August 2020 – Welcome

Ripon: Sophomore Year

Welcome back folks. Today we’re going to talk about my Sophomore year and the summer leading into it. This was a very enjoyable summer for me. I made some great friends, got into a bit of shenanigans, learned a lot, and thought I figured out my career path. The school year became far more interesting as driver’s licenses began being earned. This one’s going to be one of my longer ones, so prepare yourself.

The summer of my fifteenth year on this planet found me doing a different job out at the Green Lake Conference Center’s Hotel. I moved into a kitchen position. I was in charge of opening up in the morning and getting the ovens and grills fired up, getting breakfast started, assisting with cooking throughout breakfast, and helping prep for lunch and dinner. This meant I was in at three in the morning and done by eleven. It sucked getting up that early, but it was awesome to have my afternoons free.

Due to me having to start that early, and not being able to drive legally yet, it was decided that I could live in the dorms on the Conference Center grounds through the summer. I ate for free at the Hotel, so food wasn’t a problem. I had my Dual-Sport motorcycle there for transportation. Being private property, it wasn’t illegal for me to ride it down the big hill to the hotel in the morning and back up after work. I also shared the dorms with several people that were much older than me, so my parents were ok with it. Besides, my Dad was the Maintenance Director on the grounds, so he was there every day during the week anyway.

The building we stayed in doesn’t exist anymore, but it was just inside the front gate and just past the golf maintenance shop. Our back door opened to the eighteenth tee on the golf course. Being employees, we could golf for free. I would occasionally grab one of the extra carts by the maintenance shop and just start on the eighteenth, stop at the pro shop to check in, and work my way through back to the dorm. I wasn’t supposed to take those carts, but then they shouldn’t have hidden the shop key where I could see them putting it away in the afternoons.

The group of people that I lived with that summer were a blast. It was almost like a sitcom. You had the jock twin boys who worked out a lot, the quirky lovable girl with the southern drawl, the mother hen who tried to look after us, the shy quiet girl with glasses, the lovable geek who also played guitar, and me, everyone’s little brother. They were a great group of people and never looked down on me for being the young one. Even the night we all piled into the boss’s truck and went into a local bar. I cannot confirm nor deny that I drove us back that night being the only sober one.

I thoroughly enjoyed working in that kitchen. Being that we served cafeteria style, we would make up a ton of food to run down to the line for the start and just keep replenishing at time went on. We recycled the bacon grease by straining it through a coffee filter and putting it in a metal pot on the grill. I had a five-gallon pail of eggs mixed up in prep for scrambled eggs or omelets. Scrambled were fun because it was just ladle on some bacon grease, dump a bunch of egg mixture out of the bucket, spatula in each hand and start mixing. When it was all done, slide it off into a big rectangular pan, sprinkle on some shredded cheddar (my addition,) a little parsley flakes for color, and off it went.

We cooked mostly for the conferences that came through. Some of the biggest were Boy Scouts of America, The Southern Baptist Conference, and Math Teacher’s Conference. We did a lunch for the Boy Scouts once of burgers and hot dogs off the grill. How do you do that for a conference of over two thousand kids you ask? Well, your maintenance department builds you a twenty-foot-long charcoal grill out of old metal barrels for starters. Then you run and assembly line on both sides of the grill with all available cooks on hand. First one lays down the patties and dogs, second one flips or turns them, third one pulls them into the pans that the runners are carrying. We were a well-oiled machine. The kids loved it, and so did I. The non-stop movement made the time fly by.

Occasionally one of the conferences like the Southern Baptists would request a plate serve dinner for one night. These were tough, especially for larger conferences. We would give them two main options and a vegetarian option to choose from ahead of time. We couldn’t do made-to-order and get hundreds of people in and out in an hour or so. As it was, all employees had to be on hand for those nights. It was tough but rewarding to make it all come together. Plus, then we got to peek through the doors and watch service that followed. I had never experienced a church service with so much singing and dancing in the aisles. I find it interesting how things work in other areas of the country. It’s almost like experiencing another culture without leaving the United States.

The head chef was a retired Navy chef. His skill set made him perfect for this environment. It also helped that he always had a plan for the leftovers. The soup of the day was what he referred to as “five bucket soup.” Meaning we would go down in the morning, look at the leftovers from lunch and dinner the day before and come up with a soup idea utilizing those. It kept our waste down and taught me to think of leftovers as more than just what they are, but what they could be. I still utilize this in my cooking to this day.

