Joel Stiff's Adventure

Twice as a teenager, I was discouraged from attending church by church people.

One Sunday morning, a friend and I decided to go to church and went to the closest one within walking distance.  It was a few minutes before the service would start.  We entered the double glass doors on the front of the building.  There was a short staircase on our left that led to some double doors that went into the auditorium.  Once at the top of the staircase, a man I presume to be an usher said, “Stop right there.”  He continued, “You boys can leave the way you came.” and gestured toward the door.  My friend and I looked at each other and then turned and left.  We were shocked that we had just been told to leave a church.

Not to be deterred, we decided on a second church we could walk to.  This time we agreed that we would go and speak with the pastor to find out if we would be welcomed.  On Monday, we went into the building and found a secretary in an office just inside the entrance.  We introduced ourselves and asked if we could speak with the pastor.  She picked up the phone and told him that there were two boys waiting to speak with him.  He came out into the foyer and asked how he could help us.  We explained that we were looking for a church to attend in our neighborhood and asked if he would mind us attending his.  He informed us that his church didn’t have a very large youth department and that we would be happier if we looked somewhere else.  Rejected again, we turned and left.  I guess we didn’t fit the demographic.

It is incredible to recall these two events and wonder what these men could have been thinking.  God is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.  These guys were a little more particular.

Somehow I came across information that my great uncle Frank was pastoring a church about five miles from my house on Chevrolet Avenue just west of downtown Flint.

Now, I have no idea why, but I asked my parents if I could attend this church.  Maybe it was because I had whetted my appetite from my many bus excursions to various churches.  Maybe I felt better knowing that some family would be there.  After all, if Uncle Frank is there, then Aunt Edith is there.  And if they are there, probably, Paul, Karen and Joanne are there.  And if they are all there, then probably my cousins, Josh and Jeremy are there.  I could manage this.

The best I can recall the church had the traditional 10 AM Sunday school hour and an 11 AM church service.  I was still young so I was in my Aunt Edith’s junior church class.  As a kid, I was not fond of my Aunt Edith.  She was mean and she yelled everything she said.  In class though, she was different.  She taught me to say the books of the Old Testament from memory.  She taught me numerous memory verses.  I even won a board game called Eternal Life in some sort of contest.  When you opened up the board, Jesus was there covering the whole thing.  Once I was an adult, Aunt Edith was much more kind and civilized.  She just had little patience for kids.  Perfect choice for a junior church teacher.

The most amazing thing about this entire phase of God’s pursuit of me is that my dad was the one who drove me to church every Sunday.  Up until now, we had spent our Sunday mornings watching Abbott & Costello movies on channel 20.  Now, he would get dressed, drive me to church across town, drop me off and then come pick me up a few hours later.  Every Sunday for months he did this.  It may not seem unusual for a father to drive his son to church, but for my pot smoking, beer drinking, biker dad it was.

I tend to believe that God was starting to work on him too.

Through my adolescent years, various churches with bus ministries would come by on Saturdays and try to get me to ride.  Sometimes my mother would make me try it at least once.  Other times she left it up to me to decide.  I always decided no.

One particular experience I recall vividly was to a church that had separate classes for their bus riders and the children of the drive in families.  At first that may sound discriminatory, but it is actually in the best interest of both groups as I learned first hand.

Somehow, I got shuffled into the wrong line and sent to a class made up entirely of “church kids”.  Since class was starting and the class I should have been in was so far away, the teacher welcomed me and told me I could stay with him for the day.  We were in a classroom decorated just like a school with a blackboard, globe and individual desks.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a classroom for use in their Christian day school.

I found myself in a desk square in the middle of all the others.  Every boy in the class was wearing dress pants, button down shirt and a tie.  Their hair was cut cleanly over the ears and off the collar.  When they spoke to the teacher, they used “sir” to end the sentence.

I felt out of place.  I was in blue jeans, t shirt and tennis shoes.  My hair wasn’t long, but shaggy enough to be different.  He asked me a question and instead of “yes, sir”, I let out a “yeah”.  He smiled and thanked me for coming to class.  I had hoped he enjoyed my being there because it would be the one and only time he would see me.

Any resistance to the people or the programs of the churches trying to include me was brought on solely by my own fears.  No one ever made me feel unwanted or unwelcome.  Quite the opposite.  I was pushing back hard.

