Mouthing Off

I'm pretty sure that the classroom rule that said "Keep your hands, feet, and comments to yourself." was meant to discourage kids from mouthing off in class. It was a poorly written rule because the "comments" part had nothing to do with the "hands and feet" part. Almost every classroom had a rule about keeping your hands to yourself, and some of them extended the jurisdiction to feet and other body parts. The "comments" part was a separate issue that should have been covered by a separate rule. It was common practice among Cheboygan students to interrupt their teacher's presentation with random sarcastic comments. This would have been frowned upon in Sawyer Elementary or Gage Park High, and I was surprised to see how tolerant many Cheboygan teachers were of the practice. This teacher was likely not so tolerant of it and was trying to suppress the behavior.

I don't remember Chicago kids being as prone to touching each other as the Cheboygan kids. They usually did it in a playful manner, and I don't remember many real fights starting that way. I don't think it was sexual, although they might have been doing it instead of sex. I know that it usually got them excited, sometimes to the point of hysteria, but it didn't seem like sexual excitement. Back in my day, you didn't touch somebody like that unless you wanted to fight them or fuck them, and I never did get used to it. Like I said, almost every classroom had a rule against it, and most of the bus drivers tried to suppress it, with varying degrees of success. It's dangerous for people to get that excited in a moving motor vehicle or any other confined space, and I was surprised that more kids didn't get hurt fooling around like that.

I seldom mouthed off in class, even in my stupid year. If I wanted to say something I raised my hand like I was supposed to do. I have been told, by people outside of school, that I was a mouthy kid but, in those days, there were still lots of adults who believed that "Children should be seen and not heard." Old Dog's comment about the trees in Chicago dying off and needing to be replaced reminds me of the big Dutch Elm Disease epidemic. We didn't have many elms in our neighborhood, but some sections of the city did, and they were all dying from Dutch Elm Disease. At some point, the city decided to remove all those elms, sick or not, and replace them with maples. Walking home from Sawyer Elementary one day, I came upon a city crew that was cutting down all the trees on a particular block, even though none of them were elms. I asked one of the workers about it, and he said that those trees were all sick, or soon would be, and they had to come out. I asked him if he was referring to the Dutch Elm Disease, and he said that he was. I politely pointed out to him that the Dutch Elm Disease affected only elm trees, of which there were none in sight, and that the tree he had just cut down was a healthy Lombardy poplar. At that point he called me a "mouthy kid" and refused to talk to me any longer.

Some months later, a different crew came along planting maple trees that had been reared in a city nursery. I could see that they weren't planting them deep enough, and I told them so, but they didn't listen to me. When I got home, I replanted the couple of trees that they had put by our house, and they were the only ones on our block to survive. Later, as their trees started to list and lean, some of our neighbors tried to prop them up with sticks and wires. I told them that it would be more effective to dig them in deeper like I did with ours, but they didn't listen to me either. I may have been a mouthy kid, but my trees lived and theirs all died. So there!