Soup's On

There's something about the smell of hot vegetable soup, drifting up from the lunchroom on a certain kind of chilly and rainy day. It's a smell that takes me back to my old elementary school cafeteria. Good old Harris School- where years of my youth were spent trying get through life without being noticed...usually ending in abject failure.

It started in kindergarten, with my earliest recalled public humiliation being the day I fell asleep during nap-time on a section of the large, horseshoe shaped window seat. I awoke to see the rest of the class sitting on the remainder of the semi-circle- staring at me. I have a vague recollection of trying to come up with some lame excuse, like I wasn't really asleep. But I'm sure this only helped to label me as not only lazy, but a liar as well.

It was only the first of many more incidents to follow: getting called out in the cafeteria by my teacher for not finishing the so called "chipped beef", screaming out an oral report in third grade with the teacher at the back of the room continually raising her hand because I "wasn't being loud enough", having to stand up and sing a solo at a "Glee Club" rehearsal (which, by the way, God only knows why I was in Glee Club- either it must have been required, or the alternative was likely a sports activity- which held the potential for even greater humiliation),  or having to put our "fun" art project up on the wall at the front of the classroom (which in my case was a self portrait), so it could be brutally critiqued by my "colleagues".

The list goes on and on... all the way up to, and including, the very last day of sixth grade, when I broke my arm at recess. No doubt this, like all of the other infractions before it, went into the scrapbook they called "My Permanent Record"- which served as a repository for all of my failings and personality flaws that were collected during the years of my incarceration.

All these memories and more come rushing back to me as I stand in the cold air at the stairs outside of the break room and take in the smell of the vegetable soup.

God, I hate that smell.