I did have a couple of “incidents” in the kitchen that I’m not proud of, but I guess I should mention them. The first was a little minor but involved a burned foot. One of the cooking devices we utilized were steam cabinets. These were metal cabinets that would seal and lock and cook the contents with steam. Worked well for veggies keeping them firm, colorful, and delicious, but it also worked well for hard boiled eggs. You’d fill a deep pan with some water and eggs and throw them in the steamer. One day while making said eggs for the salad crew, I pulled the pan out to check the eggs. After doing the spin test and realizing they weren’t done yet, I went to put the pan back in the cabinet. I caught the pan on the door of the cabinet and dumped the boiling hot water on my left foot. I immediately took my shoe and sock off to see it blistering already. The lunch cook was already there doing some prep work, and breakfast was over, so the head chef told me to go see the nurse. If anyone has ridden a motorcycle, you know that you shift with your left foot. With the top of that foot burned, I couldn’t shift out of first gear. I was also barefoot on that side which didn’t help either. It was a long slow ride to the nurse to get some ointment and even longer back to the dorm.

“Incident” two involved the preparation of ingredients for club sandwiches. The cooking of the bacon went fine. The slicing of the tomatoes went fine. The slicing of the turkey…well not so much. After finishing the second turkey breast and going to set up the third, somehow the ring finger on my left hand dipped low enough for it to touch the blade. I immediately wrapped it in a towel and threw the turkey in the garbage. I then told them to clean the slicer and called my Dad. Now I’m ok with movie blood, but my own is a different story. I passed out on the way to the hospital and again when they started cleaning the wound before dressing it. I only missed one day of work with the foot, but this finger thing cost me a week and it was still hard with a big glove on my hand after that until the main bandage came off.

I occasionally would work the snack bar that we ran on the weekends. This was for people coming in off the lake and was basic bar food fare. Burgers, chicken sandwiches, deep fried everything, hand scooped ice cream, and soda. I didn’t enjoy this as much because there was a lot of downtime. Not many people knew we were there, so it was usually the same handful of people coming in. I did make some outstanding burgers for myself at times back there though. My favorite I think was the Philly-ish burger I did with two patties, sautéed onions, peppers, and mushrooms and a couple slices of provolone on a toasted hoagie bun. Great, now I’m hungry.

My brother and I had bought a boat prior to this season, and he worked at the boat house just down from the hotel that summer. This meant that our boat was docked in the unused slip at the end of the piers. So, when I got done with work at eleven, I would quite often go grab the boat and head out on the lake for a while before heading back up to the dorms. It was fun being the fifteen-year-old anchored in Norwegian Bay with all the much nicer boats and much older people. I’d get into some frisbee or football toss with some of the college kids hanging out down there. I would be offered adult beverages quite often, but of course I turned them down. I was underage. Did that sound believable? I tried.

So, you can see why this was one of my best summers. It’s one I wish I could relive for sure. It’s also what made me think that I wanted to be a chef for a career when I was older. At that time, I had planned on going to the tech for Hotel and Restaurant Management and then maybe to a culinary school. Those plans changed as I got older which I’ll talk about in a later installment. Now back to school.

As you know, Driver’s Education is two parts, classroom, and behind the wheel. Classroom was easy and I had it knocked out right away. However, there was a backlog for behind the wheel, and they were going alphabetically. I know “K” isn’t that far down the alphabet, but there were still Juniors taking behind the wheel when school started, and I likely wouldn’t have gotten in until almost the following summer. So, I made the decision to go with an outside source and went through a driving school out of Fond du Lac. I believe it cost me three hundred dollars, but I didn’t care at the time. I “needed” to be able to drive. Not the best choice on my part as I got my license on the first try, but after three accidents and a speeding ticket in the first five months, I lost it. I wasn’t allowed to get it back until I graduated from high school and needed it to go to college.

My first accident happened out at the Conference Center when a person stopped in the middle of the road to take a picture of a deer at the edge of the woods. I came around the corner messing with my CD boom box, not fully paying attention, and rear ended their car. My second one was in the school parking lot. I pulled into a stall and flung my door open without looking, directly into the fender of the car pulling in next to me. The speeding ticket happened when going to lunch and driving behind the middle school. I was going thirty in a fifteen mile per hour school zone. My third accident and the final straw occurred leaving the school parking lot. I looked to my left to see a minivan with its blinker on, looked right, and hammered the gas. The van did not turn, and I plowed right into the side of it. Because two of my accidents ended up not being point violations, I wouldn’t have lost my license that way, but the insurance company was going to drop my parents if I remained a licensed driver. So, I surrendered it and had to wait until I was eighteen and had to have my own insurance.

