Because Throwback Thursday is just too routine...
An excerpt from a tongue-in-cheek, semi-autobiographical project I sometimes work on when the fancy strikes me. A little first-person memoir, a little travelogue, a little non-fiction socio-cultural observational reportage about a piscatorial subject near to my heart. Who knows, maybe someday I'll hammer it into a book proposal.
On the morning of April 21, 1986, a phone call was placed to the junior high school attendance office in Cretinous*, Oklahoma, a sleepy, forgettable little hamlet in which junked cars slowly rusting on cinder blocks were a much-admired measure of wealth; the kind of place where drinking beer from your front porch sofa while picking ticks off the dog and commenting on the olfactory and aural qualities of each others farts was the preferred means of entertainment on those evenings when professional wrestling wasn’t on the television.
But in
addition to doing its part to produce America’s future Honey Boo Boo
demographic, Cretinous, Oklahoma was also surrounded by innumerable ponds and
small lakes teeming with a gluttonous, ill-tempered brute of a fish that, much
like the anglers who pursued it, would eat absolutely anything it could fit into
its maw. Said fish was the reason for the phone call to Cretinous Junior High that
long-ago morning.
“Yes,
hello, this is Chad Love’s father. I was just calling to let you know that Chad
won’t be in school today. We’re attending his aunt’s funeral. Poor woman, she
died in a tragic sheep-dipping accident. Chad’s quite distraught over it, she
was his favorite aunt.”
A pause.
Something being said on the other end of the line. “No, no, his grandmother was
last week, God rest her soul, she never should have been allowed on the
tractor. This week is his aunt. Yes, it has been a rough couple of weeks for
all of us. Yes, yes, thank you for the
kind words, and Chad should be back to school tomorrow. Goodbye.”
My "father", who was two years my senior, and who had a preternaturally deep voice for a seventeen-year-old, hung up,
turned to me and said, “OK, they bought it. Grab the rods and let’s get the
hell outta here.”
Thus was
the American educational system denied yet another day – in a long, long list
of days - in the life of a lost and obsessed soul. I didn’t know it at the
time, but that same basic pattern of subterfuge and avoidance of responsibility
would be repeated endlessly throughout an adolescence and young
adulthood spent almost entirely in the pursuit of scrounging gas money for whatever
smoking wreck one of us happened to be driving at the time. We needed just enough to get us to the nearest body of water, and possibly back.
And while my lack of ambition, foresight, or concern for my future would, later in life, doom me
to an existence of poverty and unrealized potential, I, of course, had no way of
knowing that at the time, because I was young, stupid, and having too much
fun. There were certainly worse ways to grow up.
*not its real name, but probably should be...
