Chapter 24
“School’s out… teacher let mules out… one went east, went west…
” Remember that song and how we sang it the last day of school?
Remember all the excitement—how we heaved a great sigh of relief when we PASSED to the next grade.
It didn’t matter that we’d made straight A’s all year!
Teachers had US convinced that we could be flunked on bad conduct!
! Only the little man in the red suit with horns sprouting out of his head and who carried a smoking hot pitchfork around knew just exactly how rotten we had been.
And we were SO relieved to discover that HE had not been discussing the matters with TEACHER! !
We played in the sandy bottom bar ditch in front of the house. Pieces of wood became cars, boats, trucks or any number of interesting things! They even came in handy for clubs if we had the desire to disagree on whether the sand would be a river or a highway.
When the heat got absolutely unbearable—usually when the sand got all mixed up with the sweat which was trickling down our face—we ran into the house to get COOL in front of the water cooler.
Most of the time it was throwing hot WET air back into the already hot room, but we THOUGHT we were cooling off!
Just like we THOUGHT we were having so much fun not a routine.
These days kids watch the boob tube in air-conditioned comfort.
They ride to painting and music lessons in a cool car.
They swim in a filtered pool instead of a muddy river.
And two days after school is out wail about “being bored.” The only spelling and meaning we knew for bored was B-O-A-R-D.
Momma knew how to apply it if we got B-O-R-E-D and started whining.
So here it is the final day of school for this year! Did I hear three cheers from the kids, and three cheers from teachers—and was that moans and groans from the parents? Everything appears to be NORMAL!!