June 30, 2011
Superhuman Bed Linen
When my friend Melanie was little, she tied a sheet around her neck for a cape and ran wildly around the backyard with her arms outstretched superhero-style, shrieking, “WooOOOooh! WooOOOooh! I’m JEsus! I’m JEsus!”
Her father sat her down and said in his most serious tone, “You should never imitate the Lord.”
Also, by way of an update, this, posted to the Dubuque Freecycle group Thu Jun 30, 2011 5:27 am (PDT):
I have a large blanket with the Incredible Hulk smashing through a wall if anyone is interested
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Deron, the Jesus-running occurred in the actual backyard of the real house that became the true House of Ruben Bustiz (as distinguished from the House of Ruben Bustes).
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!
That’s funny. I was told that imitating the Lord was the only way to heaven. Can you believe that? Those Church of Christers. Leading people on like that.
But that reminds me. Once Miss Nell told me, “It is rude to sing at the supper table.” Another example of parents making up rules willy nilly.
If you meet the Incredible Hulk on the road, kill him.
Carole, even when Melanie was still pretty little, she laughed when she told that story on her daddy.
I always heard that it was rude to read at the supper (or dinner) table, not that it was rude to sing.
What if you conversed in a musical fashion?
What if you bowed your head and sang grace?
I got in trouble for reading in math class.
She probably did not care for my song selection. Again, just making up rules.
I totally understand that, Deron.
I knew a little kid whose parents allowed him to read his Harry Potter books during church services. It was a Presbyterian Church in Alexandria, VA. There are some churches in some places that would have cast him out!
My brain wasn’t prepared for algebra.
Carole, you can sing at my table any time you please. Sing anything you like. And that goes for all y’all.
Presbyterians! They’re lax!
You wouldn’t believe the deal now, Deron. High school kids who will be avoiding math in college and life, at all cost, have to take not only the algebras but things like AP calculus. You don’t even want to think about this. It makes me nauseous to write it.
Thank you, Shelia. I will be preparing my repertoire.
I think I have a math brain in me, it just has taken me years to figure out how to access it.
I loved “story problems” when I was in grade school, and I caught on to geometry instantly. I am not very good at what you might call abstract thinking.
And we should be considering our tableaux vivants as well.
Those Presbyterians. I used to fall asleep during the sermons but God bless ‘em, there was never any yelling from the pulpit.
Mr. B. also found geometry easy. He has gutted out the rest of it because he had to. I cried uncle really early.
I’m pretty sure I am an abstraction. But I can sing.
I wonder whether you might be someone who would get calculus then, Shelia. Mr. B. was saying this year they were “past numbers.” He said they were using letters to work out the problems. At least that was my understanding before I passed out and he stopped telling me things about it.
Cindy, we have you in the lineup.
You are our, what do you call it, headliner.
The “Living Last Supper” I ducked out on around Eastertime was sort of a supper table tableau vivant.
Every time I hear the word “headliner,” I think of a little kid in the back seat of a big car, violently punching holes in the headliner with sharp pencil.
So I get to be that!
Don’t forget your pencils, Cindy!
We played dominoes in our math class. With a couple of guys from the basketball team who had study hall next door.
Those basketball guys had to teach me to hold the dominoes in one hand and call them, “bones” but they didn’t have to teach Oskar and I how count dominoes and read the board.
I just barely passed that Algebra class, but I learned a lot.
Melanie and I ran a casino in the back row of chemistry class. Mostly a tiny roulette wheel and some pairs of dice. Should have taught us something about probability while we were ignoring chemistry, but we were mostly studying not getting caught by Mrs. Sukup.
[Pronounced SOO-kəp. Not the way you might think and the way some kids said.]
I think we might have bought the little roulette wheel at what we called the “trick shop.” Games and gimmicks and fake vomit and fake flies in plastic ice cubes. A shady establishment in downtown Dallas that was just on the edge of where our parents did not want us to be. The kind of place where the proprietor would bark out at us if we drifted over toward the section labeled ADULTS ONLY.
I accidentally drank hydrochloric acid in Chemistry class. Boy, were my teeth white for a while. And I stabbed my Biology teacher in the hand with a pair of tweezers. My bad-but-smart boy friends in Algebra always asked Mr. Kohl about the Nazis, to keep him distracted. Then they’d toss around a wadded-up ball of aluminum foil and I would laugh and laugh.
