well, gee
I'd posted some grade school stuff in my own thread, but this one is so appropriate
Thought I would jus' go ahead and clutter this thread up too
Getting past this will be a long scroll (sorry)
SCHOOL
Year One
We didn’t have kindergarten. Hell, we didn’t even have all eight grades in that one room school tucked deep in the Chapman hills.
And we didn’t have a bus, or lunchroom, or gym, or indoor plumbing.
What we did have was Mr McDunn.
Looking back, he was the best grade school teacher I’d ever have.
Field trips were field trips, thru the woods behind the school house, down to the creek, buildin’ mud dams, and makin’ wood sail boats, or we’d head up stream to the beaver dam, and when the steelhead were runnin’, before I even knew of a sea run rainbow fish that would grow to enormous proportion, he’d stand straddle legged in the stream and bail out those monsters with his hands.
Then we’d watch him cut one open, displaying the biggest fish eggs I’d ever seen.
One time, when it was snowin’ like a banshee, we took an old mop wringer and made igloos.
Yeah, we went every day, snow, ice, whatever.
And yeah, no bus, so kids appeared at school early, and while we were waiting for teacher to arrive (from his attached living quarters) we played with these little plastic red bricks that would snap onto each other….they fascinated me. We made planes, and built forts, and skyscrapers. It was like goin’ to the beach, I could never get enough.
But school, it was work books, my own pencil, my own desk.
Desks were the old wooden ones you see in old movies, the kind that hook up in a row, had the ink well, and groove to put your very own pencil, and you had a place underneath, housed in black wrought iron, to put your work books, and the seat flipped up, and so did the person’s in front of you.
That person was Francis Keller.
She was a tad messy, as her workbook place was eternally jammed with wadded up papers, and leaky pens, and broken things.
And Francis herself was a bit unkempt. But she did have a fetching look about her, and she was tough as nails.
She could beat the crap outta most kids there even though she was only in third grade.
One rather disenchanting thing I recall about her was her habit of snorting whatever was in her throat and nose and swallowing.
First I’d ever heard such a noise. Kinda like a reverse gargle…..and she ate paste.
Thinking about it years later, those unseemly habits may very well have become attributes………
One time during recess, nature called, and I headed to the outhouse.
It was a three holer, and it had a trough.
I grabbed the middle hole so I could peek thru the crack in the door for female invaders.
But Francis got the jump on me.
There she was. But she wasn’t there for business.
Next thing I know she’s flippin’ her dress up and her underwear down. Standin’t here starin’ at me.
Whoa, I immediately had a flash back of me and Connie in grampa’s tool shed, and made the brilliant deduction that Connie was not deformed, as most or all girls were missing some very vital things.
Then I took care of my back side and jumped off my perch to button up and head the hell outta there, but not quick enough to skirt Mr McDunn’s shadow.
So there we all were, Mr McDunn in his aura of teacher/god like omnipotence, Francis of who magically had put herself back in the altogether, lookin’ at me like I was satan, and me, standin’ there with my bib overalls huggin’ my ankles.
I learned a couple things that day.
1) Wimin are way ahead of any mind game you may ever venture to get conned into playing.
2) It’s because they are not distracted by all the apparatus us guys have.
So, yeah, we didn’t have all the facilities of the schools in town, but my first classes in psych and anatomy were right there in the three holer.
Over all, I learned more about social life that first year, than all the other seven grades put together.
And now, every time I go fishin’, wading a small stream, and catch the faintscent of roiled mud and creek water wafting thru my nostrils, my mind flashes back to those first golden autumn days of school.
School, The following years
The local craftsmen had united and built us a real school.
Closer to town.
Two rooms.
Indoor plumbing, one for boys and one for girls.
Newer desks.
Swings.
…and a huge field.
Mr McDunn took us out to the field to explore.
Now I’d been runnin’ thru woods all my life, so I was a tad unimpressed….until he had us kneel down and move slowly thru the weeds and thistles, identifying everything that grew or crawled.
It got so I couldn’t wait for the next discoveries.
OK, we were all a bit rowdy, but he had a presence about him that got your attention. It sorta made the teachers that followed pale in comparison….and we took advantage.
Seems every one after him ended up having some sorta nervous breakdown right in the middle of the year.
Not sure what happened to Mr McDunn, but I got drift that our folks were not impressed with his philosophy, cause he was quite direct and they were a bit protective of their little darlings.
The Year of Taboli
Mr Taboli arrived my third year, straight from the Philippines….or as he said, the ‘pillippeens’.
He wore a suit.
Reminded me of Desi Arnaz, hair all slicked into a pompadour with half a can of pomade.
And that accent. He didn’t have a chance.
‘OK turd grade, turn to page turdy eight.’
We slowly sacrificed that poor soul.
Francis had a little brother, Dicky. Remember, this was in the ‘50s. The term ‘Dick’ had yet to have a negative connotation. Fun with Dick and Jane was just that.
We called him ‘Dicky’.
The kid was just one happy little guy.
Always grinnin’ that huge grin, buck teeth spaced wide apart, gigantic mouth….but had some intellect issues.
However, happy…just glad to be included in anything we did.
Unfortunately what we did was mostly to his detriment.
Andy had this oversized gravenstein apple.
‘Hey Dicky, I bet you can’t put this whole apple in your mouth.’
