There are something’s old men do better then young men and ruminating is one of them. You see we have refined the thought process down to an art because we have so much past material in them old gray heads to work with. Today with the spring sun high in the sky and water running in the ditches, my thoughts go back to my youth and what spring meant to me back then, or should I say-- way back then.
I remember sitting in fifth grade class in Staples School back then. There was just one school in Staples. No Elementary or Middle school or classes for the gifted or the not so gifted. We all just got along in one big building, the big kids on one end and the little ones on the other. But back to fifth grade and those spring breezes blowing in the classroom window. You would steal a trip to the pencil sharpener just so you could get a look outside and see what you were missing. All to often the teacher would walk by and rap you on the head with her pencil to snap you out of your daydreams. Yea, she could do that. If you told your dad on her he would give you another rap and it might not be with a pencil, so you kept those things to yourself.
At recess and before school we would shoot marbles on the dirt playground. Let me define playground for you. A great big empty gravel lot. Each kid had his little bag with cat eyes and crockies and the dreaded steelie’s in it. Steelie’s were easy to come by in a railroad town as they came from the roller bearings in the boxcars. The best ones came from steam engines and they were about the size of a golf ball. We would play pot where everybody anted up and put one mib, as we called them, into the pot. Then from a line about fifteen or twenty feet away you rolled your shooter and the first one in the pot or the closest to the pot won. Another game was mumbly peg where you showed off your skill with your pocketknife doing different tricks with it. What’s that a knife in school? Yea, you could bring your knife to school. Every boy had one but he also had something else called common sense. No one ever threatened anyone with a knife. That all started much later, after they banned knifes in school. We caught tadpoles and put them into a fruit jar and watched them grow. The girls made hop scotch grids on every sidewalk in town and showed of their athleticism. There wasn’t much more for them back then. Maybe some jump rope but all in all they seemed happy. So do you think today that boys would abandon their x-boxes for a bag of mibs? Would girls set down their cell phones to go jump rope? Do kids now days even know what a tadpole looks like? Oh, maybe if they saw it on the National Geographic Channel between x-box war games.
Yes. We now worry about our fat kids, and bored kids, and if the schools are feeding them the right things physically as well as academically. We have formed a more perfect world. For every action there is a reaction and I’m going beyond physics here. Guess what? You sit on your duff all day, you’ll get fat. You feed your mind violence and smut on the television or computer, and you’ll get a sick mind. Now come on over here so I can give you a rap on the head with my pencil. What’s that better not? You’ve got a lawyer.
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