But no matter how hard I resisted, God continued to send people my way.

As a kid, my family didn’t attend church.

My mom and dad were newly married and starting a life together.  They were very young.  While quite responsible for their age, they still wanted to party in their downtime.  Of course, the party lifestyle and Jesus don’t fit together real well.  That didn’t keep God from beginning to seek us out.

One Saturday, I heard a knock on the door and ran to see who it was.  Standing on the porch was a nicely dressed couple with a clipboard in the man’s hand.  They asked to speak with my mother, but I could already hear her footsteps as she made her way to the door.  The adults all greeted one another while I stared up in silence and listened to the conversation.  They explained to my mom that their church had a bus that picked up kids in our neighborhood.  They told us all about the singing and games that went on.  They mentioned the candy and prizes available.  After hearing the whole pitch, they asked if my mom and I were interested in riding.  My mom looked down and asked if I wanted to go.  I shook my head no and hid behind her .  She, smiling, looked to the couple and stated that I would be ready in the morning.

Oh, man.  Thrown under the church bus by my own mom.  It’s not that I didn’t want to go to church or that I didn’t like the nice people and what they promised.  I was just still young and shy, not wanting to go alone.

The next morning I was up and ready.  The bus pulled in front of the house, a young boy ran to the door and knocked.  He said that he was glad I was ready to go as they didn’t have time to wait for kids to get ready.  I climbed the steps and found an empty seat on the left side.  I slid all the way to the window and leaned my head against the cool glass and just stared out of it the entire trip.  It was an uneventful morning and I don’t remember much else about it.  I just know that I was relieved to get home after it was all said and done.

The next week, the workers came back on Saturday to see if I would be riding again.  My mother informed them that I would and the man pointed a finger gun at me and said he would see me in the morning.  Not if I can help it, I thought.  I recalled what the boy had said who knocked on my door about not being able to wait.  The next day when he knocked again, I opened it wide to reveal myself standing in my underwear.  He bemoaned the fact that I wasn’t ready and said that he would see me next week.

Again, not if I can help it.

 

In the last few years of elementary at Potter, I was afforded the opportunity to go to a special program across town at Walker Elementary.  On Mondays, I would ride a bus to the school and participate in some unique classroom experiences.

Each quarter, we would all gather in an assembly room and a half dozen teachers would present their class subject for the quarter.  We would then make our first, second and third choices for which classes we would prefer to attend.  The classes I remember taking were astronomy, television production, kite building and backpacking.  The school was very hands on and allowed the students to choose their course of study.  As a result, we were eager to go to class, we were invested in our subject matter and we sought to excel.

The education process is far more successful when the student is allowed to choose their field of study and play to their strengths.

Our sixth grade year, we were taken to the junior high school that we would be transferring to.  When I was a boy (said in my best Foghorn Leghorn voice), elementary was from kindergarten through sixth grade, junior high was seventh and eight grades and high school was ninth through twelfth.  Lowell was the junior high for our area.  We were loaded on buses and driven for a tour of the school.  When we walked in, the students were in between classes.  They saw our group of sixth graders as fresh meat and took the opportunity to put the fear of God in us.  Kids were slammed against lockers and the smell of weed was in the air.  Our tour gave the group the opposite intended feeling.  Instead of showing us something to look forward to, no one I knew wanted to go.

As I pondered the torture that my junior high years would be, good news suddenly came my way.  There was another special program available to me.  Across town a seventh through twelfth grade academy was something I could apply for.  If my grades and citizenship score were high enough, I would be accepted and dodge the nightmare I was facing.

Two things happened as a result.  One, it turned out that anyone who could fill out the application was accepted.  Two, nightmares weren’t just reserved for Lowell.

Sadly, Walker is empty and up for sale.  Lowell is completely abandoned and has become the home of graffiti artists and urban explorers.  Flint Academy was torn down years ago.

I could ride my bike to school.  The first time I did, it changed my life.  Walking would take me about fifteen minutes.  Riding my bike would take maybe three and that’s if I got caught by the light.  It didn’t matter as much coming to school, but going home was a treat.  School dismissed at 3 PM and I could be home with a snack watching Scooby Doo by 3:05.  There was nothing like the feeling of whizzing past all the suckers walking home.

