Boredom at Work Inspires Memoirs

So the work software is down for the next few days and until a committee gathers to designate "busy" work we have nothing to do. I may be posting dozens of boring memoirs from now until 4/29. For some reason I am getting a flood of memories from when I was kid. Maybe it's because I have a birthday at the end of the week, in any case, humor me:

One of the things I remember in Catholic school was the snort stuff up your nose fad. Really interesting comment on society at the time. Kids were snorting Kool-aid, ground up Tylenol, sugar, flour even chalk up their noses. I wasn't one of them because I had common sense enough to know better. That lasted maybe a month before we had the principle come in and give us a talk. This was the early 80's.

Some of those same kids, a few months later, had gross, bloody, gangrene looking scabs on top of their hands playing a game called man or mouse. It was a guy game. Basically a boy would let some other kid (rarely female)scratch the hell out of his hand until it bled and there was no skin left to prove he was a man not a mouse. The mice were females or males unwilling to participate, probably neurosurgeons now having possessed so much intelligence, common sense,backbone and conviction at such a young age. That ended up in a lecture with just the principal, just the guys.

There was carry a horned toad in a shoe box and bring him to school fad. Again, I didn't participate since I wasn't about to touch anything not flufy and cute. Wow, when I think of how they are extinct today and how some kids seemed to have a new one in a box for a full two years straight, YIKES!

After Grease was released on VHS the kids at my school had this join a club fad. There were several all girl and all boy clubs. Everyone had a decorated index card with a top secret club name and their favorite color, favorite this or that...primitive myspace if you will. Being the non joiner that I was (still am), I didn't participate. I think at the time I was digging a hole behind the coke shed where the asphalt had parted. I had found some trinkets there so there had to be more. I managed to engage a few in this, I wasn't totally alone. The nuns came down on the whole club thing. The hole we dug reached two feet before it was discovered and cement poured into it.

Hard to believe we still played marbles in the schoolyard from Kinder until 3rd or 4th grade. This was the early 80's, that was an ancient game. Wonder if it was just a Del Rio thing. I got to use marbles my grandfather had used when he was a kid in the 30's. Never lost one either.

There was the bring your boom box to school fad. I remember playing marbles and hearing Another One Bites the Dust and Devil Went Down to Georgia. That didn't last long, imagine every kid in school with music blaring at recess, from Kenny Rogers to Kiss (the nerd I was, I brought in Elvis, Connie Francis and the Beatles). Other fads I participated in were the Chinese jacks, regular jacks and Chinese jump rope fads.

Since the school yard sat under pecan trees we had pecan picking and eating season (you'd smash the pecans with your dirty old shoe on the dirty old asphalt and then eat the bits, yeah, from the ground) that coincided with drinking more cokes (had a coke shed with two coke machines, a quarter! and a nail to punch the coke can on so you could drink it from the side. Yikes, rusty old nail polluting your drink. Well, we had TAB there so, lose, lose situation for some). Coke cans all over the schoolyard attracted bees so there were tons of bees (I hear these insects are on their way out too, sux.) and tons of kids with allergic reactions from being stung. For awhile those kids weren't allowed outdoors ever then they got wise and got rid of the coke machines.

Because it was a Catholic school it attracted all sorts of religious cooks and we'd have Chick Tracts thrown at us and into the school yard. Hey Comics! What's this 666 on the forehead thing, creepy. Those would get confiscated and we'd get a lecture to calm down the freaked out kids.

I remember we were all into playing every record backwards not just the Heavy Metal stuff and while stuck indoors when it rained kids would take the class turntable (those heavy grey ones) and put on a record and play it backwards and we'd swear we heard all sorts of devil messages. Teachers didn't know what was going on. Once they caught on, week long lectures by the religion teacher and a visit from the principle. There was even a book on the subject or what looked like one and we all had to sit through that. Rodney? You probably remember more.

For some reason people walking by the school would hand out candy to us kids in the school yard (chain link fence near downtown area and an HEB) and we'd take it. YIKES! Then again we had a jungle gym over asphalt, a bunch of old wood boards with long nails sticking out of them behind the coke shed where everyone like to hang out (only 2 feet of space, if that, between this shed and the back wall of HEB, nice place for rats and scorpions and bats that was the attraction), and huge, old, splintery see saw that sent more than one kid home with a 3 inch splinter in their belly when they tried to slide down it.