Most of my friends fared better than I did, and I unfortunately leaned on them to get me everywhere. The two friends that I was walking to school with were now picking me up in the morning to drive to school. Instead of stopping at The Breadbasket for donuts, we now would make runs out to Hardee’s or McDonald’s before school. Cranking out eighties metal music and smoking cigarettes on our drive in. We had an open campus, so lunch runs began every day too. McDonald’s, Hardee’s, Dairy Queen, A&W, and the occasional run to Fond du Lac for Taco Bell. That last one got us a few detentions because we never made it back in time. We also found out we could go to Jim’s Liberty Inn downtown, come in the back door and get bar food while playing pool. They had the only thirty-five cent pool table in town and I can still remember that Guns N Roses – Sweet Child of Mine was A2 on the juke box.

On the weekends, I would either walk up town and watch the people “scoop the loop,” or get a ride down to Double R Lanes to shoot pool. Scooping the loop, I feel needs a post all its own, so I’m just going to explain what it was to those who don’t know. It was basically just cruising. Our main street (called Watson Street) had a double drive at the start of it that lent itself to driving down one side, turning around, and back up the other side to head back down the street. Three blocks later, you could turn left and there was a triangle shaped block that going around would bring you right back to the main drag. Pretty much everyone did it and it was the place to be on a Friday and Saturday night.

Double R Lanes was obviously the local bowling center. It’s changed hands a bunch of times since I hung out there back then and looks nothing like it did inside. I would quite often get a ride from my brother down there to shoot pool. Several of my classmates as well as kids older and younger would go down there either to bowl, play video games, or shoot pool. I feel like I was a better shot back then than I am now, probably because I was down there multiple times a week and shot all night long.

There was really only one or two times I can remember there being any trouble down there and one of those times was because of me. This situation started in school. I was in shop class working on a lawnmower engine with one of my friends. This class had some Juniors as well as Sophomores in it. Due to a theft, we only had one set of metric sockets and due to me getting there a little early, I had that set. A couple of Juniors decided they wanted that set and tried to take it from me to which I did not relinquish said sockets. After using my sarcastic wit and intelligence to make them both look stupid, it ended with the larger of the two holding my arms and the other one grabbing me around the neck. The teacher broke it up and one of the two said, “I know where you hang out. I’ll see you Friday night.” I laughed him off and went about my business. I mentioned this to my brother, who also hung out at the lanes with his friends, and he said, “if it happens, it’ll be fair.” That Friday, this gentleman showed up with one of his friends and got in my face while I was shooting pool. I agreed to meet him outside. Once him and I walked past my brother, my brother stepped in between this guy and his friend telling him that his friend was staying inside. After much back and forth, and me waiting by the door, he said, “You’re not worth my time,” and left. So technically, it wasn’t actually trouble.

Now that some of us had licenses, this is also when concert time started kicking off. Kiss, Ratt, Motley Crue, Poison, Tesla, you name a big hair band, and we saw them. One of my friend’s family had a fifteen passenger Plymouth van that was quite often the transport bus to and from the shows. Many good memories of very stupid things being done. One that I feel I can talk about now involved a spotlight, some colored filters, and another vehicle in our group. We were coming back from a show in Green Bay, and we passed the other vehicle for whatever reason. The driver of that vehicle decided to pass us back. This back and forth continued most of the way home. Between Pickett and Ripon, we came up with a brilliant idea. I pulled a red and blue filter out of the bag that had the spotlight in it, held them up by the windshield, and someone from the next seat back took the spotlight and moved it from one filter to the other and back again. Now before we did this, we had dropped back a bit and then came flying up on the other truck with these lights going. He of course pulled over and we passed him laughing hysterically and came into town first. I know, that’s extremely illegal, but we were dumb teenagers, it was pretty funny at the time, and not one got hurt.

You’ll notice that I didn’t talk much about classes, homework, tests, and all that school related stuff. That’s because it’s not really what I cared about at the time. School was a social thing for me. The learning was secondary. I know my parents would be upset to hear me say that, but I made it work for me in the end.

I think that’s more than enough for today. You’re probably sick of reading this stuff anyway. So, until next week, you know how this goes:

We’re all in this together. Luv luv.

Headed to Ripon Senior High School

Hello friends. Today I’m going to get into the high school years. High school, a time we all remember fondly…or something like that. Good times, bad times, and just ok times. But we can’t argue that high school may have been the single most important time in forming who we would eventually become.

The summer before my Freshman year, I worked out at the Green Lake Conference Center at the Hotel as a Dining Room Orderly and dishwasher. They served food cafeteria style, so as a DRO, my job was to bring the food in the warming cabinets down from the kitchen to the dining room as well as bring the empty pans back up. Plus, stock all the beverage dispensers, ice cream, cereal containers, plate carts, silverware stands, and general cleanup after meals. Grunt work, but I was fourteen, what else is there at that age. Once school started, I was done out there for the season, but I still helped my Dad on his side jobs on the weekends.

