I was thinking about my teenage years last night, when sleep was elusive and my head was filled with past memories, and I made a realization. That my "oops" moments were a lot more fun than any of my accomplishments or achievements as a teenager.
Has life ever been as funny as when you were a teenager? How long has it been since you belly laughed, with tears rolling down your cheeks? Have you acted totally silly in recent years, totally unembarrassed and uninhibited by your behavior? Well, let me rephrase that, have you done this without alcohol?
Probably not. If you are like me, we have our silly moments, especially Hooterville and I, but for the most part the guffaws and haha's aren't as funny as they were when we were young.
I was thinking last night of how I was with Barbara Hart in Carolyn Weiss's dad's '57 Rambler, at the Goody-Goody, Enfield's local drive-in and the place to see and be seen. We were all sitting in the front seat, eating hot fudge sundaes, and she backs out of her parking space, no doubt to impress a boy, and smacks right into a telephone pole. And what did we do? We sat there, with hot fudge all over our shirts and we laughed until we cried.
I remember practicing for the senior play, and the boys came in with a basket of contraband apples, that they had filched from the local produce stand late at night, and how we all ate the apples and were shocked at how wild and daring they were.
And we roared with laughter, when a particularly nerdy teacher, while sitting on a podium in study hall, got his shoelaces tied together by some of the boys, who shimmied on their bellies to do so, while someone else detracted him with some insignificant question.
And I vividly remember being in the same study hall, when Janie Wilson, a really portly girl, went outside to lower the American flag for the day, and we all got up and went to the window and said The Pledge of Allegiance, with our hands over our hearts, while laughing uproariously. Of course, it wasn't quite so funny when we all got detention for a week for doing that.
We had a math teacher, Mrs. Cash, a really brainy woman, but a total oddball, and we would take turns daily, sneaking into the teacher's lounge to check her lunch sack - the poor woman brought the same lunch every single day. A cold fried egg sandwich and an apple. Then we would report back to the others that "yep, old lady Cash had the same thing, again!"
Detention was also to be had the last week of my senior year, when our business teacher was out of the room, probably down the hall flirting with the school secretary, and we all turned all of the office equipment backwards, turned our chairs around and faced the wrong way.
And then there was one halloween when the boys broke into the school late at night and put a cow in the library. That was quite the scandal.
And one day, the school superintendent came around the corner to see a chair dangling from the 2nd story math room. In those days there was no air conditioning, and no screens, the teachers just opened the windows and let the breeze in. And someone got the bright idea that it would be funny to dangle the chair from the venetian blind cords. So we're all sitting in math class laughing, the teacher totally oblivious, until he got a knock on the door.
Such silliness, and I'm sure today's sophisticated teens would think my memories totally not cool, but at the time it was freakin' hilarious.
Good memories of a more innocent time...
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