. And he had a knack for ruining our fun.
One week, someone brought marbles to school and in very little time, we were all hooked -- even me. Those who were skilled at playing accumulated marbles from others, and although I could win prizes for my poor coordination, for some reason, I really cleaned up on marbles. Mr Bell got wind of our marble playing -- "gambling," as he called it -- and outlawed this. He outlawed comic books, too, and other fun things, like yo-yos.
One day as we were walking to class, we noted that someone had written the F-word on one of the bungalow walls in lurid red spray paint. Everybody knew the F-word, of course, and we were all mildly shocked, but by the time class started, we had forgotten about it.
I was sitting with a group of others during recess (mourning the loss of our beloved marbles), when Mr Bell discovered the most recent grafitti. Even now, I remember his almost exaggeratedly horrified reaction. The spray-painted obscenity spanned a good two feet, and Mr Bell immediately stood with his back to the offending word to cover it. Extending his arms so that he formed a perfect T, Mr Bell managed to hide the entire word. He asked one of the school monitors to go to the school office and bring back masking tape and paper.
It took the monitor a full fifteen minutes to execute this order.
For the entire fifteen minutes, Mr Bell stood with his arms outstretched, covering the offending word. We all felt like telling him that we knew the word -- that everybody knew the word -- and that his actions were useless. His arms must have ached, but he stood there until the class buzzer went. Finally the monitor came back with the tape and paper and Mr Bell carefully papered over it. School monitors were assigned to guard the abomination lest someone peeled back the paper, exposing the horror beneath.
To this day, I can picture Mr Bell with perfect clarity, standing there, arms held rigidly out, protecting our innocence. Because that is absolutely what he was doing: protecting us from what he saw as the vulgarity of the world. Sure, he was out of touch and hopelessly naive, but I have no doubt that he acted in our best interests.
Thank you, Mr Bell. I wish you hadn't taken away our marbles, but I get what you were doing now. And if it's any consolation, I've used that word very sparingly all my life.
