I don’t care who you are, you just can’t reach middle life without having done and said a whole lot of foolish things. 29 December 1934   Will Rogers

I have to admit that I have done some pretty foolish things in life, especially in my high school years. Things that I am not particularly proud of but I own up to them. Don’t get me wrong, nothing I did left any permanent harm on others and only a little to myself but some of them were a little bit unlawful. 🙂 I used to readily admit that I drank much more before I was twenty-one than I have since.  I guess now that “since” is more than 45 years I shouldn’t make that claim anymore.
I grew up in a small rural town in the 1960s and there just wasn’t much to do in those days. So every other weekend or so there would be beer drinking and drag racing out west of town along the lake ditches. It was kind of like the movie “American Graffiti” except the rural Midwestern version I guess.

Another part of our summer activities was to go to a local pond and catch some big old catfishes and then proceed to put them in  the school principle’s and others mailboxes. If you have never heard of this just try to imagine what the person would encounter when he opened up his mailbox during the hot sweltering summer with a dead fish having taken up residence a couple of days before. We always liked to joke that “we didn’t particularly dislike school it was the principle of the thing we couldn’t stand”!! 🙂  In reality our principle was really a pretty good guy but it was our duty as teenage boys to give him a hard time.

We did some pretty stupid things in my teenage years but I suspect that I was not too unusual in that regard. At least as the 1960s went. I was in college during most of the days of protests in those times but I must admit I didn’t get involved in that stuff. I was working forty hours a week and doing almost a full college load so there just wasn’t any time left for that tom foolery. But if I had the time I might have been right there sitting down with the rest of them. And no I didn’t smoke any marijuana but I did smell it in the dormitory halls on occasion.

I remember the time when grandma told us about our father racing his dad’s car down country roads. Dad did his best to try to quiet her but she was determined to get that story out.  Unfortunately due to not getting married until later in life I don’t have any kids to be embarrassed by Grandma’s stories. I kind of wish I had some; I think I would have made a good dad and grandpa. But that is a road not taken…