Loogy races are quite possibly the grossest thing I have ever witnessed.  In the winter, time was passed waiting for the door to be unlocked by having loogy races.  For those who may not know, a loogy is a snot filled glob of spit.  Some of the guys would snort and hock until a sufficient loogy was present.  They would then spit it onto the side of the dumpster and see whose loogy travelled the farthest before freezing.  Gross.

One morning I arrived at school before anyone else.  It was a cold winter morning and so I was standing inside the inset entrance way to stay out of the wind.  There was this older kid who didn’t go to school.  We all knew who he was, but no one really knew him.  I saw him approaching me and I started to freak out.  I didn’t let him know that, but inside I was a ball of fear.  As he came right up to me, he pulled a knife.  I managed to grab each of his arms and somehow held him off.  I was able to get around him and I took off running.  I turned to see how far I had separated myself from him, but unfortunately, he was running too.  The dumpster was right next to another entrance, so I climbed on top of it and got on the roof of the school building.  He was still hot on my heels.  The problem was that I had nowhere to go.  I was running down the length of the building, but it was a dead end.  When I got to the end, I just jumped.  I hit the ground and rolled.  I looked up and saw my pursuer wasn’t willing to take the leap.  He just waved me off and walked away.  One of my friends soon showed up and asked why I had been running on the roof of the school.  He had seen me but not the nutcase with the knife.  Most people I tell this story to don’t believe me.

The exterior of the gym wall had a huge pad of asphalt in front of it.  We would hit tennis balls against it for days.

One night a week, the school would host roller skating in the gym.  You could rent those brown skates with the orange wheels.  I went often.

On the playground, there was this weird thing we called the mushroom.  It was about eight feet tall and composed of three vertical poles with a top covering it all.  Each pole had these steel discs that could be used like steps to climb up to the top.  We would then climb up on the very top of the mushroom and hang out.  We would scratch our names into the paint.  Everything on the playground was a potential deathtrap.  Monkey bars, giant rusty rickety rocket slides, giant swings that would let us fly fifteen feet in the air, merry go rounds that would go so fast the centrifugal force would send kids flying.  It was the playground where we gained a sense of our mortality.

We went to Toronto for our sixth grade class trip.  Our chaperones spent the evenings drinking in the hotel lounge.

Every year, we had a balloon day.  Each child filled out a card with their name, grade and teacher.  It also had the school’s name and address on it.  We attached the card to a helium balloon and the entire student body would go outside and let their balloons go.  After a few weeks, we would start to get responses from the balloons.  Farmers would find the balloons in their fields or people would find them in their yards.  Many of the were found in Canada and the New England area.  Once in a great while, the would make it overseas.  None of mine were ever returned.  At least I wasn’t like some unlucky kids who watched theirs go straight into a tree.

As I mentioned before, I attended the small units associated with our elementary school just around the corner from my house.  My second grade teacher and my mom agreed that I should be promoted from second to fourth grade since I had completed the third grade work.  This was exciting but also a bit scary at the same time.

The morning of my first day of fourth grade, my mom informed me that she would be driving me to school.  I wasn’t having any of that.  I argued probably more than I should have been allowed to.  My logic was that I had been walking to school for two years on my own, why should I be driven now?  My mom was considering the new quarter mile distance as well as the five lane road I would need to cross without the aid of a crossing guard.

I’m fuzzy on how it all went down, but I seem to remember walking to school and then hearing a car behind me.  I turned around to find that I was being tailed by my mom.  What cool, self respecting nine year old allows his mother to take him to school?  I confronted her right there on the street.  I have no other memories beyond this moment in the interaction.  It may be because I was concussed after arguing so disrespectfully with my mother.  I’m not sure how I lived through my childhood years seeing how unabashedly independent I was.

I made my way down Dexter Avenue until I reached Longway Park.  Those of us who walked to school would cut diagonally across the field comprised of baseball diamonds, football fields and tennis courts.  This brought us to the south entrances of the school.  The school day started at 9:00 AM and the doors would remain chained until just before then.  It seemed to me as though there were thousands of kids swarming the doors.  One thing I hadn’t considered in skipping a grade was that I would be a year behind everyone in size.  Sure, the education and maturity were there, but I was shorter and smaller than everyone else.  That first morning, I was discovered by a set of twins named Lynn and Lydia.  They found me and my fear must have been apparent.  They asked me who I was and where my home room would be and promised to get me there safe.  It was a good thing too, because when those doors were unchained it was like a Who concert.  You don’t forget kindnesses like that.

