Old secrets slipped out at the school reunion of the graduates of the high school now consolidated into a larger school. The MC pointed at his head. “You may have noticed, I am missing some hair. When I was ten, my great-grandfather died and his body lay in the farm house for a while before the funeral and family pot luck.”
A cousin who came for the funeral told him, “I heard that you can smoke corn stalks and get high.”
“We went to the corn field. I got a foot long piece of corn stalk. I tried to light. It wasn’t lighting and we were not getting high. We found to a depression in the ground and got a little fire going. I held my big stalk out to the fire and puffed. It never started.”
They quit trying when the cousin realized, “Hey, we have to get back in time for the funeral.”
“We rushed up to the house, went in the side entrance, washed our hands of the smoke smell and then realized our eyebrows and hair were singed. I cut the singed hair off my head and eyebrows.”
The boys declared themselves fit for a funeral. They came down the back stairs and slid into the last row of chairs in the dining room. “We thought nobody knew what we had done. But, can you imagine the smell of the fire in our clothes? No one said anything, but ever since then I have had trouble growing hair up there.”
No one else confessed to any attempts of getting high. Lesser evils occupied the man who grinned, “We had a lot of fun on the bus. Truman and I used to put spit wads in our suspenders and hit the bus driver in the head with the spit wads. We got spanked once for it.”
Innocent fun and memories compared to the story that began, “I remember Jim and me when we were parked on a farmer’s field at the corner of the county roads. There was an open septic tank on the property with its top off. The farmer saw our car parked in his field and came running out the door with a gun.”
One of the guys and shouted, “He has a gun! He has a gun!”
Running away in the dark one of the kids landed in the open septic tank. Taking him home the alumni recalled, “that guy stunk.”
A co-ed from the 60s recalled the year of transition before consolidating the small high school into the larger. “When I was a junior we had to go to [the larger school] for half a day. One day my friend and I decided we did not want to go to class that day. So we skipped school.”
The girls headed to the highway where “We found a cute young Swede guy hitchhiking.”
The girls spent a couple hours driving him to a large city. At three, one girl remembered she had an dental appointment at four.
“The police stopped her for speeding. She didn’t get a ticket, but she told her dad that if a policeman called about her speeding, it was a fake.” In conclusion the former co- said, “With two schools, you can hide pretty well. I probably have the school record for skipping the most days. I skipped 68 days in my junior year. ”
With stories about smoking corn stalks, skipping school, spit wads on the school bus and a stinking night, the alumni rocked the old school one more time before going their separate ways.