Turns out he could.
It’s just that he couldn’t get it back out.
So, we’re all laughin’ our asses off, and Dicky is laughin’ and droolin’ and chokin’ some, when Mr Taboli blows the recess whistle.
We all file back inside to our desks.
Dicky’s sittin’ there with his gigantic mouth stretched to the max, buck teeth clamped on that apple, just starin’ down at page turdy eight, droolin’ all over his work book.
We’re all lookin’ straight ahead.
Then Dicky begins to get a little red and choke.
I gotta say, he held it together pretty good, not bein’ able to swallow and all, but once he commenced gagging, it was pretty much all over.
Remarkably, Mr Taboli was pretty good with a knife. He leaped over Bart’s oversized legs hangin’ in the aisle, and proceeded to perform an applectomy right there in class.
So, he was a hero…….for a few minutes.
An event that I recall was pretty much the end of Mr Taboli;
It was only a matter of weeks that his rosy outlook of teaching the children of the trees would take a turn.
The event that became the clincher to his destiny was our zip guns. Little simply made ‘guns’ from clothes pins, springs and pebbles.
Just enough zip to cause a welt.
A well placed shot destined for a girl’s hind end…unless it was Francis….she’d take it from you and feed it to our own hind end.
Well, after all the lunchtime screaming and running, Mr Taboli rounded us up and just sat at his desk for several minutes.
Then calmly gathered up our zip guns and placed them on the floor in a little pile and commenced to jump up and down on them, screaming something in a language other than English.
Then he strolled over to his desk, sat down, put his head down, and started beating the surface of it with both fists.
Fascinating.
We didn’t have school for a couple days after that.
The Wadsworth years would follow.
I bumped in to Dicky a decade or so later.
‘It’s Richard now’
The poor chap had been working in the woods.
If you are short on brains, the woods are not the place to work. It’s bad enough if yer quick and sharp.
Seems Dicky had run a chain saw up his hand, right between his fingers, up to his wrist.
They didn’t do much for him in the patchwork dept.
At first, seein’ him at a distance, I’d thought, geez, Dicky is a Trekie, showin’ me his Vulcan wave.
Wonder how they're all doin' now..............
The Wadsworth Years
Mrs Wadsworth was our teacher for a couple years…..actually 2 ½ years, as she stepped in when Mr Taboli made his infamous exit.
The white coats didn’t come to get him, but after the zip gun affair we never saw Mr Taboli again…our first conquest.
Mrs Wadsworth was different.
She was old, and done with it all, but folks gathered around her and conned her out of retirement.
Turns out she’d run a concentration camp of grades six thru eight back in Milton-Freewater for centuries.
Quite the disciplinarian, as she could still wield a bamboo rod with the deftness of a samurai.
And those high top orthopedic oxfords that housed her rheumatoid ankles were nothin’ to mess with either.
She stood about five six, and weighed in at oh say 97 lbs, but still had a presence about her.
I got her to smile a couple times, but usually she wore this sour look, like she just got fed some horse shit, of which we tried.
She had what was sometimes referred to as denture face, some real jowls, kinda looked like Deputy Dawg’s gramma….and she used it to her advantage, lookin’ down on you thru her bifocals.
Eddy P, the terror of turd grade, was putty in her gnarly hands, and even his little brother, satan of second grade, was no match.
So things were as quiet as they could be in those two years.
We all respected her, and I even admired her, and I’d like to think she got a charge outta me, as she would single me out as an example for others not to follow.
When she gave me her special attention, I’d notice her neck would commence to sorta blossom into a rather deep crimson beginning at the start of her collar and creeping up to her chin.
This aurora was gradual, and mesmerizing.
Grammar was her specialty, and diagramming sentences on the black board was what we all did, over and over…past participles and me became friends, as we both found our little special place in the parse tree of life.
But the second room in that school held my fond attention.
Miss Dickerson taught kindergarten thru second grade.
She had a dimpled smile that would melt me into deep daydreams of her and I.
I’d sit thru history class, fanaticizing about us goin’ campin’. Her lookin’ on with admiration of me building a camp fire with nothin’ but my woodsman’s prowess, and then skinny dippin’ and then, well things got sorta grey from there, so I’d be stuck on replay, filling in more details with each re-run of my boyish manliness and her absolute womanliness, then fog, then back to camping, swimming, fog….sometimes we’d just lay on the bank after skinny dippin’, all naked, basking in the sun, fixated on each other’s *******s…but there was always that darn fog…….
The Mrs Nelson half year….aka The Half Nelson
She tried to be nice.
‘You can attract more bees with honey than with vinegar.’
Killer bees
The white coats did come for her
High School (I’m still trying to forget)
Sophomore year I had a task master of an English prof.
He wanted a poem.
So I gave him a poem.
I happened to be reading a James Bond novel in class when this poem leaped to the fore.
Only it was a bit short.
So I added my own words for length and to be able to say with a semi-serious face that I’d written it.
He asked me to stay after class, and expounded on how profound the words to that poem were….right up to where Ian left off and I began, or as he said (since he’d never read that crap) ‘right up to here, then you seem to lose the gist’ his index finger pointing to the first word of my submission.
I told him I got in a hurry right there cause I didn’t want to be late for class………….
He seemed to buy it.
