Back to the future — with WD-40
By Burton W. Cole
Lately, I’ve been possessed by an urge to return to the simple life of the fourth grade.
Mom and dad paid the bills. Mrs. Cuffman guarded the door. And all the work that crossed my desk was illustrated with colorful, smiling kids enjoying to their fullest a variety of activities, including diagramming sentences, doing long division and discovering skeletal remains of dinosaurs.
Very few of us in the classroom smiled like the kids in the pictures did when diagramming sentences or doing long division. But the faces we made at the chalkboard proved quite comical to the rest of our classmates.
We never did find any dinosaurs at recess, but we were convinced that some of those old fossils sitting at the teachers' desks had been around back then. We calculated that some of those old geezers must have been least 35 or 36 years old! No wonder they knew history so well, having been around before it was invented!
As I sit here today surrounded by unpaid bills, overdue work assignments I haven't started yet, a list of household chores longer than the remaining roll of toilet paper in the house, and the usual back-stabbing, toe-stepping jerks that fill the typical adult's everyday life, I found myself wondering where Michael J. Fox parked the DeLorean.
However, I have just found out all these years later that treachery starts earlier than I remembered. My classmate Ben zapped me an e-mail a couple weeks back reminiscing about the good old days at our little country elementary school. I was happy to share my yearnings for a return to innocence with someone else.
“Remember the class bike trip we took in sixth grade,” I wrote back. “Seems to me that you won the race back to school. You and John and Herbie.”
That's when Ben wrote back his confession: “Yeah, the bike ride. But I forgot to tell you, I put more air in the rear tire — it made me a lot faster. And me and John loosened up your handlebars so it made it a little harder for you to get around the curves.”
Well! Perhaps the good old days had a bit of cloak and dagger to them as well!
Of course, this was sixth grade, not fourth grade, where Mrs. Cuffman let me draw on my homework assignments and didn't mark me down for it. Try scribbling smiley faces and werewolves and superheroes all over your next project report to your boss and see if your raise gets marked down!
But at least in sixth grade, we all still loved each other and cared about one another's feelings.
“Then there was the last day of sixth grade where we had field day,” Ben reminded me. “That is where we all got into those big bags to see who could pick our faces up off the field.”
Oh yeah, the sack races. Seems like I almost won that until I was overcome by a powerful notion to turn vegetarian, starting with the patch of dandelions I nearly hopped on but missed completely—with my feet, anyway.
“Then we tied one of our legs together and ran in a straight line if we could,” Ben wrote. “It got to be real funny seeing everyone eating dirt that day.”
So now I'm thinking what was so good about the good old days in the first place? Well, besides Mom and Dad paying all the bills and 35-year-old fossils guarding the classroom doors.
Ben had the answer to that, too. “Today, I think I would really need duct tape and bottle of air and a doctor to pick me up because my bones are not what they were back then. I am going to spray myself up with some WD-40 on the ribs and maybe they will move better.”
Ah ha! Now I see where the real treachery lies! I have met the enemy and he is us. Well, our back-stabbing bodies, at least.
And if our peers laughed at this then, just think about this scene in the emergency room:
DOCTOR: A nasty fall, but the patient appears to have no broken ribs. What's that smell?
EMT: I believe that's WD-40.
DOCTOR: What happened?
EMT: Well, he got to reminiscing about elementary school, squeezed himself into a sack and started hopping around his front yard. I think that's what he said. It was hard to make out through the mouthful of dandelions.
Take a trip down memory lane with Cole at burton.w.cole @ gmail.com or the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.