On Hazing

I keep coming back to this memory, this moment of my life that had been pushed back to the far recesses.  Its a big storage space, the part of my brain holding onto past knowledge on the chance that I might need it again.  This one, its about 17 years old, but it resonates with me now like never before.

I am a high school freshman...well, I'm about to be.  In August, the band members load up instruments and a duffel bag of necessities and travel south to Camp Wakonda.  We sleep in cabins in the woods...My friends and I claim Cabin 5 as ours, and we return to it for the next two years.  It is our haven, a place where we are silly and weird and have teenage girl fights.  It is where we entertain with "Inspirational Romances" (wherein I read the "dirty" parts of a Harlequin romance novel in a silly voice and we giggle about things that we don't really understand), we tease and gossip.  Outside, there is a sort of bathroom.  There is a large "trough" on a cement slab where girls brush their teeth, wash their faces, shave their legs.  At any given time there are at least 15 of us engaged in one of these activities or another.  There are stalls with toilets and showers, and Tracy and I share Herbal Essence shampoo over the divider so that our hair smells pretty when we go up to the practice field.  The field, where we spend so much time in the sun that my knee pits gets sunburned.  We play "Across the Field" and "You Can Call Me Al" and "The Star-Spangled Banner".  We come back to this field when its dark, we lay on the grass with the boys who stay in the cabins on the other side of the woods, we look at the stars and imagine that we are quite grown-up out here, so far away from our parents.

And three times a day, we line up outside the Lodge, waiting to grab a seat in the dining hall.  Each table seats eight (and no more, we learned the hard way when we were seniors and there were nine at our table, and our band director made us clean every other table after the other kids were dismissed.  We blamed it on CJ at the time, because he was goofy and an easy target, but really, I wish I had just sat somewhere else instead of feeling like I had to be at a table with Melissa, Tracy, and Mike.  It was kind of miserable).  And when you are a freshman, you are assigned a day that you have to "hop" a table.  We eat family style, so the hopper is the person who brings the food to the table, gets refills, and then cleans at the end.  Its a rite of passage, we all had to do it, and fortunately, when you are a sophomore, if the class behind you is big enough, you don't have to do it again.  At each meal, a group of senior boys gather at a different table, and their goal is to not let the hopper sit down long enough to eat.  I remember this so well, the senior boys at my table, we were eating grilled cheese and tomato soup.  I don't think I got much to eat, although I think I was able to grab a few bites.  I will never forget placing the large bowl of soup on the table, it had to have at least a gallon in it, and Tad, the big sousaphone player, lifted the bowl to his lips and sucked it down.  The WHOLE thing.  In one long, unending gulp.  All in the name of hazing, or so I thought at the time.

It wasn't horrible, not like the boys who got duct-taped to their bunk beds a few years later.  It was understood that this made you part of the group, and they did move to a different table for the next meal, so it was only one missed meal for the week, and we were privileged kids whose parents sent candy and chips and jugs of water that we were supposed to leave with the directors so we didn't get raccoons in our cabins, but no one ever did.  As far as hazing goes, it was tolerable.  But now I am a mom of three growing boys, and every meal feels like this one day at Band Camp.  I am up making another sandwich, opening another cup of yogurt, slicing another apple.  I am refilling drinks that are spilled or gulped, either way empty in seconds.  It makes me wonder how much those boys were trying to harass freshmen or if they were really that hungry.  I guess when the yelled "HOP HOP HOP" as you walked up to the counter to get more food, and only stopped when you actually jumped, and how they took it a little easier on you if you were a good sport...that part wasn't necessary.  But after marching around the field all day, then swimming in the lake during our free period, maybe they were just that hungry.  Hungry enough to drink a tureen of soup.