It was a bit unnerving having left my friends behind and moving into a room full of strangers.  My teacher for the year didn’t help much either.  She was an older lady who should have retired long before I met her.  She was mean and had little patience for us.  She was short with cat eye glasses.  Aside from her daily screaming, I recall her picking a boy up by a single arm and paddling him right in front of the entire class.  Paddling was commonplace at this time, but it was done with a certain protocol.  The teacher would take the student to the hall, have the student bend at the waist and then administer three swats in the presence of another teacher as witness.  This lady did none of those things.  She jerked him up by one arm and paddled him in front of us all.  Half of the class stood there mouths agape while the others were organizing a protest on the basis of a violation of rights.  What else could be expected from the children of union men and women?  If memory serves me right, Mr. Schnell, a large German man that taught across the hall, burst in and saved this young man from his punishment.

At our school, we stuck with one teacher for most of the day only occasionally venturing to another teacher’s room.  Once in a while, we would go and see Mr. Mashni, an Arabic teacher, for some math.  Mr. Schnell would have us over and play classical music on a record player while we worked.  We had French once a week.  I was disappointed the first day when our teacher went through the room telling us what our names were in French.  Mine was still Joel, just pronounced with a French accent.

Once the school year was into a rhythm, the guys in my class would bring a football to play with before school and during lunch.  We would either divide up into even teams or play smear the queer (different times folks).  Being physically smaller made it a challenge for me, but I did all right.  Every day I packed a peanut butter sandwich, a baggie of Doritos and a Little Debbie nutty bar.  The faster you ate, the sooner you got to go outside for recess.  I would eat my nutty bars, put my Doritos in my coat pocket and wad my sandwich up into a ball and throw into in the trash.  It made this great thump when it hit the bottom.  I would say I have thrown away hundreds, maybe thousands of peanut butter sandwiches in my time.

I started out with a cool, metal Star Wars lunch box with Darth Vader on it.  I would sit it by the door I used to go back to class after recess.  One sunny day as I approached the door, there was a sixth grader named Jimmy Slaughter who was about twenty yards in front of me.  When he got to the door, he jumped up with both feet and slammed down on top of my lunch box.  I’ve been trying to avoid using names, but with a cool one like Jimmy Slaughter, how can you not?  As I approached it and studied its flatness, all I could think was, “That’s a shame.”  I just walked on past and left it there.  After all, who wants to be the kid carrying a flattened lunch box.  Brown bags for me after that day.

Fifth grade was better because I was a bit of a teacher’s pet.  Mrs. Greer loved me.  She was a short lady with similarly short afro.  Her class was across from Mrs. Wood’s and our classes went to gym together.  One gym period, our class was playing dodgeball against Mrs. Wood’s.  Yet another game in which I was outsized.  I was always looking for a way to get some respect and this day, I thought I had found one.  The biggest boy in Mrs. Woods class was not looking in my direction and I had a ball.  I whizzed it in his direction and hit him square in the side of the head.  I heard that distinctive sound made by those red playground balls and then watched as this boy stared dead into my eyes with fury.  In a millisecond, I went from feeling like a hero to fearing for my very life.  I hadn’t realized it, but he was already out of the game and was making his way off the floor.  Like a scene from an old western, every kid ran to the side of the gym leaving me and my nemesis alone staring each other down.  I was paralyzed with fear and couldn’t move.  He slowly marched toward me while Mrs. Greer and Mrs. Wood were running in slow motion toward us saying, “Nooooooo. Stoooooppppp.”  He shoved me with both arms until my back hit the folded up bleachers.  I seem to feel like my feet even left the floor as I flew through the air but I’m not quite sure.

About two weeks later, Mrs. Greer informed me that I would be going to Mrs. Woods for English from now on.  It seems I was being promoted yet again at least for English.  I begged and pleaded for her to keep me back knowing what I had to face in her class.  Nonetheless, she escorted me over.  Mrs. Wood didn’t have individual desks, but rectangular tables for two.  There was only one seat available in the entire class.  It was at a table with my dodgeball friend.  As I took my seat, he looked at me, then smiled and said hi.  Maybe the blow from the dodgeball had caused him to forget who I was.  All was well.

