Wednesday, July 16, 2008

More childhood reminiscing....

Well what do library book carts, green granule floor cleaner,and flattened shipping boxes have to do with a summer of absolute fun?? TONS! Every summer after school was out my brother and I headed to the school that my mom worked at. Mom worked at Benvenue Middle School which was next door to Benvenue Elementary School which is where my brother and I attended. However my mom had to work through most of the month of June. So many days we headed to work with her if my Aunt couldn't baby sit us. We had a blast at the school.And of course got into some really innovative mischief. 
So let me start with the library book carts. Each summer the Janitor, Mr. Jones who was incredibly sweet to us, would sprinkle these green deodorizing cleaner granules on the tile floors in the hallways and leave them for a few
 hours so they could do their work. I like to think he did it just so we could ride and slide on them. :-) We would have fun getting the book carts out of the library and riding them up and down the hallways on these granules. The granules just made you slide farther :-). WOO HOO! And you could slide on them in your tennis shoes really well too! Remember those white Ked sneakers? Of course my brother was wearing his converse tennis shoes. Usually Carolina blue ones or white.
Now the flattened shipping boxes were used outside. There was the school football field down an embankment behind the school.  Now the joy of joys was to take these flattened boxes and ride them down the sides of the embankments. The challenge that my brother ALWAYS gave to me was to try to stand up on the box and try to "surf" down the embankment. Now I was somewhat adventurous but when I would look down the side of the embankment I would always chicken out. It always looked like we were 200 feet away from the bottom. My
brother LOVED to tease me about that. 
Next door at the elementary school my mom's friend Mrs. Imogene Tyson worked as the secretary. Her children were the same age as my brother and I and we also went to church together, so we would play with them if they came to school with their mom. We always liked to go into the school auditorium and act out plays and create musicals. That was a BLAST! Now please understand that the original Benvenue Elementary was built in the early 1900s. So the picture next to this of the auditorium wasn't too far from what it looked like. It was OLD! And truly falling apart even when I was attending there in the 70's. They finally tore it down in the late 80's. Of course they built a new one in another location further down the road. I remember the 2nd floor of the school having to be inspected by the Principar Mr. Edge. Many times he did it he was afraid he was going to fall through. I remember the swarms of termites in the spring. That was hilarious. Only because we had to have class outside on the breezeway. 
Ooops sorry I got sidetracked with history. Back to our antics. Usually Cindy, who was my brother's age wanted to play school. How BORING!!! Yuck! But we would agree and what better place to do it. 
But the real fun for me was when Mrs. Tyson would unlock the library and let me read to my heart's content. Now unfortunately I would get ahold of the ghost stories and then I would scare myself to death. Or my brother would figure out what I was reading and he and Rusty Tyson, who was my age, would sneak up on me and scare me to death. 
All in all we had a lot of fun. But amazingly we didn't have digital players of any sort, no TV's, no gameboys, no movies to entertain. Just plain old imagination. And wow what we could do! 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Your school sounds a lot like the elementary school I attended. It was torn down in the late 60s or early 70s. The gym was on the top floor. We would go up there to dance (the Virginia Reel) and our music teacher would warn us to stay away from the edges so we wouldn't fall through! But those green deodorizing crystals sound like FUN!!