Freshman year was a pretty good one. I had lockers next to one of my good friends, and I knew some of the upper classmen from early football practices, so that helped a little. Almost all my classes were on the same side of the school which kept late to class detentions to a minimum. We also started a tradition. A couple of my friends, including one of my best friends who lived near by me, would walk to school together. When we got there, we’d drop our stuff at our lockers and just walk laps around the halls talking stupid and saying hi to our other friends. It doesn’t seem like much, but you’ll learn in a later post just how awesome that was.

I was far from the model student, and I may have had acquired a detention or ten here or there, but hey, I showed up most days. And that’s something, right? I had a knack for making teachers a bit upset with me because I wouldn’t do the homework most of the time, but consistently got As and Bs on the tests. I understood the stuff, I was just a bit lazy. I heard that “if you would only apply yourself” speech so many times I should have gotten it tattooed on my chest. I was even accused of cheating by the biology teacher once, so I told him to give me another test and I’d sit alone in the room with him watching the whole time I took the test. I ended up getting a better grade on the second test.

Shop class got a whole lot better. We got to start welding. I enjoyed this immensely, except for maybe that day a classmate set himself on fire with the torch and proceeded to yell, “I’m on fire, I’m on fire” while trying to put himself out with the hand that was still holding the lit torch. We did finally get him to drop the torch so we could put his arm out. He suffered very minor injuries, but we were done welding for the day.

How many of you remember the trick of jamming two pennies into the bottom of your locker door so it wouldn’t lock? I couldn’t remember the combination to save my soul, so I did that on week two and it stayed like that almost the whole four years. Almost. One morning during second semester, I came in to see my locker partner standing by the locker with his backpack in his hand. He said someone had taken the pennies out and he couldn’t remember the combination. I couldn’t either, but lucky for both of us, I had scratched the combination into the metal above a locker three lockers away from us. I know, destruction of school property, blah blah blah. But smart. Wasn’t above our locker, so we wouldn’t get blamed for it, and it saved us that day.

I wasn’t much for study hall. I usually just sat there listening to Metallica’s Ride the Lightning on my Walkman (Walkman is a registered trademark of the Sony corporation, I don’t know if they’ll see this, but better safe than sued) the whole time. I found out a good way to waste time was to volunteer to pick up attendance sheets. At a normal pace, this would take maybe ten minutes to complete. Our school wasn’t that big. You just had to grab them off the door and drop them in the office. I managed to make this task take forty-five minutes. Now that’s talent. I also knew which classes my friends were in so I could slowly walk by the door making faces or gestures to make them laugh. I only got in trouble a few times for that. One of the English teachers stopped me one day as she had witnessed my sluggish retrieval of said sheets. She proceeded to tell me how much potential I had, and that she really loved my imaginative stories I came up with for my writing assignments. I blew it off like most speeches I got back then, but in hindsight, it was really nice of her to say.

I had two after school activities. The first was football. Football was fun because you get to hit people and not get in trouble for it. I liked defense better than offense because there seemed to be less rules and less plays to remember. I wasn’t the best at it, but I enjoyed playing until a knee injury my Sophomore year put a damper on things. I’m sure I would have lost interest in it anyway because most of my friends stopped playing after Freshman year.

The second was weight club. This one I enjoyed even more. Mostly because if you start lifting weights in your early teens, your strength gains are quite rapid. Plus, we got to go on a river rafting trip. Most of this trip was like tubing. Tying off with each other and drifting, although the Freshmen were in charge of keeping the raft city off the banks. Towards the end there was a stretch of rapids and my partner and friend fell out of our raft almost at the start. He rode the rapids down with one arm over the front of the raft and the paddle in the other hand while I tried my best to steer away from the rocks. I can’t remember if he broke anything, I don’t think he did, but he was pretty bruised and scraped up after.

Speaking of football, sometimes when it rained, Coach would have us run laps in the halls. A certain janitor, who lived across the street from me and had two lovely daughters (I don’t know if either of them read this, but if they do, brownie points for me,) used to give us grief when we did. It was a friendly back and forth with him. One time I grabbed his garbage can on wheels and took it with me for a lap. Hey, at least I didn’t leave it in the opposite hall. Of course, then he tried to trip me with his dry mop the next time around. He was my favorite janitor.

Let me tell you a little story about Freshman Algebra. I was always a fan of Math. I even took four years of it in High School including the ones where you had to write out proof of how you came up with your answer. But myself and the teacher of Freshman Algebra did not see eye to eye on things at all. First thing we didn’t agree on was me sitting next to my close friend in the back of the room. Something about disrupting those who were actually there to learn something. We also didn’t agree on me being the one who had to move to the front seat. She also didn’t like me doing the homework she hadn’t assigned yet. I picked up on the basic concepts of Algebra quite quickly, so while she was teaching the next chapter, I was doing the problems at the end of it. This apparently was “not the way we do things here.” Let’s just say the time spent with her was very unpleasant and may have netted me a good chunk of my first year detentions.

