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There was a fire drill during davening this morning. Conveniently it didn't happen during the Amidah (silent prayer, done standing in one place) or the Torah service (hard to move a torah mid-reading), but just before Musaf (the additional set of prayers for holidays and the like, today being the beginning of a new month). So we picked up and continued praying outside on the porch. (I grabbed my jacket on the way out, and was very glad of it: today's been chilly.) I guess that was my first sort-of sensation of what wearing a tallit katan would be like, since i put my jacket on right over my tallit, leaving pretty much just the tzitziot (fringes) showing.
But it reminded me of a school-career's worth of fire drills and the like. I remember having to leave the building single-file in elementary school and having to line up once we got outside in middle school- and in both of these having teachers warn us before our first drill of the year, and go over which route was the one we were supposed to take out of the building- something that worked poorly in middle school, since we did switch classes. I remember being shocked that we didn't have to line up in high school, just make sure that our teacher's knew we were there- but that for the first few years we stood in little class-lumps, and then the later couple of years, give or take, people would mingle and make it into a little extra social time. Somehow going from having fire alarms in one's classrooms to having them in one's dorm didn't seem like such a huge difference: it was the same drill, but which has somehow relaxed a bit over the years: I'll stop and grab my coat and purse before heading outside. I hope that's never the cause of something horrid.
It brings back the memory of something else too- not precisely fire drills, but pretty darn close: the 5 or so bomb threats my schools had in the time that I was there. Three were in middle school, within the same weak: for the third of them, people somehow knew in advance, and as the third of three, my parents actually kept me home- although I was skeptical and didn't want to have to miss a day, I think. But I specifically remember the first one of those- I was in Life Skills (aka Home Ec, but renamed to be PC), doing some sort of worksheet prior to cooking the next day, when the fire alarm went off, along with an announcement that the teacher's meeting for Friday was cancelled for that week. I didn't notice it at the time, I was busy running through the usual fire alarm drill. But later, when we were all told to go across the street to the game fields instead of waiting in the back yard of the school (that and graduation were the only times we got to go there: there was a battery dump in the corner, and the place was toxic: more so than the rest of the school which is getting relocated/rebuilt elsewhere because of the chemicals now: but it's the same middle school my father went to... Go figure)- someone smart reminded us that teachers' meetings are always on Thursdays, had always been on Thursdays for our entire school career- i.e. the message was a code. And anyways, a fire drill is a weird time to announce the cancellation of a teachers' meeting. One of the ones in High school was memorable too, since it happened just as we were beginning our science CAPT (Connecticut Academic Performance Test)- and then we got sent up to the bleachers (past the sports fields), and then up above them to the area outside the ice rink, and then home. I keep remembering walking home from that one with Ben Jonson too, although that isn't possible, he'd graduated and gone off to the University of Wisconsin to start his life of crime then. (Explanation: he at some point stole a bunch of signatures and a rare copy of Moby Dick from the Beinecke Rare Books Library at Yale, and tried to sell them on the black market- and got caught rather quickly. No one ever say that I haven't had odd friends.)
But it reminded me of a school-career's worth of fire drills and the like. I remember having to leave the building single-file in elementary school and having to line up once we got outside in middle school- and in both of these having teachers warn us before our first drill of the year, and go over which route was the one we were supposed to take out of the building- something that worked poorly in middle school, since we did switch classes. I remember being shocked that we didn't have to line up in high school, just make sure that our teacher's knew we were there- but that for the first few years we stood in little class-lumps, and then the later couple of years, give or take, people would mingle and make it into a little extra social time. Somehow going from having fire alarms in one's classrooms to having them in one's dorm didn't seem like such a huge difference: it was the same drill, but which has somehow relaxed a bit over the years: I'll stop and grab my coat and purse before heading outside. I hope that's never the cause of something horrid.
It brings back the memory of something else too- not precisely fire drills, but pretty darn close: the 5 or so bomb threats my schools had in the time that I was there. Three were in middle school, within the same weak: for the third of them, people somehow knew in advance, and as the third of three, my parents actually kept me home- although I was skeptical and didn't want to have to miss a day, I think. But I specifically remember the first one of those- I was in Life Skills (aka Home Ec, but renamed to be PC), doing some sort of worksheet prior to cooking the next day, when the fire alarm went off, along with an announcement that the teacher's meeting for Friday was cancelled for that week. I didn't notice it at the time, I was busy running through the usual fire alarm drill. But later, when we were all told to go across the street to the game fields instead of waiting in the back yard of the school (that and graduation were the only times we got to go there: there was a battery dump in the corner, and the place was toxic: more so than the rest of the school which is getting relocated/rebuilt elsewhere because of the chemicals now: but it's the same middle school my father went to... Go figure)- someone smart reminded us that teachers' meetings are always on Thursdays, had always been on Thursdays for our entire school career- i.e. the message was a code. And anyways, a fire drill is a weird time to announce the cancellation of a teachers' meeting. One of the ones in High school was memorable too, since it happened just as we were beginning our science CAPT (Connecticut Academic Performance Test)- and then we got sent up to the bleachers (past the sports fields), and then up above them to the area outside the ice rink, and then home. I keep remembering walking home from that one with Ben Jonson too, although that isn't possible, he'd graduated and gone off to the University of Wisconsin to start his life of crime then. (Explanation: he at some point stole a bunch of signatures and a rare copy of Moby Dick from the Beinecke Rare Books Library at Yale, and tried to sell them on the black market- and got caught rather quickly. No one ever say that I haven't had odd friends.)
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Life-skills wasn't just Home Ec renamed to be PC. It also involved manly pursuits such as electronics and wood-shop. :-P
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