Thanksgiving always means crazy Indians and wild corn and turkeys running crazy and a bunch of weird men dressed in tights with giant belt buckles the size of a bedroom window and women with a whole lot of something stuffed up their dresses and other interesting things that this run on sentence has no room to mention.
I will just tell you of one Thanksgiving. No not the one that my mom hand stitched an Indian costume for me (moccasins included) out of the thickest brown suede known to man. I wore said costume to school with no back up change of clothes and had to lie down most of the day because I was in danger of having a heat stroke. (it is usually still 80 degrees in a South Arkansas November) (was I the only idiot that wore a Thanksgiving costume to school that year?) (Be looking for this costume to be recycled on Tyrone the only African American kid in my church. He of course got the part of the Indian in the christmas play one year. I'll post a blog about that closer to Christmas.) (I will now stop putting things in () and carry on with this story.)
Ok so I'm in the 2nd grade. 2nd grade is know by my parents as The Year Of The LIAR! For some reason 2nd grade was a banner year for me as a liar. It probably had a lot to do with my teacher, Ms. Hollis. A tall woman, who had dark hair cut in the style of most of our dad's hair. She wore plaid button down shirts, like most of our dad's and double knit trousers, like most of our dad's and had a scary deep voice, like most of our dad's and a she had a MUSTACHE, like some of the dad's........I'm just saying.
So apparenlty I got a reputation real fast in 2nd grade for not being 100% honest. My stories included, but not limited to:
-My parents own derby race horses and we have a couple running in the Kentucky Derby and that is why I will be missing school next week. (the truth is that my dad is a pastor and we were going to Kentucky for a pastors convention) I returned and got up in front of the class and told a big long, long story about my dad's horse and his great win at the Derby! (I got busted at the parent/teacher conference when Ms. Hollis congratulated my mom on our horses big win.)
-I raced motor cross (dirt bikes) and I was going out of town to race in the national chamionship. ( truth is it was another trip with my dad, he was preaching for some church out of town) I again returned and told my class all about my big win. Don't think Ms. Hollis gave me the floor anymore after racehorse gate so I gathered them all at recess. Sad thing is that Jason Jeeter was convinced that he saw me win on TV!
-Came into class one day wearing sun glasses and Ms. Hollis told me to take them off. I explained to her that these were perscription glasses that I needed to read the chalk board. We argued for a moment about the reality of my story and then she threatened to put my name on the board and I agreed to take them off, but stated that I wouldn't be able to see. I forgot to bring my cool shades the next day and Ms. Hollis first thing says from the front of the class "excuse me Shane, but where are your glasses today?" That was the moment I realized I had forgotten them, so I quickly replied "I got contacts yesterday after school." Ms. Hollis was determined to prove me the liar I was so she comes back to my desk and says "really...then look up to the light, I want to see those contacts on your eyes." After she failed to see them on my eyes I then explained that these were some new invisible contacts.
-I hated waiting in the bus riders room, I was envious of the car riders because they got to escape the choking walls of school an hour earlier than the bus riders. We bus riders had to wait in a classroom with the lights out and watch cartoons. Now I didn't have a TV growing up and anytime I got a chance to watch tv it was like candy or Disney Land, but for some reason getting out of school earlier was more enticing than cartoons. So one day I just decided to line up in the car riders line. Ms. Hollis of course noted my actions and questioned me. I explained that we had moved and I no longer needed to ride the bus because my mom would be picking me up from now on. She should have known better. So want to know what I did? Well I walked out those prison doors with all the other lucky car riders and I walked down the sidewalk chatting with my buds and said my goodbyes and they got in their cars and I crossed the street and found a nice shrub to hide in. Yeah that's right, I could be inside in the nice a/c watching cartoons with all those other lame bus riders, but I was far too smart for that. I was crouching in a shrub across the street, free, FREE! This plan worked for a few days, I would wait til all the other lame bus riders came out and in the confusion I would slip out of my shrub and onto my bus. But one day for some reason I got impatient, could have been the heat, or the itchy shrub or ants, but for whatever reason I decided that once the bus got there I didn't need to wait for all the lame bus riders, I could just go wait on the bus for the rest of them. Of course my bus driver questioned me, but I thought it was just between me and the bus driver, I wasn't aware that the now evil bus driver had notified Ms. Hollis. So the next day I lined up with the car riders and said my goodbyes and slipped into my shrub and waited. Then about 15 minutes into my hour long crouching session this kid (Johnny Bush, for real that was his name) comes out the front door of the school, walks down the sidewalk and crosses the street and walks strait up to my shrub and says, "SHANE!" I'm like "shhhhhhh........go away......" he says "Ms. Hollis says that if you don't come inside right now that you'll get your name on the board!" She get's me every time!!