Oh man I just loved school dances. Ya, I don’t believe me either. So, I went to some winter dance in the cafeteria because a few of my friends said they were going. After opening the windows, reaching down, and bringing snowballs in to throw, we were asked very politely to never come to any more school dances. I was happy to oblige. Less pressure for me to try and find a girl that would actually say yes without having a full-blown panic attack in the process. I believe my friends ended up going to at least one of our proms, but I think they were drunk when they did.

Well my mind isn’t coming up with anything more to talk about this week, and it’s past my bedtime. I know because the dogs are giving me “the look.” So, I’ll close this week out and we’ll start next week with the summer before Sophomore year. The year of living away from home for a few months and starting to drive legally, for a little while at least.

Until next time, we’re all in this together. Luv Luv.

My Welcome to Ripon

Welcome back my loyal readers. Today our journey moves to the small city of Ripon, Wisconsin. Ripon is the second “largest” city I’ve lived in with a population hovering around seven to eight thousand people. I moved to Ripon at the age of twelve. This move was not totally planned over time, but rather sudden. We moved the summer between me being in sixth grade and seventh grade. I’m going to start these stories with a few tales of what it was like for me to be and outsider in this little berg.

For starters, I had been in little league almost the entire time we lived in Redgranite and would have been going from “B League” to what was called the “A League” that coming year. This would have meant moving from overhand moderate pitch to overhand fast pitch closer to what one would see in High School ball. However, I wasn’t signed up early enough in Ripon to play at that level, so at twelve years of age, I was stuck on a team of nine and maybe ten-year-olds hitting off a tee. The parents of the other teams wanted me kicked out of the league saying they were afraid I would hurt their kids. I was also five nine and a hundred sixty-five pounds at twelve years old, so I kind of understand their concerns, but it wasn’t my fault. It’s just where they stuck me. Needless to say, getting yelled at by opposing parents and occasionally benched for games so as “not to cause issues,” caused me to lose interest in playing baseball.

Then the school year started. If any of you have moved schools in your life, you know its hard to find “where you belong.” Having gone from a school where there were maybe twenty kids in my one classroom to a new school with lockers and constantly changing classrooms was a bit stressful. This was made more tough by not knowing a soul there. As I said, I was a bit big for my age and I inherited the dreaded acne curse as well, so it was fairly easy for people to make fun of me back then. The first “who’s the pizza face?” comment hit before they even unlocked the doors to let us in in day one. This in turn almost immediately drove me into my shell.

It took me almost a full semester to start to make friends. Coming from the tiny town mentality where everyone hung out with everyone, I didn’t fully grasp the “clique” mentality. I learned very quickly though. One of my first and eventually best friends was a guy that was considered a bit of a troublemaker. And I guess to an extent, he was, but it was harmless fun…I mean trouble. He ended up playing a pivotal role in my life, but I’ll discuss that in full later.

I never agreed with this clique separation thing, so I did my best over the next several years to make friends in as many of them as possible to try and blur the lines. I fit in well with the metal heads and gear heads because that’s my bread and butter. But I also shot guns and went fishing with the outdoor sports guys. I played football for a couple years and that got me in a little with one or two of the jocks, but I was primarily on defense, so not the super popular ones. We did have a handful of what I liked to call the “Fringe folks.” These were the people who were better looking and popular but didn’t believe in class lines either. I still talk to a few of those to this day.

Unfortunately for my grades and extra curriculars, seventh grade was also a time when I just stopped caring about school. I would pass the tests, because I picked up on what was being taught, but I wouldn’t do the work. I didn’t make it past a week in band, and left choir after just one year. I tried basketball but wasn’t very good, so I rode the pine the whole time. I wrestled for a little bit, but hated trying to make weight, so I quit that after seventh grade too. Believe it or not, I was a sprinter for a year, but lost interest in that too. Just because I’m on sports, I’ll fast forward a little. I made it through Sophomore year playing football, but then I decided working and earning money was more important. I ended up having to do summer school a few times to be able to advance to the next grade, but I always managed to do just enough to skate by.

Because I wasn’t doing little league anymore, much of my summers were spent working for my Dad with his side work. Growing up, Dad never seemed to have just one job. He had his main nine to five, but always did carpentry and insulating on the side. With me being the only one left in the house, that made me his only employee. I’m not saying I didn’t make good money loading the insulation into the blower and hauling shingles up ladders, but that was tough work for a twelve and thirteen-year-old (who had never lived on a farm and would later become a soft fluffy computer geek) to do.

