average life

I’ve never really been a big swearer. I can count on two fingers the number of times I dropped the dreaded “F” bomb. The first slipped out after I made a minor error. I wasn’t even upset, just surprised. The second involved a cockroach and I still feel no remorse over that one. I generally feel that one can be imaginative enough in language without resorting to the same four letter words used by everyone everywhere. So with me, I guess, it is a method of standing out that, like with all such methods, is likely to be a way of saying, “I’m better than all you $&#@s!”

In second grade, it was a different story. My elementary school’s playground had a large pile of tractor tires that were filled with sand and strategically placed for jumping and castle imagining. These were simply referred to as “The Tires” and were important for several reasons. In a playground without decent shade-trees, these tires were your best bet for escaping the Alabama sun that weakened the will to live of even the most outdoors-y kid in the months of August and September. Most importantly, these tires were the farthest point from the teachers as they discussed new methods of child torture or enslavement or whatever else we imagined they talked about while they sat on their metal folding chairs under the shade of the school building. This distance meant that “The Tires”, however benign they appeared from afar, were really the seedy underside of the playground. It was inside one of those tires that Sydney Johnson kissed Jeff Morgan…or so the story went. No one actually witnessed the deed.

“The Tires” was the perfect place for a gathering of devious minds that someone referred to as the “Cussing Club.” My friends and I would gather around the tires during recess and would utter the most horrible, foul, and four-letteringest words that we could think of. We were no longer bound by the reigns of classroom rules or standards of morality that were crammed down our throats by “The Woman” (all of the elementary school teachers were female). For a couple of days we came back and recounted all the foul language we had learned since the previous day. Most of the words came from television, but some came from a kid’s parents, which gave the owner of the obscenity particular pride.

The “Cussing Club” lasted for about two days. After we realized that we really only knew two swear words, we lost interest. Some went to play kickball, others went to the swings, still others went to hang upside-down on the monkey bars, and almost all of us forgot the spot under the honeysuckle vines where, just out of sight and earshot of the teachers, we tried to grow up as fast as we could.