S.O.S.

Back in the dark days of the late nineteen-seventies, when I was in middle and early high school, my church had something called Youth Club. Youth Club existed before most of us in Richmond had cable television or video games or computers, and we youth had little to do save wander aimlessly about, sad and listless and unaware that we were among the last, lost generations of teens who could never post drunken photos of ourselves to our MySpace pages.

Well, thank goodness for the church and its highly-structured Wednesday evenings, or else we never would have had anything to do. Youth Club started after school let out, and consisted of choir rehearsal, then a worship service that well-meaning adults tried to make relevant to us kids by filling it with strummed acoustic guitars and songs from Godspell, all sung in a style so earnest and sunny that it has induced in me a permanent antipathy for any religious service involving folk guitar and the songs of Stephen Schwartz. Afterwards we had dinner, which usually consisted of boiled hot dogs and one of those glorious Southern church casseroles that are constructed from such unlikely bed mates as asparagus, a can of Campbell’s soup, and crushed potato chips. And then, after a cross-grade recreational period, we older kids would head off to our crafts sessions.

Ah, the crafts sessions. How I hated them. By the time it rolled around, I’d been at the church for over four hours and was ready to go home. I also disliked that the two available craft classes tended to divide up by gender; one would be a traditional, ‘girly’ craft like decoupage, where the girls would cut pictures from magazines and shellac them onto flower pots. Another semester, the ‘girly’ craft might be the construction of endless amounts of god’s eyes, using popsicle sticks and brightly-colored yarn. The boys, on the other hand, tended to gravitate toward the manlier choice. One year it was woodworking, where I managed to produce a handsome and only slightly lopsided birdhouse, and a chess board that was absolutely sunning so long as you regarded it from four feet away, squinting all the while, and ignoring the globs of wood filler and glue that I’d required to fill in the major gaps between the inlaid squares.

Another semester the boys opted for car repair. I went right along, afraid that giving in to my utter lack of interest in the combustion engine and a vague preference to be sitting with the girls making pot holders from stretchy loops might brand me as a sissy. So I suffered for three long months as the group’s leader, a deadly-dull adult church member, would point to the scale model of a car engine, remove a part, hold it up before the six of us assembled in a semi-circle, and intone, “This is a carburetor. A carburetor injects fuel with air. Air passes through the barrel of the carburetor, thusly. Gasoline meets the air stream through a small hole in the shaft of the carburetor.” For twenty minutes he’d drone on about the carburetor. Once he was certain we should have absorbed that information, he would set the plastic part on the table and move on to the next. I think the goal was that by the end of the semester, when he had gone through a theory of every part of the engine, we would be able to put it back together with a confidence born of twenty hours of his lectures, but I don’t think he actually ever got us down to the very inside of his sorry little plastic model.

Of all the crafts classes I disliked—and I disliked them all—the one that caused the most suffering was on learning Morse code. Now, I’m not even sure how Morse code qualifies as a craft; it certainly doesn’t produce anything that one’s parents can display on their mantels or refrigerators for a week before quietly losing them into the trash can where they belong. It’s not soothing or restful. But the church had someone—Mr. Dunwoody, an elderly gentleman in his late sixties or early seventies who deserved better than a half dozen boys sitting sullenly in an airless upstairs Sunday School room, staring at him with resentment because we were all too proud to admit we’d rather be with the chattering girls snipping pictures from old copies of Good Housekeeping—who was willing to teach Morse code, so Morse code it was.

Every Morse code class began the same way. “This,” Mr. Dunwoody would say, pressing the little buzzer that served as his teaching tool, “Is A.” He would let off a short beep followed immediately by a longer one. “And this,” he would add, impressed with himself, “Is B.” He’d tap out a dash followed by three dots. On he’d work through the alphabet until we’d reviewed all the letters. “Did we memorize all that?” he’d ask. We boys would look at each other, arms crossed, not saying anything. “Good. Now let’s try a simple message.” Tap, tappety-tap, tappety-tap-tap-tap, he’d pulse out at a medium speed for what seemed like hours. “Did we get that? Anyone?” Our faces would remain unmoving as he looked around the room. “Why, it was a popular Bible verse that any of you young men should know. Anyone?” Eventually he would grow frustrated with our stony faces and simply tell us what the verse had been, and then, unfazed, would tappety-tap out another.

