As we sit in the bitter classrooms of senior year, wasting time on statistics and comparative essays, a question begins to ask itself of the dreary setting– “what happened to swing time?”
Years ago, time was spent well, counting lessons were interrupted by fruit snacks, playing tag, and spilling who-likes-who at least twice a day. Recess was a warm promise, like Santa Claus who interrupted the sad passage of winter, and the Tooth Fairy who interrupted the pain of a loose bone flailing and contorting in your mouth that your mom would eventually tie to a string connected to a door and then slam the door to rip out the tooth.
The undefeatable trauma of living could be polished with five bucks under your pillow as easily as childhood is forgettable. Recess was a part of the scheme to interrupt life’s ever-present blandness, and elementary schoolteachers were agents employed to teach us that we instead could all become astronauts in a basement in Hollywood. Recess was not only the best time of day, but the point of each day. When children lost recess, they lost the fictitious joy of living.
This loss of fiction is especially deafening inside our own hallways. I started to wander these halls one day and came upon another recessless soul sitting alone on a bench, Yuvrha Chandel. All the way in 11th grade, his pain from losing recess has not yet been outgrown. As we began our conversation, I could not ignore the longing look in his eyes where he recollected happy memories of playing on the monkey bars and eating morning granola snacks. When I asked him if he would want recess back, his pain surfaced as doubt. “I’m kind of already used to [not having recess],” he blinked. “But I feel like a recess wouldn’t even be bad.”
The loss of recess not only resounds in the student body, but it conflicts in the hearts of our administration. Mr Dieter, our new bubbly assistant principal, seems to be constantly bound in the energetic spirit of recess. Yet as I met with him, he relayed in a nearly apathetic attitude that his memory of recess was blackened by the “torn pants and scuffed knees” he witnessed amongst the blacktop where he played. In his casual tone, I witnessed a man dispossessed of what should have been a happy playtime instead sabotaged by America’s favorite road-filler.
Mr Dieter seemed to be in the late-stage of recess grief, a phase where he could not even allot himself a blink to contemplate the loss. Life now approaches as rapidly as a driver may into the side of a highway tunnel. We all face the reality of a future which can no longer be pacified by the cushion of recess. The end of recess meant more than a schedule change, it revealed that we may not land on the moon one day and our broken bones will invite six-figure invoices rather than under pillow presents.