Sixth grade found me with Mr. Bach.  A pretty uneventful year except for the time he lost his temper and cussed us all out.  He was a good man, just had had enough of us that day.  It was also the year I would start making a fool of myself pursuing girls.  I had always noticed them, but from a distance.  Now I would begin humiliating myself.  Oh man.

Living in Michigan didn’t afford us year round outdoor activity so we learned to have fun indoors as well.

One funny memory I have wasn’t as humorous for my mom.  She had decided to take a bath, leaving my toddler brother under my watchful care.  Mistake number one.  She also left a candle burning.  Mistake number two.  He and I had this little orange truck that would go on its own if you revved it up.  Instead of playing with it on the kitchen floor as designed, Cory had a question.  What would happen if I set this truck on top of this burning candle?  Only one way to find out.  The candle was about four inches in diameter and provided a nice base to sit the truck on.  Since it had been burning a while, the flame was in a nice hole ensuring the truck wouldn’t put it out.  I have no idea where I was or what I was doing at the time, but I sure wasn’t keeping an eye on him.  The truck began to melt and caused the candle to topple over onto the carpet which then began to burn.  At this point, my brother started to knock on the bathroom door and say, “Smoke.”  My mother exited the bathroom to find this half melted truck covered in wax burning her carpet.  She then asked me two questions I would hear many times through the years, “Where were you and why weren’t you keeping an eye on your brother?”  I think I actually did her a favor.  She was one step closer to getting rid of that nasty red, orange and black carpet.

For being six years apart, my brother and I enjoyed each other’s company and still do.  We came up with a few games to pass the time.  One was developed by playing hot lava.  If you’re not fortunate enough to have ever played hot lava, allow me to explain.  You have to navigate a room by jumping from one piece of furniture to the next without your feet coming into contact with the floor because……..it’s hot lava!  Here we were jumping from couch to loveseat to chair when I made a misstep and fell to the floor.  My brother then attempted the same leap and I reached up and grabbed his feet pulling him into the lava with me.  If I am going to be scalded to death in hot lava, then someone is going with me.  So this gave me an idea.  I would become a monster that lived in the lava.  Anytime Cory would try to navigate the lava, I would reach up and grab him.  There were some rules.  He had to abide by all of the hot lava rules.  I had to remain seated on the floor.  All I could do to catch him was reach into the air with my arms.  The first few rounds of this taught him to be careful of his timing.  He had to catch me off guard in order to make a successful leap.  Eventually, it came down to me having to pretend to fall asleep, to the point of my eyes being closed, before he would make his move.  I had to rely on the sound of his movement to snatch him from the air.  Many times, he was victorious in his jumps, but when I got him, it was painful.  Imagine jumping from the arm of a couch only to be snatched midair and drug to the floor and trampled upon.  Oh man, it was a good time.  For some strange reason we called that game Hamburger Monster.  For the life of me, I do not know why.

Another we played was called rest.  I do know the origin of this name.  After a round or two, Cory would say to me, “Let’s rest.”  Mind you, these games were played when we were left home alone.  The moment the adult supervision would leave, we would jump up and play Rest or Hamburger Monster.  Our house was long and narrow.  All of the main rooms were connected by a walkway going through the center of each room.  About three fourths of the way, there was a slight jog to the left.  The field of play started at the end of the living room where the couch was.  It ran east through the living room, through the stereo room, through the dining room where the jog was placed and ended at a bathroom.  The game was basically a race for my brother’s life.  I would place my foot against the couch and he would be one or two steps ahead of me.  Without an official, “three, two, one, go!”, he would just take off running through the length of the house.  The one step head start and spontaneous commencement was his advantage.  Once he took off running, my job was to catch him and tackle him before he got to the bathroom.  Sometimes he made it, other times, he didn’t.  If I managed to catch him, it was usually ugly.  There were generally three ways he would be caught.  Often, I would anticipate his start and be on him like a linebacker, wrapping him up and throwing him to the floor.  Other times, he would get the jump on me, but I would make a diving grab for his ankle, catch it and he would fall face first to the floor.  Probably the worst outcome came if he failed to navigate the jog in the dining room.  If he couldn’t maintain speed or he lost traction because of his socks, he would either be slammed into the wall on the right or bang his ribs on the dining room table on the left.  It was  a painful game for the both of us, but we loved it.  Many times, he made it to the bathroom and would gloat about his victory raising his fists in the air like Mohammed Ali.  And right after, he’d ask if we could rest.

