Kids do stupid things. I have the mark to prove it.

In 1972, I was sitting in class at CD Franks Elementary in Ashdown, Arkansas, when I did or said something that riled Sonja Yates. I don’t recall what I did or said, but it must’ve been provocative.

Her response was to bury the end of her pencil in my elbow.

The mark, over a half-century later, is still there.

When I mentioned to a group of folks that I had a pencil mark under the skin, I was surprised at the number of other people who also have the same thing.

I did confirm that Ms. Yates didn’t stab them too.

Sorry, Sonja. Just seeing if there was a pattern here.

But it got me to thinking. Why did we do some of the things that we did back then? We weren’t frequently dropped as infants. Well, not all of us, anyway.

Eating glue. Sticking a straight pin in the crease of our arms and closing it up. Shooting spitwads. (By the way, is spitwads one word or two? Spit wads is included, just in case.)

Hindsight, I think we did what we did as children for two reasons: To be noticed or to flirt.

Sometimes both.

During our early years we are all learning. Our experience is lacking in almost everything. So, we have little to say and even less to discuss.

But grossing out other kids? We can do that. And it sends a strong message. Not sure what the message is, but it sends a message.

Eating Elmer’s Glue isn’t the smartest thing I ever did, but at least it wasn’t a Tide Pod.

I don’t remember which kid at Burke Street Elementary was the first to present the two options to me for using Elmer’s to get attention. But it stuck with me. (pun intended)

You could either pour it onto the palm of your hand and then peel it off in one piece after it dried; or if you wanted it all around school that you did something really crazy, you ate the Elmer’s out of your hand while it was still wet.

I’m not sure what they put in Elmer’s Glue, but every time I ate it I had the urge to count to 10 by stomping my foot on the floor.

This also may explain why I didn’t major in mathematics.

Another worthless, yet valuable, means of getting the attention of other students away from their education and onto yourself, was by having a strait pin or needle on you.

Why a middle school kid would have a strait pin or needle on them is another question, but for the sake of discussion, let’s just say it’s OK for them to have one or both.

The trick, if you want to call it that, is to straighten your arm out and place the pin or needle in the fold. Then, slowly close your arm until the pin or needle is removed from view by your arm being closed all the way.

I have no explanation why the pin or needle doesn’t perforate your skin, but it never did when I performed this act.

And I performed it way more than once.

It’s a trick that causes all witnesses to wince. It also sends word around school that the same kid who eats glue and counts with his feet afterward, also can fold his arm on a sharp object without being harmed.

Spitwads were another way to seek and get attention.

Just as it sounds, the action involved saliva. It also involved notebook paper.

There’s an art to securing just the right amount of paper, and then mixing it with just the right amount of saliva to make the perfect spitwad.

For clarification, one kid from east of the Mississippi moved in around the fourth grade and insisted they should be called spitballs instead of spitwads.

We didn’t agree with him, so whenever he told the teacher that we were throwing spitballs at him, we said we were not.

Semantics wasn’t a word we learned until junior high.

Spitwads may have been what spurred Sonja to come after me. Or it was just as likely to be something I said.

Getting noticed. Flirting. Wanting to be relevant. All things that we all seem to want, regardless of our age.

But our youth was far less inhibited.

And many of us have the pencil stab marks to prove it.

 

©2024 John Moore

John’s books, Puns for Groan People and Write of Passage: A Southerner’s View of Then and Now Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, are available on his website TheCountryWriter.com, where you can also send him a message.