as you might already know, my fifth year of life i started school. montgomery central elementary school to be exact. we lived on "the other side of the river" which meant we lived in the country. the other side of the river included sak-n-pak gas station. my dad and i went on date's there every friday night. lucky. i know. sometime we went crazy and took mom with us and went to town and had dinner at western sizzlin'. i would order steak tips.
there i go getting sidetracked again. back to the original story...i think.
sak-n-pak (that word didn't seem so foreign and just not right back in the day), hilltop grocery store and the catfish house were your choices of entertainment. and then there were places like palmyra and roundpond. i had a friend that lived on possum holler. and yes, there was no "o" in opossum and no "ow" in that hollow. and don't think it 's because the person that made the road sign ran out of letters either, that is just how you spell it in those parts. we also had morrison lane where yours truly lived. i lived on a nice, spelt right, civilized sounding road...uh hum...lane. can't you just see the trees bellowing in the wind and the flowers starting to blossom? did i mention we had a dog named millard?
when i started kindergarten, my parents made the decision i would ride the bus. i don't really remember if it was an everyday thing, i seem to only remember the bus rides to school and never the ones home.
there is a reason for that.
me and my pigtailed, plaid-chambray shirt wearing, hot pink shorts wearing self were ready. ready to get on that big yellow bus. because when you are five, you think that is cool. somehow parents are really good at convincing their children that whatever they think is a good idea really is. i was convinced. sucker. i never really thought about the fact that there would be other children on the bus, or the "goings on" on a school bus, just the fact that i was five and old enough to go to school. woo hoo.
let's re-live it for a moment, shall we? i step on that bus, go up those three steps. look around and oh my! there are other kids on that thing. big ones, little ones, a lot of 'um. my bus driver shows me to my seat. i am face to face with the biggest boy i have ever seen in my life. (let's remember that i am five, so anyone six or older was HUGE!) i, wanted to cry and resist, sat down beside him. he looked at me, and i was sure not looking at him. i have always been a scaredy cat. still am. his fault probably. and then it happened. he started picking his nose. H to the E to the L L O...i am a girl, boy! that is soooo gross. then whatever he found up in that there nostril of his...oh. yes. HE. DID. he ate it. looking at me the whole time. i am sure i had tears welling up in my eyes, because that meant he was gross and therefore he would probably hurt me. or put whatever treasure he found in that thing, smack in the center of his face, on me.
i will never be the same.
like that wasn't bad enough. the trauma to my little five year old self, seriously. then, maybe because he saw that he was getting the response he was looking for, because i was scared...or maybe his lips were chapped. he reached into his pocket and pulled out the original chap stick, black tube, you know what i am talking about... he slathered as much as two lips could possibly handle and then he ate the rest. you read correctly. he ate the rest. he ate the rest. ate it all. he ate his chap stick. hello, buddy! starting kindergarten today, trying to keep it together here, kinda missing my mama already. stop. please. now.
lets review.
1. jessica boards the bus happy as a clam, after all she does have new sharpened pencils.
2. jessica sits by a big boy. she will be okay, maybe he will be nice.
3. jessica was wrong.
4. jessica is not watching the boy pick his nose and...... she is watching, and her chin is quivering. she will not cry...
5. jessica is scared and the big yellow bus is not as fun as she thought it was when she was four.
6. jessica thinks being mature is hard.
7. jessica thinks the big boy that she is sitting beside has cool chap stick as she watches him get it out of his pocket.
8. jessica IS watching that bog boy eat his chap stick.
9. jessica is scared of the original chap stick for the rest of her life. and big boys. and big yellow school buses.
10. jessica sees this happen morning after morning, day after day. on that big yellow school bus that her mama told her would be fun.
this happened over and over again. seriously. my main memories of kindergarten to this day are that darn big boy on that big yellow bus and learning blue + yellow = green. but mainly that big boy.
but don't cry for me argentina. the whole year wasn't a bust. when i got my yearbook, a nice boy in my class wrote on the whole first page "keith anderson. his phone number. call me please." apparently those pigtails were magical to keith. i didn't call him. girls don't call boys.
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