Growing up in the seventies and eighties meant freedom.  Parents didn’t hover over their children as much as they do now.  We roamed our neighborhoods, met interesting people and did interesting things.  It was how we learned about life and the world.

As soon as we were settled in, I began to explore our street.  My parents allowed me to travel up and down our block, sometimes on foot and sometimes on my bike.

Bikes were a huge deal when I was growing up.  My very first bike was a sky blue two wheeler with hard, twelve inch tires, a white seat and an orange alligator decal on the chain guard.  Another bike I had was a three wheeled chopper.  The huge orange seat was molded around the two oversized rear plastic wheels and the extended chrome front end was a thing of beauty.

My first twenty inch bike was bought for my birthday.  It was a standard Huffy with a banana seat and upright chrome handlebars.  It had a brown paint job that faded into the joints.  I didn’t have this bike long.  I had ridden it to Ideal Pharmacy and went in to buy a can of 7up.  When I came out, it was gone.  I searched all the way around the store and couldn’t find it.  Later in the day, my dad drove me around the whole neighborhood and we couldn’t find it.  She was gone forever.

Knowing I couldn’t live without a bike, I begged my dad to get me another one.  We got into the car and found a guy selling used bikes on the side of the road.  He picked out a girl’s bike with a green boat flake metallic paint job.  When I began to protest, he asked me if I wanted a bike or not.  Once we got it home, he helped me tear it down, sand it and paint it.  He even pinstriped it for me.  He took the bar bar off my alligator bike and fit it onto this one so that it was a boys bike.  Truthfully, this was a better bike than the standard Huffy.  I spent time customizing this bike with a MX seat and knobby tires.  We would go to the parking lot of the AC plant behind our neighborhood and steal chrome valve caps off of the nicer cars and put them on our bikes.  I should mention that I am no longer a thief just for the record.  While everyone was riding around the same dirt bike style two wheeler with the “54” oval on the handlebar, I was customizing my own ride.

Eventually, I graduated to a ten speed one Christmas.  It was black with white cabling.  That Christmas morning, before my parents were up, I was riding it up and down the length of our house.  The clicking of the wheel awoke my dad and he made me take it outside.  Ten speeds and wintry Michigan roads don’t mix too well, especially on thin ten speed tires.

I never had the pleasure of owning a big wheel or a green machine.  Maybe the Lord has them waiting for me in Heaven.

Our street was a pretty great street with pretty great people.  To our left was a sweet elderly woman whose son Bob took care of her.  Across the street on the corner was an older couple that had two cherry trees with limbs stretching out over the sidewalk.  They would yell at us if we tried to pick them.  Next to them was the neighborhood barber.  He owned a shop next to Dairy Queen on the next block.  He sold to a young family that would buy fireworks from out of state and put on a great show for the fourth of July.  The next house had an older teenager who could ride a wheelie on his ten speed without hands.  We all thought he was the baddest ever (bad meant good of course).  Next to him was a family with a couple little girls.  The mom was known for screaming out the names of the girls as well as their dog when she wanted them home.  Their neighbors were some of my closest friends growing up.  The parents were Christian people with four boys.  The youngest two boys and I hung out quite a bit playing sports in the street or our yard.  Their neighbor was a lady that didn’t like us much because our basketball would always go into her yard and we would jump the fence to retrieve it.  Her neighbor was a funny kid with the last name “boner”.  You just can’t forget a fact like that.  A little further down the street were the Clarks.  I met Mark one day while he was doing some work in his backyard.  I asked if I could help and he for some reason allowed it.  Free labor from a six year old isn’t much of a bargain.  Mark used to cut his lawn with an old fashioned reel mower.  I asked him once why he didn’t use a gasoline mower like everyone else in the world.  I don’t recall his answer, but looking back now, it’s because Mark isn’t like everyone else in the world.  He was also probably too cheap to buy gas.  Mark’s son Eric would become best friends with my brother and we are all still close today even though the miles have separated us.

