Member Retreat Racist, but True

This weekend was our fraternity's member retreat. We were supposed to drive to Bolivar, MO, to camp for the weekend. It snowed there, so the officers moved it. Also, I told them I wanted to sleep in a real bed and have fresh bluebells in my trailer. They asked me to leave their meeting.

We slept in a gymnasium owned by a church. Last year, we had a retreat with four other chapters in Stillwater, OK. We called it the Trifecta until the Missouri chapter joined; it then became the Superfecta. We slept in the main worship hall of an enormous church with no light switches. We couldn't turn off the lights. I pushed eight chairs together and wrapped a shirt around my head to make darkness. Originally it was a trash bag, but I had to be revived. That's why I tell people I've already been baptized.

Saturday morning we drove to Winslow, AR, to the farm of a member's family, to shoot guns. Winslow used to be home to the Winslow High Flying Squirrels till the district had to start busing to Greenland. The school house is still there. It looks like a stone garage.

Shooting skeet is interesting because you can never predict who is going to be good. Obviously, a few brothers are easily identified - they wear their camouflage jackets when it snows. A lot of good that pattern is doing you when trying to blend in with white. But many of the members who had guns were dark horses. I had these gunhands pegged as dorks and geeks. Guns scare me. When I was younger, there was a gun that lived under my bed. No one believed me.

The best part of the retreat happened that first night. We were an hour early to the ice rink to play broomball; it was the kid's broomball league. Instead of leaving for an hour, we settled down and eventually began cheering. We didn't know any of the kids, but we gave them and their teams names. Legs was the goalie for the Barracudas. Number Two was an eight year old who kept changing teams. Martha jean was by far the best player on the ice.

My favorite player was Brian; Brian was the best player on the Barracudas. He was our answer to Martha Jean (though he couldn't move like her). He was also hispanic. When we first started assigning names, he was Jose or Juan or Miguel. Something like that. Then I felt racist and changed it to Brian. After they finished, I approached and gave him a high five; I wanted to congratulate him on playing so well, but I couldn't. He didn't speak English.