All posts tagged with "my-youth"

One of the things that the lady said reminded me of something. When I started 7th grade, my new school had a designated smoking area for students.

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Probably the funniest thing about my mom is how she pronounces "potato." She changes every single sound of that first syllable, and comes up with a word pronounced roughly like "buh-TA-tuh." This led to hundreds of conversations in my life that went something like this....

I got to thinking about Three's Company today. And I've decided that a big part of why it's no big deal for people of my generation to have opposite-sex roommates is that our parents spent so much time in 1979 defending Jack's right to cohabitate with Janet and Chrissy. I know this sounds ludicrous, but I remember that it really was a controversy when that show was a prime-time series.

There was about a year-long stretch when I was in elementary school where I was quite enthusiastic about reading up on UFOs, the Loch Ness monster, ghosts and spirits, and other unexplained mysteries. My school library had a series of books on these topics, and I went through them one after another. By far, my favorite topic was Bigfoot. I went on to read other books that I could find. Of course, this was before Al Gore invented the Internet, so library books were about my only option. I knew about all of the highly-publicized sightings, and I had seen pictures of that grainy video that the Bigfoot nuts still site to this day.

I think I mentioned once that Auburn fans think that the LSU fans smell like corn dogs. I had heard this through word of mouth, and then at the Auburn game last year, I actually heard an Auburn guy walking around LSU's campus say, "It sure does smell like corn dogs around here."

I have this little sheet of paper where I jot down ideas for posts as I think of them or as I have them suggested to me. This gives me the illusion that I have tons of ideas to share with everyone, but when I read line by line down the list, it becomes amazingly clear how little I really have to say to you guys.

Many of my readers will be too young (or too old -- Hi Dad), to remember the day before Bryan Adams wasn't a pussy. Back in the summer of 1986, I was 15, and enjoying the freedom that comes with being old enough to run wild, but too young to drive and work. But most of my friends were 16 and driving, so it was the best of both worlds. And this isn't one of those "I didn't know how well I had it" types of posts. I knew that it was great even at the time.

After I posted my article on the bad things that I had done, I got an email asking me to relate the details of a misadventure that I had glossed over. I mentioned in that entry that I didn't have the time or space to detail all of the mean things that I had done to our housemother. So by request, here is one such story. First, some background information is necessary. Our house mother is the first -- and to this day the only -- woman mayor of Baton Rouge. Her husband had been mayor, and when he died, the city apparently decided to name a park after him (Webb park, right down the road from my house), and panic about the succession plan. Somehow, they just talked his wife into finishing his term.

I think most people worry from time to time that they need to be better people. I'm not immune to such thoughts, so I started to take stock in the bad things that I've done.

My buddy Perv used to refer to the "Porn Fairy" from time to time. I wasn't sure until recently whether this was a widely known term or just something that he came up with. It seems to be the latter. Every boy I knew had experiences where they just come across unexplained pornography for no reason. For me, it was often a wet matted magazine lying out in the woods where I would play. There's no explaining how it got there other than as a gift from the porn fairy.

While my entries are in this reminiscence theme, allow me to spin you another tale of childhood. I guess most of us had that summer or two of childhood where we were old enough to run wild, but not quite old enough to drive or be tied down by a summer job of any consequence. When I was of that age, we lived in a subdivision in Little Rock with tons of other kids of my age. We spent every minute between waking up and curfew roaming the neighborhood in packs.

The other night, I got to trying to think of what were the earliest things that I could remember. I came up with a good number of short scenes that were all before I moved from Baton Rouge during Kindergarten. I remember the house we lived in on Woodbine, and I remember washing the car with my old man. (Specifically, I remember him showing my how to get the whitewalls on the tires good and clean.)