By John Grindrod
Guest Columnist
While the winter that came and went so very quickly as time often does for us older folks was more a whisper than a shout, it’s still always good to welcome May’s warmth.
Back in my teaching days I greeted each of those 32 Mays with open arms. At May’s beginning, in all three schools in which I taught, both students and teachers alike were anxious to put our academic burdens down and welcome in the summer. For most of the students it was a break, but for me, a chance to work and earn extra money to supplement a pretty skimpy teaching salary.
Long before my teaching days, I also remember each May the unbridled joy of reaching the end of school years, especially those St. Charles Elementary ones when I could look forward to a summer without the disapproving (albeit well-deserved) looks of my Good Sisters of Charity.
Yet while I have some very fond memories of May, there’s one memory from the end of my junior year at LCC that still evokes some shame that I feel it whenever I recall my youthful missteps. And, there is one that flashes across my hippocampus every time I drive south down Nixon and pass a house at the intersection where Oakland Parkway crosses.
It was a balmy, sunny early May Saturday, the kind of day we had CKLW on full bore as my pals and I were driving around in my bestie’s parents’ ’65 Chevy Impala Super Sport.
In many ways, we were typical teens, I suppose, as in too dumb to know what we didn’t know, far too self-involved and far too full of the type of false arrogance that, of course, masked our insecurities.
We did our cruising up and down residential streets whenever someone could secure his family’s second car on Saturdays as we awaited darkness to fall so we could make that tour of North Street from the Red Barn, past Spyker’s and down to Big Boy.
And, we had our silly rituals, one of which was the Chinese fire drill, where everyone jumps out, and runs around the car and gets back in. Now, I will tell you that on this beautiful May Saturday when Greg pulled to an abrupt stop after turning onto Oakland Parkway, a slightly different version of what we’d done on numerous occasions took place. Unbeknownst to me, my pals had conspired against me and when I jumped out from my shotgun seat, no one else did and away three howling teens sped.
Now so far, my recollection has no taint of shame and wouldn’t have had I laughed at myself for being duped, sat down in the grass and waited for my friends to return.
But, here’s why I always feel that twinge of shame whenever I look at that house on the southwest corner of those two streets. Instead of accepting the universal “guy” truth that there will be times when you’ll be the recipient of practical jokes, I reacted differently and let loose at the top of my lungs a stream of extraordinary profanity, those “cool” new words we hadn’t learned all that long ago, the ones we tried to put new combinations together to show off for each other.
From that southwest Nixon-Oakland Parkway corner house, a screen door swung open and a young father bolted down the steps and hurried across the grassy boulevard headed straight for me. When he arrived in front of me, I was the recipient of a world-class lecture, one delivered without one word of profanity. He pointed to his two young daughters playing in the front yard and forcefully told me that the language I was using was completely unacceptable. He went on to say that in my life I’ll be judged by others by my actions and words. He ended by telling me something I’ve never forgotten. He told me while most things have their own time and place, there are also other things which have no time and no place, meaning, of course, my behavior.
I dropped my head, mumbled my apologies and endured the rest of the five-minute wait that seemed an eternity for the car to swing back around to pick me up as he walked back to that house. Frankly, I was so embarrassed that when I got back into the car, I said not one word about what had just happened.
While May’s beginning can evoke so many pleasant remembrances, there’s indeed one from my young-and-dumb teen years that still resonates some 57 years hence. It was a time when there was community parenting that proved there was certainly veracity in the proverb that begins with “It takes a village.”
John Grindrod is a regular columnist for The Lima News, a freelance writer and editor and the author of two books. Reach him at [email protected].
