I am still winding down from watching all that 2016 Summer Olympics footage last month. As usual the athletes were amazing. It is mind blowing when you stop to think that some of them are in training for months and years, yet their actual competition can be as brief as mere minutes or even seconds.

I could barely wait for the big event to start, but not for the reasons you might think. It was the South American venue that caught my attention. You see, when I was in the sixth grade, we spent an unbelievable amount of time studying South America. We learned about its various countries, their capitols, topography, geography, crops, weather. I thought it would never end. You name it and we had to study it. .At that point, we had not even learned about the counties in our own state of New Hampshire, yet for some reason South America loomed large in the 6th grade curriculum that year.

My friend Marjorie Wilcox and I even teamed up to make a large and impressive salt map of South America. When it was finished, we were quite proud of it and certain it would be the class winner. That is, until the fateful day we were to turn it in. We had to hand-carry the thing from Marjorie’s house to the school, which was quite a trek. To make matters worse, it was a windy morning so by the time we reached the school, we had lost a goodly portion of Brazil and, as I recall, poor Argentina had been blown off the map entirely.

To wind up our lengthy studies about South America, one evening the class put on a special program for our parents. It featured girls dressed in native costumes, a chorus singing Spanish songs and, last but not least, there was a short skit that even provided a bit of love interest to the evening. A classmate named Vito was cast as a gaucho who had ridden horseback from his home on the pampas to ask his sweetheart (yours truly) to marry him. You have to picture the scene because I was one of the tallest girls in the school and Vito, well, he hadn’t gotten to his next growth spurt yet but he did a great job playing his part. He knelt right down on one knee and gave the proposal his all. My part consisted of just one line: “Oh No! No! I could never live such a wild, wild life!” That was the beginning and end of my stage career and the conclusion of our show. When it ended, the audience members (our parents) applauded loudly, either because we did such a good job, or because they were sick and tired of our complaining about having to study South America for so long and they were glad it would be over.

Looking back, I grew to be somewhat fond of South America that year, especially Rio and its world-famous sidewalks. When the announcement came that this year’s Olympics would be held in Rio, I got excited and thought that surely we would get to see more footage of those sidewalk beauties, yet we didn’t.

But wait! In 2020, the Summer Olympics will take place in Japan, right? Well since I missed the ones in Rio, I wonder what kind of sidewalks they have in Tokyo.

Joann Duncanson is a former Peterborough resident now living in Greenland.