Saturday, October 30, 2010

Roast Brisket of Mouse!


and other cool recipes.
When I was in the fourth grade, about ten years old, my teacher, an old spinster named Miss Westen, asked the class to write an essay on "What we did on our summer vacation". I think many of you did the same thing. I did this the previous year with a different teacher and I don't remember her name. She was fat; that is all I remember about her.
I remember Miss Westen because she was an old lady, I mean really old, over sixty for sure
and probably older than that. She taught my brother four years earlier and even my dad, like a million years ago! It was a small school and she taught everything. I have the mathematical tables permanently etched into my brain because of her.
I was so stumped on how to begin this essay on my summer vacation. Some kids had it lucky and actually went somewhere, maybe even Disneyland, and had a lot to talk about. Summer days in our little town were pretty boring. Well, we did have a creek that ran through the town and into the nearby hills and with my best friend, Bill, the two of us would hike this often, searching for treasures, catching frogs and letting them loose and sometimes actually catching enough crawdads to take home and make a meal. Other kids did this too and would be writing about it and there was that Disneyland story! How could I beat that?
Summer evenings, right after dinner, I would run out to play. These evenings are etched into my mind right along with the mathmatical tables! We played softball in the street and kick the can and hide and go seek and a million other games that would cause us to get so tired we would sleep so well. Sometimes I would sleep over at Bill's house and often we would sleep outside in
sleeping bags under the stars. We would find the constellations and learned to identify them.A favorite passtime was to pick a star, one star out of a katrillion, and make the other find it!
One time Bill found my star and I told him that I was really from a planet that circled that sun!
I was visiting here and often through time travel would go back and forth to my home planet.
I don't think he ever believed me but he always asked me questions about it.
Well, that was all jibberish, I couldn't write about that, could I? I'll tell you what I ended up doing tomorrow, if you are interested!

2 comments:

Ruby said...

Oh how I remember those 'What I Did On My Summer Vacation' essays.
Indeed! Experiences in pain!

Always the same! Picked blueberries until I turned blue, looked after younger siblings and worked from dawn to dusk helping in the house!

As you, I wandered the fields and forests, listened to my grandmother's tales and ate her home baked goodies, worked in her garden with her, but after the first writing these seemed unimportant some how. And, played all the childhood games.

But what did I do? Finally, one summer I went to Girl Guide Camp...fantastic! Something to write about when school begins in the fall. Guess what, the next year we were in middle school.....and no one wanted to know what I did on summer vacation!

Jerry Carlin said...

Ruby, thank you for your response, it will give me encouragement to finish this tale. I am not trying to bore people but rather "bash ideas around" and if I do all the bashing I get a headache!