We first lived in a lower apartment on Liberty street in Ripon. This road is also referred to as “the double drive.” We lived in a corner house and that meant that if you were coming from the West, you had to drive to the end of the block and make a U-turn to come back to the driveway. Let’s just say my Dad tended to ignore that rule all the time. I think he only received two tickets from it though. Being on that end of town, much of my time was spent at Pamida. Perusing their cassette tape selection, flipping through the poster display with posters of Motley Crue, Judas Priest, and of course, Heather Locklear, and dumping quarters into the Donkey Kong 3 and Tapper games out front.

It was strange those first couple years in Ripon because I felt I had more things to do and more places to go when I lived in the small Village than when I was in the significantly larger City. I know this is a pretty short post for me, and there isn’t quite as much fun stuff as usual, but we’re going to call seventh and eighth grade my rebuilding seasons. Next week I’m going to start off with Camp Webb, move to a different street, and head into the High School years. I promise some much better stories from those years.

As always, we’re all in this together. Luv Luv.

The Formative Years: Pt. 3

Welcome back. We made it through another week in these uncertain times. Don’t worry, I’m not going to get into that. That topic’s been run into the ground on every social media and news outlet in the world. I know I originally said it would only be two parts, but I keep coming up with stuff to talk about. If you remember, last week I spent a lot of time talking about some of the fonder memories with me and my cousin. Today we do something different.

It’s time for school. I think I mentioned before that we only lived a block away from the elementary school in Redgranite. In those days, it was normal for kids my age to walk to school by themselves. For sure not out of the ordinary. Mom would usually watch as I crossed Highway 21, but once I was passed that, I was pretty much on my own. Our school building at the time was very old. It had been the high school back in the days when the town was bigger. It was actually built in the 1800s. It has since been torn down and a new modern style school has taken its place. Not going to lie, I was pretty sad the first time I went there and saw that it was gone. I stopped in front of the empty lot in my car for a while and reflected on the memories I had.

I don’t remember much of first grade as it was mostly spent getting to know everyone. I do remember coming home and telling my Mom about the girls in class and which ones were going to be my girlfriends. Ya, I was a six-year-old player. But much like my later years in life with women, none of those plans came to fruition. I think I just heard a collective “awwww.” Don’t feel bad for me. There were a lot of bullets dodged by those plans not working out.

Second grade was a big one. I turned eight in February that year, and in March, my sister gave birth to her first child. I was the only uncle in my second-grade class. I asked her, and she agreed for some reason, to bring him into my school so I could use him for my show-and-tell one week. He was a hit, even though many kids were confused because their uncles were “really old.” Granted, back then we thought sixth graders were “really old.” This was also my “dinosaur” phase. If you’ve had kids, especially boys, I’m guessing they all had a dinosaur phase. Every picture I drew, every report I did, every book I read, dinosaurs.

Third grade was one of my favorite years. I had a great teacher, who’s name escapes me because I absolutely suck at remember people’s names. Math, which was my favorite subject at the time, got a little more challenging. We learned a few basic Spanish words like gato, roja, and verde. These come in handy when Spanish speaking people are looking for their cat or you want to know what color the salsa is. I was put into a gifted program for a while to do even more advanced math because I had picked up on everything so quickly. This ended when I realized none of my friends were in there with me. I sort of sabotaged the situation until I went back into general population. I was also reading a lot more and loved it. I feel bad because that has changed as I’ve gotten older. I may need to reunite with books soon and try to reignite that flame.

My dinosaur mania switched to cars. We started going to Jefferson and Iola. Dad would take me to just about any car show in the area and I would study the differences between the years. The headlights, taillights, roof lines, grills, bumpers, and anything else that distinguished them. It started with Mustangs because my dad loved them. I always struggled with the ’64 ½-’66 but could nail everything after that up to the ’74. Then it went to Corvettes and I’ve kind of been obsessed with trying to know the year, make, and model of just about every older car I see ever since.

I think fourth grade is when a long-term crush on a girl in my class started. Of course, I never had the guts to say anything to her, and we moved before we were at the boys and girls “hanging out” stage of our lives, so that never happened. It’s also the year that I became really close friends with who turned out to be my best friend for the last three years I was there.

He lived in that subdivision that I had mentioned my Dad and Uncle developing outside of town. He had an Atari, I had a ColecoVision. I had my little Kawasaki; he had a Honda ATC three-wheeler. We got along great. His back yard was woods. We’d be outside all day together just doing kid stuff. Climbing trees, building forts, and avoiding his jerk of a brother. We’d race our bicycles around the block of the subdivision. The road was all loose gravel, so that sometimes didn’t end well and in one case required a trip for some stitches in his hand. His Dad did taxidermy, so it was always fun to go into his shop and look at the mounts he had on the walls. Deer, elk, a moose, a string of bluegill, a sturgeon, and he even had a full black bear standing on his hind legs in the corner.