I think I’ve told y’all what we did to poor Mr. Rittman in Latin class. The explosions. The permanent eraser-shaped chalk dust marks on the back of his suit. The burning paper airplanes. The way we’d creep up closer to his desk every time he’d turn his back, until finally we were right up on him and he’d panic and say, Get back. Really, I think maybe we went too far in that class.
I remember those little roulette wheels. I won $5 in 6th grade on 14 black.
My biology class was much sadder than chemistry class. It was only the second semester we started dissecting, and our first animal was a starfish. The teacher walked around, and he looked at the hash my lab partner and I had made and sighed. “Look at the mess you’ve made of that beautiful animal.”
After that I got very good at dissecting and made A’s in biology for the rest of the year.
Cindy, it sounds like y’all did to Mr. Rittman what we did to that lady who taught us for the first half of seventh grade till she had what used to be called a nervous breakdown and then we got a new teacher.
By the last few years of high school, though, we got really nice. When the English teacher started tearing up and left the room because she felt bad for her little boy who was at home sick, Ruth Anne and I ran out after to comfort her.
I refused to participate in the dissections. That didn’t go over well.
My friend Allen did not like the insect collecting-and-pinning part of biology class. He finally caved in but presented his insects pinned to the inside of a cigar box on which he had scrawled in crayon MY BUGGIES.
What a sweet boy.
He is still one of my best friends. He and Renner were best pals the year I met the two of them, and they are still good friends.
I refused to participate in the dissecting as well. My alternate assignment was to boil a fish down to the bones and bring that in. But I abandoned the fish once the boiling started, and Miss Nell was not pleased. I remember turning it in, though.
Poor Mr. Rittman. I wonder what happened to him.
Mr. Rittman was an odd fellow. He was in his early 60s by the time we got to him, and that was in the 70s. He’d been abused by students for many years. He honestly seemed completely oblivious to it. Honestly. I hope he was. I was always a good girl and never did anything rude to him or anyone, really. But I’ve always been greatly amused by bad boys and would laugh myself blue at their antics. I’m still drawn to those kinds of boys.
Mr. Rittman told me that he had been awarded a Rhodes scholarship but turned it down because Oxford was too liberal. He spoke 6 languages and 5 of them were dead. He really was on a different plane from the rest of us at Ysleta High School in El Paso, Texas.
I made the only C of my life in that Biology class. Because of my conscientious objector status. I argued that I could learn anatomy from photos in books and would not take part in anything of the sort. I think it would have gone a lot better if I hadn’t stabbed Mrs. Cialone in the hand, though. I didn’t mean to do it–she told me to get (with my sharp tweezers) whatever it was that was in her hand, and I have some depth perception problems and stabbed her pretty hard. She bled. That might have been okay, but I have this laughter problem that you don’t know about, Cece, but some other flockers know that I can get started laughing and, well, I just can’t stop. And that’s what happened. I sat on my stool the rest of the class period trying to keep from laughing, and I turned really red and blew up like a bagpipe, then I’d release a kind of snort-laugh because of all the pressure and, well, it wasn’t good for me in the long run.
I got D’s in basic algebra (9th and 10th grade, which was regular algebra spread over two years), mostly because I thought I was bad at math and I couldn’t make myself memorize the rules. Like you, Sheila, I took off on Geometry. It was puzzle solving and drawing, I did not mind learning those rules for some reason. I got A’s.
When I finally got to college the second time, I sat in the Business Algebra class the first day and knew I had to do something. I enrolled in the “short-bus” non-credit, one-semester class of remedial (they called it something else) algebra, I learned the rules, aced every test. Business Algebra, no problem after. Neither a couple other math courses I had to take. Statistics wasn’t easy, but I learned the formulae (That I would have to relearn today, if I needed to use them). Managerial Accounting, another story.
Miss Toni, our teacher, would start each class with a question. Point to a couple people, who could not answer, then “Take out a piece a paper, pop-quiz.” She was wicked. There was one Accounting major in our class who always aced her tests. Once she gave a test, she regave because the Accounting Major aced it. I was the next closest score, a 62%. On the re-take, I think I got 81%. The highest score of the re-takers. She was a tough lady. I think I loved her.
Cindy, I am sure it was a great relief to the faculty when you graduated!