At first I was only allowed to ride my bike on the sidewalk on our side of the street.  Then I could cross the street and before long I was riding in the street.  I swear, all we did was ride bikes.  Mark would take Eric, my brother and I to For Mar nature preserve to ride.  We knew how to tear them down, lube the bearings and fix our own flats.  Once in a while, we wouldn’t tighten our handlebars properly and we’d pull a wheelie only to have our handlebars come off in our hands.  I can still hear my dad yelling at us for leaving skidmarks on our sidewalk.  There were two reasons for this.  One, he didn’t want any skidmarks on his sidewalk and two, he “wasn’t going to be buying another *#!@ tire after we skidded all the tread off of it.”  We would do our paper routes while riding our bikes.  We would make ramps out a two by six and a cinder block.  My brother and Eric were a part of the Mongoose rage that came about.  I can remember them trading stuff for mag wheels and used bikes.  I bought a girls bike from a family down the street for $25, brought it home, washed it and sold it for $40 from my front yard.

It was true that once the streetlights came on, we were to be home.  Long days of running, playing, sports, bike riding and mischief were my life.  Parents oversaw us but didn’t hover.  We all seemed to make it out alive.

 

Geographically, our house was separated from the main elementary school by a busy four lane road called Davison.  In an effort to keep younger kids from having to cross that busy road alone, the school system built small, one room, school houses that we called units.  Just around the corner from our house were three such units.  One was for the kindergarten class, one housed the first graders and the third was shared by second and third graders.  When we moved to Ivanhoe, I was heading into the first grade.

I convinced my mom to let me walk to school alone since it was less than fifty yards.  After all, no cool first grader would ever be walked to school by his mother.  I’m sure now that she watched through the windows on the end of the house, but I didn’t know that at the time.

My first grade class was taught by Mrs. Madrie.  She was a short, sweet lady that taught us the alphabet using posters of personified letters.  The consonants were male characters and the vowels were ladies.  The only one I seem to recall is Mr. H who was hairy.

She used to sell old fashioned candy sticks at the beginning of class for ten cents a piece.  I remember watching with a jealous eye as kids would line up to buy them.  It wasn’t that my parents wouldn’t give me the money for them, but I never seemed to remember once I got home.  One morning I remembered and I snuck into my parents room to get some money.  They kept a large plastic jar full of pennies and I stole one hundred of them and jammed them into my pocket.  When Mrs. Madrie called us up to make our purchase I got in line with a big smile on my face.  When it was my turn, she asked me how many and what kind I wanted.  I told her I wanted ten as I emptied those hundred pennies  out onto her desk.  I don’t know if she didn’t trust me or just didn’t want me hopped up on all that sugar, but she asked me if my mother knew that I had all that money and wanted to buy ten candy sticks.  I responded that she did.  She asked me if she could call my home and make sure.  I called her bluff and said, go ahead.  To my dismay, she punched the buttons on the phone and got my mother.  After a very brief conversation, I was told that she would hold onto the coins until the end of the day after which I could take them back home where they belong.  A lying thief I was.

During this first grade year, I noticed that one or two kids would leave school once lunchtime came.  I inquired as to their absence and was told that they went home for lunch.  What!?!  I had no idea this was an option.  For the remainder of my time at the untis I went home for a peanut butter sandwich and some doritos with Richard Dawson entertaining me on the Family Feud.  It was awesome.

One winter morning I was the first kid at school and I found myself laying on the ice with my cheek making contact.  All was well until I tried to get up and found that my face had frozen to the ice.  I ripped it off like a band aid .

It was also at the units that some knucklehead had me lifted up on the teeter totter and then got off quickly, knocking the wind out of me for the first time.

The next year found me in second grade in a new building with Mrs. Powell.  The room had two chalkboards. On one she would write down the second grade work.  On the other, she would write down the third grade work.  If you remember, my mom had been working me at home well before school came and I took to the work pretty easily.  I would often finish the second grade work early and had paid attention when Mrs. Powell went over the lessons with the third graders.  I found myself turning in the work from both boards every day.

At the end of the school year, Mrs. Powell asked to see my mother.  I couldn’t imagine what I had done wrong.  I hadn’t stolen any pennies since the great candy stick heist of 1978.  She explained to my mom that I had completed both year’s schooling in one.  She was recommending that I be promoted from second to fourth grades.  My parents agreed with her and before you know it, I was on my way to Big Potter.