Fifth grade was when art and music started to pick up and we got to do more stuff there. I think that was when the recorder made its evil presence known, and my personal favorite at the time, the autoharp. I liked it because it was kind of like a guitar laying down. Or at least that’s what I told myself back then.

In most places, sixth grade means moving up to middle school, but in Redgranite, it was your last year before being bussed to Wautoma. I don’t know why they did that as I think the Wautoma kids started middle school in sixth. I guess we just weren’t mature enough to roll with those big city kids. Sixth grade could almost get an entire post to itself, but I’m going to boil it down to just a few high points. This was my introduction to personal computers. We got ourselves a Tandy TRS-80 computer in the classroom. I was drawn to it like a magnet. It had some educational games for it that took a while to load. I believe they were math based, so of course I was all over that. We didn’t get a lot of time to play around with it at the time because most people just looked at personal computers as simple toys at the time. If only we’d known.

Do you remember being asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Well, we got an assignment to do a report on that and explain why. People in my class did the usual, Doctor, Nurse, Veterinarian, Policeman, Fireman, Astronaut, Farmer, or whatever their parents did for a living. Then here’s Bart over in the corner of the room putting the finishing touches on a picture of his future-self jumping a big pile of dirt on his green Kawasaki dirt bike as he wins the Motocross Championship. I always liked to add an illustration to my reports for that little something extra.

Sixth grade was also the start of band. I loved music, so I was all in for band. However, being the small unwanted stepchild of Wautoma, their kids got first pick of instruments. When it got to us, all that was left for us to choose from was French Horn, Clarinet, Oboe, Flute, Piccolo, and I think Bassoon. No drums, no guitar, no sax, and no keyboards. Well, I had agreed to do it already, and my Mom played the clarinet in high school and still had her extremely nice 1950s instrument, so I played the Clarinet. For that one year only. I’ll speak more on this when I get to Ripon.

Of course, I must mention the dreaded broken chair incident of 1983. One of my favorite female classmates had a chair that was different than pretty much every other chair in the room. We all had that thin flat plywood type seat with the curve at the front for your knees to wrap around. She had an older chair that had a thicker solid wood seat with a sort of butt indentation in it. Well, during an especially heated round of musical chairs, (probably to see who was first in line at lunch, and this guy loves him some lunch) I made a move to sit rather aggressively on her chair and broke the seat right down the middle. Now, I felt a little bad at the time, and she could have just gotten a different chair, but instead she kept it so she could remind me of how I had wronged her the rest of the year. At least I’m pretty sure that’s why she did it.

That’s going to be it for elementary school. Maybe one more post next week to finish out general life in town and we’ll move on to teen years in Ripon. Got a lot to talk about there too. I hope you enjoy my stories as much as I enjoy writing them down. It’s very therapeutic for me and I thank you for sharing in this with me.

Until next time, we’re all in this together. Luv luv.

The Formative Years: Pt. 2

Welcome back everyone. I’m glad you decided to read on. Today I’m going to delve a little deeper into my time in the small community of Redgranite, Wisconsin between the ages of six and twelve and one person in particular who made that time special.

I’ve mentioned my cousin before, and she’s part of a lot of memories and experiences from that time, so I’m going to start with some of the experiences that she and I had over the years. One of her favorite stories to tell involves ice cream. I have mentioned the restaurant that my Mom worked at, Griff’s in my previous post. Griff’s had a side window in it that you could walk up to, ring the bell, and someone would come and server you ice cream or drinks out of it. It was primarily for the people swimming in the quarry so they wouldn’t have to get dressed to get some refreshments.

Quite often throughout the summer, my cousin and I would walk up to get a couple of twist cones. With everyone working there knowing who we were, those cones quite often ended up being far taller than they should have been. On one particularly warm summer day, we left with our cones and headed off down the street. In front of Elmer’s Pizza was a stone wall that had some lower sections that were in the shade. We decided we would hop up on this wall and enjoy our treats. Right before this happened, her ice cream slid off her cone and onto the ground. I of course, thought this was quite funny and started laughing as any kid would. She did not think it was that funny at all. Before I could offer to share mine with her, she grabbed my ice cream off my cone with her hand and threw it on the ground.

After my initial shock, I started laughing again and told her I would have shared. At this point, I can’t for the life of me remember if we went back and said our ice cream fell and got more, or we just dealt with it and enjoyed our cones. There’s obviously a lesson in there about patience, sharing, and friendship, but I’m sure we learned nothing that day. For some reason, when the two of us got together, our IQs seemed to drop a few points.

