I've been thinking a lot about something that happened to a group of us when we were in fifth grade. I went to a school that had like maybe six girls in our class and the rest were rowdy boys who acted like boys around 10 or 11 are known to act. I don't remember the names of all the boys who were in my class ... I just remember clearly the name of the one boy who no one liked -- and I do mean NO ONE.

He was a boy who was always seeming to make up stories about the world around him. IF you were talking about doing something he did it better or longer or before you even thought of doing it and it was great. He was the first person I ever heard other kids make dirty remarks about - saying he put sugar on his balls just to get the cats to lick it off. That was quite a thing for my ears to hear and quite a thing to hear kids talking about in the classroom before the teacher got there.

Anyway even the teachers in this school didn't like him. He just was hard to get along with. Now, being an adult and looking back on it, I'm sure he was being abused. As kids we had no way of knowing something like that, but I'm a little disappointed the staff of the school probably just ignored something that is so glaring to me NOW as an adult who has worked with children for so long.

Moving on ... the only other person I remember from that year really vividly is the class darling. It was this beautiful girl, the kind of girl who really stood out from the rest of us. I remember the other girls in our class had braces and buck teeth and glasses and mousy hair and all kinds of flaws, but she had perfect skin, big beautiful eyes that weren't hid by glasses, this tan that seemed to always be on her skin, golden hair, and when she raised her hand or spoke, people listened. Every boy had a crush on her. And, I'm not so sure at least one of the girls didn't have a crush on her as well.

I'm setting the scene for something that happens later. We were in gym class outside of this old brick schoolhouse where we attended classes. And we were doing relay races or something and the boy everyone hated and the girl everyone loved were on the same team. I think to "tag" her, he touched her chest or something and pushed her. This incensed the gym teacher. It angered him to the point he lifted the boy off the ground and slammed him into the school. He screamed at him. I don't remember what happened next it all seemed like to go in slow motion. I remember all of us going back inside and in the classroom all of the boys going to him, "If that were me I would have kicked him in the balls!" and "I'd never have let him lift me up off the ground and put his hands on me!" like any of them could have stopped this marine looking gym teacher who was double all our sizes from hoisting one of us up and slamming us into a wall. The classroom was a blur with everyone shouting out comments. Our teacher came back from her break and heard all of us talking and demanded to know if the gym teacher really did that to the boy. We all every single one of us said yes and recalled the story word for word as we saw it happen.

Now this was about 1982 ... people believed the schools when they said something, there wasn't everyone suing everyone else, and most of us if we got punished in school didn't say one word to our folks at home, because we'd get double punishment from them. Things were a lot different than they are now over 20 years later.

The next thing I knew was a few weeks later everyone in our class was called individually into this room where we were cross examined until we all boys and girls alike were crying and I'm not sure how many people changed their stories just to get out of that room with our teacher and these people we never ever saw before.

I know I didn't change it. I was asked did you see Mr. gym teacher pick up boy and slam him into the wall? And I was asked it again and again. I kept saying "yes." I kept saying "I saw that." But it was like they couldn't hear me. They were screaming at me, "Did you see this?! Are you sure that's what happened?"

As if this skin and bones little snot of a boy could have done something threatening to the gym teacher and that would have excused him hoisting him up and slamming him into the wall. I still remember seeing his feet dangling and hearing the thud. To this day I remember seeing the look on his face his mouth open and his eyes - that deer in the headlights look, that look that I now realize meant he was very familiar with a set up like this.

Nothing happened to the gym teacher. I guess enough kids must have changed their stories or the boy was such a nuisance in the eyes of everyone else that no one thought anything of him getting jacked up. He was just this annoying little kid who no one could stand who got slammed into a wall by a gym teacher. Who wants to make a thing out of that? He didn't have a dad. His mom was supposedly working all the time and never home. There was no one to come to his defense - if he even had the guts enough to tell his mother what the gym teacher did to him.

Nothing happened. The next week the gym teacher was there. He still teaches 20 years later in this district. I don't know what ever happened to the boy. I don't know what ever happened to the girl. I just know nothing was done to the gym teacher that we were told about or that we could ever figure happened, because he was still there and is still there.

I keep thinking the lesson we all learned from that was telling the truth did nothing. It just scared the crap out of all of us, and made us sick to our stomachs for a long time, and made some of us change our story out of terror. It made us afraid of our gym teacher, afraid of our regular teacher, afraid of these adults who were trying to figure out what happened by intimidating us into changing our stories.

I guess it taught us the harsh ways of the world, because when you have something that happens that people don't want to talk about, or that is something that people don't want to think about, society tends to ignore, avoid, or try to change the situation to fit how they view the world should be - not the reality of what is or what has unfortunately happened.

It's tough to take a stand. It's tough to get people to listen to you, or to what you have going on in your life. It's even tougher when people who didn't have a role in the story are now telling you what the story should be and what should be done to those involved or how it must have happened or why it happened.

Yep, it's something that happened in my life when I was younger, that I've been thinking about a lot lately.