Giants

When my kids were little, I would attend the parent / teacher conferences. When I walked in the room, and saw the size of the desks, I felt like a giant.

I used to hate those conferences when I was a kid, mainly because I knew the teachers were going to tell my parents all of the rotten things I had done.

I always followed by brother, who was a model student, so that teaches all expected me to behave the same way that he did. That was not the case. I was pretty wild. I took risks, and not in a good way.

Once, in Jr. High, there was a guy named Bob Grigsby. He was kind of a bully, so at break time, I stuffed the hole which caused the door to close. When the coast was clear, another kid and I took out his desk and rolled it down a hill where a swamp waited for more junk to fill it's desire.

We then rearranged the rest of the desks so you couldn't really the desk was missing. When class resumed, Grigsby realized that he no longer had a desk. My teacher knew that I was responsible, but had no proof and I wasn't about to tell her.
Another time, I brought a cap rocket to school. It was just a heavy little metal today you could put a cap in. Loaded with a cap, if you tossed it in the air, it made a huge noise from the cap. Our teacher thought it would be a good idea for the class to be silent for ten minutes. Ten minutes?!? That was crazy. I couldn't wait that long.

I carefully loaded not one, but two caps. While the class was silent, I lobbed the grenade toward the front of the class. The device worked flawlessly. Everyone was laughing except for the teacher. She instantly knew that I was at fault. How? Besides the seemingly endless pranks I played, she was also my pastor's wife, so she knew me well.

When I moved on from 7th grade, things got more creative, but never violent. I was very careful to avoid suspicion, and only got caught twice. I got the board of education on my bottom once, and had to write 24 hours worth of FCC regulations. Two others were caught with me. Our teacher was named Bob Berkowitz.

The other guys were going to write all of the material, and did. I told them they were crazy and that Berkowitz was not going to spend the time reading what we wrote. When we met with him, he just threw them in the trash without looking at any of them, which is good because my first two pages of the real deal, but the remaining pages were either blank or read "Berkowitz is a toad, frog or jerk.

I'm not proud of of some of my pranks, but at least they were funny.

See you tomorrow.