I also remember when we first heard the word “puberty.” We didn’t know what it meant, but we thought it was one of the funniest sounding words ever. We would say it over and over, focusing on the first syllable and stretching it out, “puuuuuuuuberty.” It drove her Dad and Stepmom so crazy, I thought they were going to kill us. Her Dad asked us what it meant, and I said, without missing a beat, “A stinky bird.” Oh, the childish laughter that followed that.

For a few years, she lived in a house by Pearl Lake. Across from her house was a tree filled hill down to the lake. One winter, after the lake had frozen, we decided we needed to sled down to the ice. After scoping out the hill for a while, we decided that there was a spot where it was a straight shot to the lake in between the trees. Out came the plastic saucer, and I was going to be first…of course. About halfway down, and after picking up some decent speed, the saucer veered off course causing me to lean to one side and slam into a tree saucer first. The saucer broke and my tailbone hurt a bit, but we were determined. A decision was made that we just needed to be able to steer. So, we grabbed the plastic canoe and some paddles. Needless to say, that didn’t end much better. At least we didn’t break the canoe in half.

When we were may be eight or nine years old, we decided to do a local bike-a-thon. I don’t remember what the charity was that we were raising money for, but we went around town and got pledges on a per mile basis. The route was about fifteen miles. We showed up on ride day on our BMX style, one speed bicycles. The only two people not on ten speeds. It was at that time when a small amount of doubt entered my head as to whether or not we would make the full fifteen miles. We started off and all was good. The route took us past Pearl Lake, and I’d ridden out to that lake many times, so that was a walk in the park. But this route kept on going, and going, and going. At about the halfway point, I believe she started blaming me for getting her into this stupid ride, and I was blaming me too. But we kept pushing. I kept telling her that at least we weren’t at the back of the pack because surprisingly, we weren’t. There was a car following to help anyone with mechanical issues, and it wasn’t right behind us, so there had to be more back there. About two hours later, we made it back to the start/finish line. Extremely tired with legs on fire, but we did it. And there were some older kids on ten speeds that finished after us. That garnered us a certain amount of pride, but we agreed to never do that again.

Speaking of two wheeled vehicles, I’ve been riding minibikes or motorcycles since I was five years old. They’ve been a huge part of my life. In my early years, I started on a Honda QA-50. A relatively small and slow minibike. Dad had even changed out the sprockets so mine only topped out at maybe fifteen or so miles per hour. Well, one day, she and I were taking turns riding my minibike on a small farm my Dad had bought. It wasn’t really a farm, but it had an old barn, silo, and a couple out buildings. She was riding along and decided that she couldn’t turn or stop as she was heading straight for my brother’s car. She got it to turn a little and ran right into a shed. I freaked out a little and she justified it by saying, “hey, I didn’t hit the car.”

She’s probably going to get a little mad at me for this, but I told you that story to tell you this much funnier one. When I was ten, I upgraded to a little Kawasaki KM-100. This one had a clutch, five gears, and would do almost fifty-five miles per hour. One day, I brought it out to her Dad’s farm, and we began riding it in the cow pasture. This was her first experience with the clutch, so I was teaching her and trying to keep her no higher than second or third gear. Well, she was doing pretty good for a while, then she came in a little hot, panicked, and yanked on the front brake. It just so happened, the front wheel hit a somewhat fresh cow pie, locked up, and caused her to lay the bike down. Not a pleasant landing for her as you can imagine. A quite humorous one from my standpoint though.

At around age twelve, we had our first alcohol experience together. We snuck some wine coolers up to her room and proceeded to giggle and drink them. Things went pretty good for a while, but then her gut started churning. Before I get to the inevitable conclusion to this story, I’m going to preface it by saying that part of our delicious dinner that night was peach slices and cottage cheese. At the time, one of my favorite little side dishes. I’m not going to get into the gory details of what happened next, but have you ever seen a whole peach slice come out of someone’s nose?

I’ll give you a minute to scrub that image from your mind. I’ve probably been a little mean to her in these stories, but come on, some of that stuff is golden. But I do love her dearly and don’t know what my life would be like without her. We aren’t as tight as we were back then, but we always know we can turn to each other for anything. Her daughter is my Goddaughter and I love her as if she were my own.

People say that your cousins are your first friends. I’d have to agree with that. The stuff you read today is only some of the highlights of a lifetime of friendship. We’re to, how should I put this, experienced to do many of these things today, but we’ll always have these memories to look back at. We’ve had some highs, and for sure some lows, but through it all, we know we will always be friends.

Looks like I’ll be turning Redgranite into a sort of mini-series as I spent this whole post on my cousin. Oh well. Now I don’t have to think as hard about what to write about next week.

So, until then, we’re all in this together. Luv luv.