My sister and I spent the majority of yesterday making the mother of all strawberry shortcakes for my grandmother. It was a massive, three-layered monolith made with real whipped cream that made a lasting impression on everyone.
Somehow or other it got me thinking about those stupid little jump rope songs that we used to sing in elementary school. I had a teacher who was quite perturbed that we didn't know any of those songs and sat around doing nothing during recess, so she took it upon herself to teach us in P.E. class.
It would always happen the same way. We'd go
Strawberry shortcake, huckleberry pie
Who's gonna be the luckiest guy?
and skip through all the letters of the alphabet until we tripped. As a testament to how inaccurate these methods of divination can be, each person landed on a random assortment of letters. Either it's inaccuracy or we're all just promiscuous. I don't feel like commenting on that.
At any rate, in spite of how random it was, more often than not, I'd land on the letter T, and then we'd scratch our heads to try and think of guys we knew with names that started with T.
"Tom!" someone would shout far too loudly with a giggle and I would protest. There were only two other boys with names that started in T, and both of them were Trevors. People don't like ambiguity much. That's why we have organized religion and that's also why I always got stuck with Tom.
Eeeew. The thought of it was akin to eating bugs.
I used to spend time over at his house, true, but that was only ever because my parents got off work so late and I wasn't quite old enough to walk home alone. We got along but we couldn't be considered friends by any stretch of the imagination. In spite of his best efforts to be tough and manly, he was undeniably geeky, and unlike certain people who are cool for embracing their inner geekiness, he continued on trying to be what he so obviously wasn't.
He had glasses, for starters. Not nice glasses but the ones that give you bug eyes. He was kind of skinny, in spite of claiming to have muscles, and contrary to what he would have you believe, his sisters, both older and younger, used to beat him up regularly. Even so much as a dirty look in his direction would send him crying to his room.
But all these things could be overlooked, but for one thing. He used to make up his very own swearwords. In a day and age when we used to resort to using boring old words like whore, damn and bastard, his absolute favourite cussword was, wait for it, "fartknocker".
Or maybe it was "fart-knocker". As far as he was concerned, that was the absolute nastiest thing that he could think of to call anyone. He used that word religiously until he was at least 15 years old.
Some people are a completely different kind of cool.
Since then he's been diagnosed with a disease that has left him really short and pudgy, and with difficulties digesting the food that he eats. Not something that I would ever wish on anyone. Sometimes you can still see him on the street, wearing the same fisheye glasses, chains hanging out his pockets and bandanas with skulls on them. They still don't help. Poor guy.
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