Sept/Oct 2023 (Volume 15, Issue 5)

 

By Arvid Huisman

 

The kids are back in school these days. Back-to-school time brings back some bittersweet memories for this less than stellar student. 

 

Oh, how I hated to see the freedom of summer turn into the bondage of the classroom. Summer meant playing baseball, jumping ramps on my bike, shooting tin cans with a BB gun … Back-to-school seriously cramped that kind of fun.

 

The summer heat had turned classrooms into sweatboxes. Open windows only added to the misery as we could see and hear life in the free world.

 

To make matters worse, many of us had to wear brand new jeans back to school. Nowadays, new jeans are soft, faded and look like they have been to war and back. Back in the 1950s new jeans were dyed a deep indigo and were stiff as a board. A good mother back then would not consider laundering the jeans just to soften them.

 

So on those hot late summer days we wore stiff new jeans to school, the legs rolled up into deep cuffs to allow for growth. The jeans made “whisking” noises as we walked to our desks. Our little heinies sweated so badly the indigo dye from the new denim transferred to our underwear.

 

Back-to-school meant sizing up the new teacher and figuring out how much monkey business they would tolerate. Each teacher had a different threshold for “enough,” though most had a low threshold.

 

In sixth grade we learned that our first male teacher’s “enough” threshold was very low. One day early in the year he slapped a disrespectful girl across the mouth. This was our shocking first exposure to corporal punishment and there was much less monkey business after that.

 

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