I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
“A new truck?!? How ----- sweet is that?!?”
I could feel it in my little growing bones. This was going to be one special year…
I had been looking forward to my very first Back-To-School experience for weeks by that point in time. I had even made it the first order of business on my first day of First Grade to check out the fresh crop of incoming Kindergarten ladies and select the cream of said crop to be my future girlfriend.
In fact, I had a classic 80’s rainbow-shaped eraser that I was going to bequeath to whichever lucky little lady I ended up choosing. And that eraser wasn’t just any eraser, either. For some odd reason it smelled a lot like candy and I remember always wanting to lick it like it was made of crack-cocaine.
Just a completely normal ol’ rising First Grader, I was indeed.
Well, ignoring for now how creepy I just made Six-Year-Old Me sound, the point is that it was a new school year, and I was more than ready to move on from the trauma of being a Kindergartner. So naturally I was a little bummed out when I found out that I was going to have put my hopes and dreams on hold for one more day.
You see, back in 1987 the first day of classes at Unified School District 217 just so happened to fall on the day after one of my older brothers was supposed to get on a bus in Colorado Springs and have his ass shipped off to Navy Boot Camp.
This must have been a particularly joyous occasion for our mom, as she insisted my bro 1 Skinny Jay1My sibling closest to me in age, a rising 3rd grader himself at the time. and I join her and our aunt–the Shenanigan Sisters, we’ll call them–on the 4-1/2 hour journey so we could bid him adieu and/or good riddance in person.
Well as it tends to go when you’re rollin’ with the Shenanigan Sisters, shenanigans inevitably ensued, and we didn’t quite make it all the way back home that night. Subsequently, us boys done missed out on all the basic grade school orientation activities the next day.
No problem, though, right? Surely, there couldn’t be that much of a difference between the first and second days of school.
Now, if I’m being completely honest (and probably a little sexist,2I suppose you could consider that a pun… as far as that goes), when I did finally make it to school, I discovered that the new bunch of Kindergartenresses3I’m pretty sure that’s the feminine form of Kindergartner, much like Master/Mistress. was, shall we say, a little disappointing.
Nope. Not a single rainbow-eraser-worthy chica amongst the whole lot of them…
But the Universe more than made up for dashing my rather shallow romantic plans that day. It wasn’t long before I found myself marching with my class past the playground on the way to the cafeteria for our early morning milk break…
Newly renovated playground, that is.
I just about creamed the crop of my pants when, behold, there before my eyes was all sorts of never-before-seen equipment for our enjoyment and recreation: Swings. Merry-go-rounds. Slides. Monkey bars and jungle gyms.
And The Truck.
Sure, it didn’t actually go anywhere. But you could sit in it and it had a steering wheel and it had enough room for at least two more friends in the cab and…
And I just couldn’t contain my excitement any longer. I turned to my classmates to see if they were seeing what I was seeing.
“Can you believe this?!? Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod! A ----- pickup truck.”
I paused a moment when I was unexpectedly met with nothing but dumb looks and blank stares.
“Yeah, whatever,” one of them replied dismissively, “we all saw it, like, YESTERDAY. Jeez. Get a life.”
As if joy-shaming me and making me feel like a complete ass wasn’t enough, he decided to go in for the kill, taking direct aim at my social jugular vein.
Turning to the others, he loudly proclaimed “Hey everybody! Get a load of this dork.”
Goodbye, Special Feeling.
Believe it or not, the point of the story actually is that you shouldn’t think twice when it comes to showing your fam some love.
Sure, seeing my brother off to the military almost cost me my nascent social life.4In addition to gifting me with a lifetime supply of FOMOOTFOA–Fear Of Missing Out On The First Day Of Anything…which was somehow supposed to be the whole point of this story.
But Karma richly rewarded me in the end, for it ’twas that very year the school counselor officially labelled me “special”5It is left to the reader’s imagination as to which kind of “special” I was.…which I think was a good thing.
Oh, and did I mention that was the only year that I had two girlfriends…at the same time?
Yeah, true story.
Who’s the dork now, y’all Brotherhaters?6[Ad voice-over:]’Brotherhaters’: for those times when you really want to say ‘Motherfuckers’ instead. ‘Brotherhaters’: now available in blogs nationwide –get yours today!
Content created on: 19/20 August 2020 (Wed/Thurs)
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