Time In A Bottle

If I could hold time in a bottle I'd probably be telling the same jokes over and over again. Oh wait, who needs a bottle?

Tomorrow Jackie and I will be heading over to BAM! to celebrate grandson Gabe's fifth birthday. Gabe is the oldest of four grandsons that were born one each to my four daughters in the same year. When our family would get together we always referred to the oldest of our 18 grand kids as "the bigs" and the next grouping as "the littles". The question was then asked as to how should we refer to this quartet. It did not seem appropriate to call these boys "the minis" so when Gabe's father suggested we go with "the dudes" everyone was in agreement.

One day five years ago when Missy was still pregnant with Gabe she phoned me saying she had a crazy idea. Missy and I both share a passion for history and she is now in her 15th year teaching social studies at Bloomingdale, a little high school located in a tiny village planted smack dab in the middle of the blue berry farms of Van Buren county.

Missy was due to deliver during the school's spring break and she wondered if I would like to be her substitute for the last 8 weeks of the school year. She already had those weeks mapped out, we would go over lesson plans together and I could drop off any essay questions from tests for her to grade. If I was interested she was sure she could get Rick, her principle, to go along with the plan.

Thus is was that one day I walk into the teacher's lounge during one of my off hours. Sitting at the long rectangular table grading papers was the science teacher, an ex football coach who seemed like a nice guy to me. I sit down across from him and notice that the only other person in the room, his back to us, was Rick the principle who was making copies at the machine which was against the wall.

Missy had prepped me about all her various co-workers and she let me know that Rick was a very stern, straight laced, by the book principle. When she would have her annual review she always hoped it would be done by the assistant principle. Rick would go over each of the ten items on the review list, check them off one by one, say some required blah blah and then leave. The assistant principle would smile, glance at her file, say something like "it looks like everything is great again this year Melissa" and then ask what her plans were for the summer.

All of my cousins know much to their chagrin that the story about the pig with the wooden leg is the LaBarge family's favorite joke. I've been known to have told it on driving tests one, two, maybe three dozen times and to be honest, I just keep getting better at telling it. So I begin to relate the story to the science teacher without letting him know it is only a joke.

I begin; "On the way to school each day I drive past a lot of farm land and last week while passing a particular farm I saw a pen and sitting in that pen was a pig that had a wooden leg". As I'm relating the particulars of the tractor and the swimming pool and the kitchen fire I notice that Rick's body language has changed and that, although still facing the copy machine he is catching every word. By the time I relate the last line"Mister, if you had a pig that special . . . would you eat him all at the same time" Rick's shoulders are heaving up and down.

Rick never turns around and acknowledges my story but really, it's the little victories in life that are special.