My Stupid Year

I always got good grades in school and never had any check marks on my report card, except for my stupid year. I had some kind of constitutional crisis when I was 11 years old and in the sixth grade. Looking back on it now, it might have been caused, at least in part, by puberty knocking on my door, but I didn't make that connection at the time. This was around the time of The Great Blue Jean Conspiracy, so that must have had something to do with it as well. (Old Dog, that story is somewhere in the archives of the institute but, if you can't find it and are interested, I can email you a copy.) For whatever reason or combination of reasons, my behavior, both in and out of school, went down like a submarine. I eventually pulled myself together and got on with my life but, for awhile there, I wasn't the kind of person I wanted to be when I grew up, and I so wanted to grow up. I don't remember exactly how I saved myself, but I think it had something to do with hunting and fishing. Now that was the kind of person I wanted to be when I grew up, and I realized that what I had been doing was counterproductive to that end, so I abandoned it.

Uncle Ken said something about me never doing anything wrong, which might be misconstrued by anybody who was not familiar with the dialogue that preceded it. We were talking about sin, and Ken wanted to define it as knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway. I asserted that, by that definition, I was without sin. Sure I had done some wrong things in my life, but I didn't believe them to be wrong before I did them and, as soon as I realized that they were wrong, I quit doing them. I don't think we ever resolved that one to Ken's satisfaction, at least not yet.

Domesticated apple trees are the result of selectively breeding wild trees to improve the quality of the fruit. In the process, the survivability of the trees themselves was compromised, so they took the upper part of the trees and grafted them to rootstocks of the more hardy wild varieties. Wild apple trees aren't native to Michigan, so what I referred to as "wild" might more properly be called "feral". These are trees that were planted by somebody and subsequently allowed to deteriorate. Some of them were cut down and spontaneously re-sprouted from the roots, so they usually don't produce the same varieties of apples as the original tree. The apples that they do produce are mostly consumed by animals who could care less about quality. Some of these apples end up re-seeding new trees, but they seldom amount to much, and are called "scrub apple trees" by the locals. Once in awhile I come across one that looks promising, so I clear the other trees and brush from around it to give it a better chance. I have not had much luck pruning these trees to rehabilitate them, and have found that it's better to leave them alone.