Payton's First Fencing Seminar Began With Tag

At eight or nine I always said that if my school didn't have a pizza day I would start one. I did not start one. She started a fencing seminar.

Payton gives students the room to do it. Approximately every other Wednesday, the school explains, students take two seminar sessions as a break from the block schedule. It is the same school whose admissions page says, with Chicago bluntness, "We do not offer shadow days nor tours. We only offer one Open House date in September."

Fencing, the paper noted, is a niche sport in the city: the Chicago Public Schools system has only one official team. So the sophomores began from the beginning. Every practice began with a variation of tag. I would like every serious endeavor in my life to begin that way. Then stretching, because most members were new, then weeks of footwork before anyone got near the glorious part.

The glorious part has physics. To score in foil, the paper explained, you have to hit your opponent's target with the tip and at least 500 grams of pressure, enough to compress a button that sends a signal to a box that lights up.

I have never applied 500 grams of pressure to anything in my life with that much precision, except the snooze button.

Here is the part that got me. The seminar was entirely student-led. RedStar Fencing Club supplied the equipment, donated or used, and washed it after every use. The seminar leaders, two sophomores, transported it between the club and the school each time. Masks, jackets, foils. On public transit or otherwise, the paper does not say. It says they carried it.

A sophomore in the seminar summed up the appeal: "The cool thing is that they bring the equipment."

They bring the equipment. That is the most beautiful sentence a parent can read in a school newspaper, because it means the parent is not bringing the equipment.

The middle one, inspired, has announced he will start a lacrosse club at his school. He has the ambition. He has the timetable. He would like to know whether the minivan is free on alternate Wednesdays, and whether I can lift a bag of sticks.