- other things I did in 2nd grade were take 5 pounds of comic books to school in my backpack most days, packed a giant Rambo style buck knife in my backpack one day, brought a jar full of fire ants to school....etc
Ok so back to thanksgiving. So for thanksgiving I went with my family to visit my dad's family on the banks of the Bayou Mason in Lousiana. While playing with cousins I hopped onto the tire swing right on the bank that slopped to the water. My lovely big sister decided to give me the ride of my lifetime and so she began twisting the tire swing round and round. As the tire swing got tighter and tighter my sister was constantly assuring me that this would be better than a ride at Disney World (which i had never been to and probably told my 2nd grade class that not only do I go all the time but my dad owns it). After what seemed like an hour she reached maximum tension and released me with a one giant spin. I quickly realized that this was not my kind of ride. As the G force was pulling my cheeks away from my gums I felt my pinky slip from the rope, I knew right then that this was not going to end well. That moment is forever etched in my mind as a slow motion movie, my sister is laughing with this scary man laugh (because it's slow motion) as I scream "MAKE IT STOP!!". I can hear my cousins laughing in the background and cheering with glee. Then my sister gives the worst wisdom of all time, she yells to me "Just let go!"
I've been holding on for dear life for what seems like as long as all the recesses combined that I spent inside the classroom writing "I will not lie" on the chalk board. Now with such spinning force on my body I am down to just three fingers of the ten I started with. Those remaining three fingers are clinging by the tips to the old rope, holding the fate of my life in the balance, so letting go isn't such a stretch. With not much effort but a lot of guts I watched my three white bloodless blistered fingers slip from the rope and I went sailing through the air. What would have been great is if there was a pile of leaves, pillows or blankets at the base of that old oak tree. What awaited me was instead the giant and very hard roots of the large oak tree from which this tire swing hung on the banks of that bayou. This was no soft landing, I immediately went into an all out scream as the pain pulsed all over my body. Those cheerleaders and my sister the ring leader suddenly became the EMS and carried the victim into the house. Once inside I was met by a team of aunts and older cousins and my mom, who were all in the kitchen preparing Thanksgiving dinner. This team however showed little concern for me the victim and didn't even put down their deviled eggs or stop stirring the giblet gravy, my mom just gave me a once over and said go put him on the couch. As I laid on the couch the pain in my body began to give way to the pain in my arm. I continued to cry and yell "IT HURTS!!", but no one seemed to care.
After over an hour of this the men of the family returned from where ever men go when the women are preparing Thanksgiving dinner and the kids are outside putting the smallest among them in harms way. Mind you I was still crying and yelling. So my dad suggested that maybe I had a more serious injury than just my pride being broken. My dad and mom packed me up in the car and drove me to the nearest ER. We were many miles from town and the nearest ER wasn't even in town but two towns away. So after a very long and painful car ride we arrived at the ER where I was X-rayed and it was determined that those roots had given the bone in my arm a good crack, I had indeed broken my arm.
This ER was so backwoods that they didn't have the ability to cast my arm. The doctor told my parents that they would have to take me all the way into Monroe, the closest ER able to cast my arm. So they put my arm in a sling, BUT they only had an ADULT XL sling, therefore they literally duct taped the thing to me. So while making the more than hour drive into Monroe my parents decided for whatever reason to journey all the way back to Arkansas which was another hour pasted Monroe.
While my sister and brother and aunts, uncles and cousins are back on the banks of the bayou eating a Thanksgiving feast, I am being driven back to Arkansas to see if someone in this region might know how to cast a poor 2nd graders broken arm. Eventually we make it and are informed by our Doc that a normal arm cast won't do the trick because the bone is broken to close to the shoulder joint. They place a body cast which wraps around my belly going under my left arm but over my right shoulder and leaves my right hand exposed just above my cast covered belly button. We then got back in the car and, yes you guessed it, drove all the way back to Louisiana arriving sometime that evening after the sun had gone down and just in time for some left over turkey, deviled eggs and giblet gravy.
Definitely a memorable Thanksgiving, but I'll end this story not on that Thanksgiving day but rather the following Monday when I returned to Ms. Hollis 2nd grade class with only my left arm exposed and my right arm inside my shirt. Ms. Hollis says from the front of the class, "Shane please put your arm back through your sleeve RIGHT NOW!" I proudly explained that I couldn't because I had broken my arm on Thanksgiving. She of course was not in any mood to hear another one of my crazy stories so she threatened to write my name on the board, but this time I stood up and lifted my shirt up to expose my new body cast with my little 2nd grade hand sticking out just above my belly button. That was the one day that she invited me to the front of the class to share a TRUE story of epic proportions!
