I believe the children are our future — and the future’s so bright, I’ve gotta wear shades.
Actually, that first sentence was a total fiction. The immediate future will be shaped by (God help us) people from my generation. These people are running the businesses, banks and government agencies that will provide jobs and, eventually, unemployment benefits for our children.
Prior to my senior year of high school, a “friend” of mine talked me into taking advanced algebra II, which ended up being the mathematical equivalent of getting a colonoscopy with a cactus. My teacher applied for and was awarded a grant to pay for the cases of red markers she needed to properly point out the mistakes on my test papers.
Thankfully, I took a few easy electives that year. Whenever my algebra test scores were lower than Lil Wayne’s pants, there was an easy A lurking around the corner to even things out.
Judge if you will, but after three years of college prep courses, what brain power I had was spent. Also, here’s a little secret: Unless you’re one of the few with the gears to be a scientist or an engineer, there is no algebra in the real world. If you don’t believe me, see Episode 1 of “Twin Peaks.”
Until I was 16, I rode the school bus, which was like “Lord of the Flies” on wheels. It wasn’t unusual to find fireworks, knives or livestock on that bus. The route encompassed several dirt roads, and one of them was the dirt road that’s now adjacent to Sanderson Farms on U.S. 70.
It had been raining all day, and as the bus was pulling up to the house at the end of the road it got stuck. As I remember it, the house didn’t have a phone, so the bus driver asked all of us to get off and push.
I refused on the grounds that if I got mud on my clothes I’d be kicked out of the house. I think a farmer eventually came along with a tractor and pulled us out.
On that same bus, some enterprising truant became obsessed with the size of my ears. Now this guy was a friend of mine, and he weighed around 250 pounds in the third grade. Whenever somebody would start teasing him about his weight, I stood up for him.
You can imagine my dismay when he got everyone on the bus to go along with his thesis that my ears were too big. At the time, there was a popular song called “The Freaks Come Out At Night” by Whodini, and this nudnik changed it to “When The Freaks Come Out At Night, Jon’s Ears Get Up and Dance.”
For the rest of the year, my nickname was “Ears.” I was also a chubby kid, so on top of the teasing about my weight, I had people asking me to fly them around with my giant Dumbo ears.
When I see any of these people today and they act like we’re old buddies from way back, the urge to lock them in a bank vault with a starving badger is nearly overpowering.
Years later, my business degree from ECU landed me a prestigious job in administration at KSI at the DuPont plant in Kinston. I had an executive office in what used to be a bathroom, with the overrun drain still in the middle of the floor just under my chair.
Wouldn’t you know it, but the guy who was obsessed with my ears worked at the same place. I was in charge of payroll, so every time he brought up the good old days with my ears, I’d delete one of his IN punches on the time clock. Whenever he came to my office to correct his time card, I’d pretend my ears were too big to hear him properly.
Near the end of my time with KSI, the ear guy called in sick. I pulled his file in order to document why he was out, and the following is a word-for-word, syllable-for-syllable account of our conversation:
Me: “OK, I have to list a reason for the absence in your file. Did you have to go to the doctor?”
Ear guy: “No; I ate too many ribs last night.”
Me: “You cracked a rib?”
Ear guy: “Naw, I ate too many ribs.”
Another unfortunate incident linked to the school bus was my one and only experience with the dreaded wedgie.
I guess I’d lived a sheltered life, but I’d never thought of grabbing the top of someone’s underwear and trying to pull it up to their shoulders. It happened to me one afternoon and it was not pleasant.
One minute I’m sitting there talking to my buddy about the length of Catherine Bach’s shorts on the “Dukes of Hazzard”, and the next, it feels as if Satan himself has jumped up through the ground and stabbed me in the tuckus with a pitchfork.
Before the offender let go of my drawers, I turned around and started punching him as hard as I could. The guy’s name was Benji, and I ended up busting his lip. The bus driver pulled over and began his investigation. He asked why I punched a guy over a wedgie, and I said because he pulled my drawers up into areas they should not be.
Benji and I were given the option of going to the principal’s office or sitting down and letting it go. We opted to let it go, although I was ultra-sensitive to any movement that occurred behind me for several weeks.
Eventually, Benji and I became buddies, and at one point we went into business together selling packs of Now & Later candies (that cost 10 cents) for 25 cents per pack at school and on the bus. The partnership ended when Benji wanted to expand the business into cigarettes. Later in life, I think Benji ended up selling cigarettes that had nothing to do with tobacco.
One good day I had in elementary school was the time a girl named Mindy and I got lost on field day. Our teacher sent us back to the classroom to get something, and when we got back to the football field, the class had disappeared. We walked around looking for them, but not very hard.
Neither one of us had any interest in field day, although several of our classmates bought into it big time. You’d have thought winning the tug of war was the only way to avoid the guillotine. The whole thing was pointless, because our class was competing against a group that included the 250-pound guy who got an entire school bus to obsess on my ears.
“Jon’s on their team!” I could hear him yelling from across the field. “Watch out; he’ll flap his ears to throw dust in your eyes!”
Jon Dawson’s columns appear every Tuesday and Thursday in The Free Press. Contact Jon at 252-559-1092 or jon.dawson@kinston.com. Purchase Third of Never’s “Downrising” at jondawson.com.