What Mr. Dunwoody didn’t really understand is that Morse code had absolutely no relevance to any of us whatsoever. I don’t think there was a single one of us who had ever seen an actual telegram. None of us had parents old enough to remember the wars where Morse code might have played an important role. Even at that age, a young person has a good sense of when he’s being taught something that he will never, ever be asked again in his entire life to call upon, and knows that even the learning of it won’t be a good exercise. The notion that we should actually invest time in memorizing the Morse code with its seemingly random assignment of dots and dashes to individual letters, when we knew that come spring we’d never be seeing Mr. Dunwoody and his mechanical buzzer again, was absolutely ludicrous.

Then Mr. Dunwoody made the fatal mistake of bringing in buzzers for everyone.

He paired us off and sat us across the table, our little charts of code and a pad of paper at our sides. “Try some short phrases,” he suggested. My partner and I glared at each other. “Something that you can pick up easily.” I consulted my chart. Slowly and laboriously, sweat almost dripping from my juvenile brow, I managed to tap out, over the course of five minutes and with a lot of pauses, K-I-S-S-M-Y-A-S-S.

My partner sneered at me and tapped back, over as equally long a time period, B-I-T-E-M-I. Either I made a transcription error, or else his finger got a little twitchy toward the end, there. “Are we having fun?” asked Mr. Dunwoody.

“Yes,” we agreed without any sincerity whatsoever.

The next week, the buzzers were back again. I wanted to gouge my eyes out. Anything, anything would be better than having to sit there tapping out little messages of disdain to each other. Even homework. “Let’s try to up the speed a little this week,” Mr. Dunwoody suggested. “You should have that code good and memorized by now!”

Fine. He wanted the speed increased? I’d increase the speed. “Ready?” I asked my partner. He shrugged. My finger paused over the buzzer button, then began to tap out dots and dashes in rapid succession, outpacing even Mr. Dunwoody at his plodding best. Tappety-tap-bada-ba-bappedy-beep-beeepety-beepety-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP! It was all nonsense, of course, but my staccato pulses sounded more urgent than anything the Titanic sent out on the last night of its voyage. For a second my partner looked suspicious. Then he drew his mouth into an expression of outright scorn, ready to denounce me.

“Well, what are we doing here?” Mr. Dunwoody looked decidedly unimpressed as he walked over to our portion of the table.

“But Mr. Dunwoody,” I said, trying to seem innocent. “It was a popular Bible verse that everyone should recognize.”

“Yeah,” said my partner unexpectedly, swallowing the insult he’d been ready to hurl. “I got everything he tapped. Didn’t you, Mr. Dunwoody?”

Mr. Dunwoody looked startled. “Why—no. I didn’t.”

“Let me try it this time!” My partner sat up, excited for the first time since class had started the month before. His finger rapped at the buzzer excitedly, producing spurts of sound that exceeded mine in speed. The index finger of his free hand glided over the Morse code chart, as if he were idly looking up the odd letter here and there. After the better portion of a minute, he finally stopped. “Did you get it?”

By this time, other kids in the class had stopped their glum stabs at their buzzers and were watching, highly entertained. “I got it,” one of them said from the far end of the table, followed rapidly by assents from the others. “That was easy!” said one young wag.

“But I didn’t. . . .” Poor Mr. Dunwoody shook his head, looking from face to face as he tried to confirm his worst fear, that we’d outstripped him without warning. “That was too fast. I didn’t. . . .”

It was too late by then, of course. The genie had been released from the bottle. Everyone around the table began punching their buttons with random dots and dashes, all at so high a speed that it was a marvel we didn’t sound like one annoying, high-pitched buzz. Mr. Dunwoody’s head snapped from side to side, trying to take it all in. His mouth twitched in a way that Edvard Munch’s model must have, trying to get into character before posing for The Scream.

“Gee, Mr. Dunwoody,” said another of the kids in his Beaver Cleaver voice. “This is fun!”

Mr. Dunwoody took one stricken look at us, gulped, and fled the room.

My parents always said that the decoupaged flowerpots I brought home the rest of that semester were some of the ugliest things they’d ever seen.