Crazy Things

I've always loved the taste of wintergreen. All my life it is one of my favorite flavors. My first experience with the taste of wintergreen was in Kindergarten. Remember the big glop of paste that our teachers would put in the center of the art table. Don't ask me what possessed me as a child to taste it, but I did. You know what flavor it is? Wintergreen!! Yes, I was that kid that ate the paste. Now as an adult, I wonder what paste contained that may have caused me harm, because I ate that stuff like peanut butter.

I was usually one of the kids that was selected to assist my teacher with the distribution of items we needed in order to complete different phases of our lessons. You know what my favorite part was? Remember ditto copiers? When the teacher needed to give a particular lesson, she would put her request into the office and office staff would wait until the last minute to get those copies back to the teacher. She would put the stack into my arms and usually they were still damp with the fluid that had been transferred on to it during the printing process. You guessed it, I got a whiff of that stuff and I was hooked. As I was passing the papers out to students, I would smell their papers because I loved the smell so much. Finally, when it was time to sit in my seat, I would sit and inhale every bit of my printed sheet of paper. I remember doing this act of craziness as long as ditto papers existed. One time they asked students if they wanted to help office staff use the ditto machine to get a high quantity of papers out to students. You guessed it, I volunteered. I cranked that ditto drum and snorted it the whole time. Please remember I was a kid and I didn't realize that breathing in toxic or non-toxic chemicals could cause harm to one's health. To this day, I am into aromatherapy.

In fifth grade, I remember a group of us sitting around because we had finished our art projects. There was that big jar of Elmer's glue just sitting there unattended, so we got a brilliant idea. Let's put it on the palms of our hands and let it dry, so we could peel it off. We must have had a really nice teacher, because she actually watched us do it. We sat there and blew on our hands to activate the drying faster. After the white disappeared and the tackiness went away, it was ready to try to peel it off in one piece. That became the goal. We did this quite often.

Remember making candles in class? I used to love that project. Dipping the string in wax over and over again until you made a candle. Then we were taught to pour the wax into molds and that's when things got interesting. Once our candles were made and there were tubs full of melted wax, we would start with dipping our fingers and pretty soon we were putting our whole hands into the wax over and over again, until we had a thick enough wax layer to wriggle our hands out of the waxed glove. Why? I remember sometimes the wax really got hot. I guess the safety of children wasn't a high priority back in the mid to late 60's. Again, where was the teacher when this was happening?

In middle school I took a sewing class. I will admit I was horrible at it. I think my dress got a "C" and I think that teacher was being generous. However, in that class I learned to take a sewing needle with thread and take the very surface of my calloused finger and put that needle and thread right under each tip of my finger and sew the tops of my four fingers together.

Here is one of the craziest ideas my Mom taught me. We always seemed to have thermometers in our house. You know the kind with the mercury at the tip? Well my mother broke a thermometer by mistake and she showed me how the mercury stayed together and you could roll it in your hand. So she left me there at a very young age, playing with a ball of mercury for about an hour. I remember dropping it on my floor over and over again to see the tiny balls of mercury scatter. I remember her saying that mercury is poisonous if eaten, but she didn't say anything about touching the tip of my tongue to it. Now that I think of it, I wonder what that did to my body at the time or if I had any after effects. I ended up polluting a landfill with it by just tossing it into the trash.

When I was in 4-6th grade, my parents owned the most hideous Chevy Avocado Green Impala with the winged ends. It wasn't so much the body shape, because actually that was pretty cool. It was that it had gotten one of those cheap paint jobs where you could drive to a garage and they would paint it within hours. Remember Earl Scheib? I'm sure my Dad hadn't realized it had been painted that way, but soon after purchasing it, we were driving down the road and pieces of paint started peeling off of it. After a year of peeling, it looked like it had a disease. Now it would probably be called a Zombie car.  I used to get so embarrassed by its appearance. So much so, that I would spend hours peeling as much of that paint off the car as possible. I thought that if I could just get the top coat of paint off, at least it would be one color. Gee, I wonder how much lead it contained. Eventually it was replaced with a blue Oldsmobile.

Remember the sissy burn? I had friends (boys) who would inflict that torturous scratching game of pain on each other's hands. It was very common to see large group of boys with these healing scabs on the back of their hands. I guess the goal of this game was to endure as much pain as you could before you would pull your hand away.

I remember when we were allowed to bring click clacks to school and play with them at recess. If you don't know what those are, they were these two strings with resin balls attached to the end of each string. The strings were tied into a round metal ring you held with your two hands and you would hit the resin balls together until they were rapidly hitting on the top of your hands and the bottom of your hands uncontrollably. I say uncontrollably, because 9 times out of 10, when you messed up those resin balls painfully hit your arms, eyes, face, forehead and would leave the biggest bruises and hematomas. Now that was just crazy.

My hands were always on the smaller size. I always tell people that they quit growing when I was in third grade. In my teens, I had this incredible talent where I could make a fist with my hand and fit it into my mouth. I'm talking about my whole hand up to my wrist. I remember I had so many people trying to do it as well. It caused a lot of laughter at the time. It's crazy what I did for a little attention.

The reason why I share these crazy things I did while growing up is because how could anyone deny that God is always with us? I can't help but think he must have a sense of humor as he watches our crazy off the wall ideas transpire.

In the later teen years through early adulthood, the craziness isn't as innocent as it was in childhood. I often think to myself, how did I survive the later year antics? Where I took risks, risks that could have possibly ended in disaster or loss of life. Certainly in my life, God put a protective hedge around me.

Psalm 121:7-8 -- The Lord will protect you from all danger; he will keep you safe. He will protect you as you come and go now and forever.