This Weeks Very Short Story: Chapter 15

My younger son could get out of many things with a smile and twinkle in his eyes. One time this did not work was when he was staying with my parents in Las Vegas. He must have done something wrong and quickly found my mother’s hand on his bottom. After that day he always behaved around her. 

I remember at Lincoln Jr. High School in Ferndale Michigan that I and some other students were pushed out of gym class early. The punishment was to bend over and a swift swat of the gym teacher’s shoe on my back side. I can’t remember if this was real or a nightmare. 

When they finally built a built in pool at Oak Park High School, I went out for the swim team. I found out that practice started at 6 a.m. That was the beginning and ending of my swimming career. 

Not being an early morning person, in college I tried to get my class to start at 9 a.m. and preferably at 10 a.m. I think I only had one 8 o’clock in undergrad school. In medical school, they did not give us choices. 

During college at Michigan State University, I hated classes on Tuesday and Thursday’s. Those were days you went from early in the day to late, sometimes into the evening. They usually included chemistry labs, physics labs and biology labs. My last term as a senior my schedule was Monday, Wednesday and Friday…. Heaven. 

I don’t eat fish. I used to say that I only eat Jewish fish… gefilte fish, lox, smoked fish and herring. The only two other types of fish I used to eat were tuna which isn’t really a fish because it comes in a can and McDonalds’s fish sandwich which can’t necessarily be identified as fish. Now it just doesn’t happen very often. 

One time I went to Santa Cruz, California for the day with a medical school class mate. Somehow for dinner I let him order some type of Chinese food with fish. Well, I go real sick. Not sure if it was from the food or from my first time in the ocean or from the terrible sunburn that I got before I ate the Chinese food with fish. 

In San Francisco, we lived in three places in two years. The first place we had to move very quickly from. No, it wasn’t because we didn’t pay the rent. We just wanted to not live there when the police released the crazy neighbor the police had taken away. 

In high school, I would sleep with a hat on to keep my hair straight. My senior picture was taken with my hair as straight as possible. In my first year at college that all ended. 

Now that I look back at a picture of myself in college, I can now see why I had trouble convincing people that I was drug free.