Gin and juice

March 9, 2007 · Posted in Reflections · 5 Comments 

First let me tell you that the title has nothing to do with the post at all. I just heard Hayseed Dixie on my mp3 player with this song, it cracks me up every time!

I will try to make sense with this post but it is coming at me in snippets and it is really hard to catch them all before they fade away in that crazy memory of mine! I was thinking about school, particularly kindergarten and first grade, the two which pretty much warped me for life. I grew up in a small, very small, farming community. They had one real factory at the time and it pretty much employed most of the town, even me for two nightmarish months but were not here to talk about that!

Anyway, I still remember my first day of kindergarten. My father dropped me off that fateful day and if I remember correctly, I was none too happy to be there. I hadn’t really had a lot of playmates up to that time so I wasn’t really crazy about being in a room full of screaming idiots, not that I wasn’t screaming too. Kindergarten set me up for my first real let down too. They start you out with a half day and give you milk and cookies, plus a nap. Then, one day, you stop going. I had no idea what summer vacation was, all I knew was that I wasn’t going to that dreadful place anymore. I was sick to death of playing with blocks.

Then as summer wound down they started talking about going to school again! I mean what were they thinking. I had already done that gig I was ready to move on! So we get to first grade and all I did that first day was watch the clock. As soon as it got to noon I let out a sigh of relief as I had made it through the day. But wait, they weren’t sending us home? No, they made us go to this God awful smelling room with several tables in it and get in line, FOR LUNCH!

Now I admit that what I got at home was not gourmet cuisine, but when compared to that garbage I was ready to promote mom to the greatest cook who ever lived! They had good days and bad days, though mostly bad. I remember my favorite day was pizza day. Those little rectangular pizzas were the greatest thing I had ever tasted. Even better was the fact that half the kids didn’t like them so we could trade them the other stuff on the plate for their slice. I usually had a stomach ache by the end of the day on pizza day, but at least I was content.

Then there were the kids I went to school with. To be fair, most of them were normal, but this was a farming community so we also had more than our fair share of oddies! I mean these guys came to school on a bus. They had to get up earlier than I did and then sit on that yellow monstrosity for a horridly long time. They talked about doing chores such as slopping the hogs and gathering eggs. Now slopping the hogs I had no idea what that was, but I had went to the store with my parents many times and sometimes they let me gather the eggs from the shelf! I did have a heck of a time eating eggs for awhile after one of those dumb hicks told me where the eggs came from!

Alright, thats enough for now. I have a lot more I want to talk about on this subject but if the post gets too long then no one will read the darn thing!

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