I started out as an eager student in the 1st grade. We had a classroom that had the 2nd grade on the other side. Right away I found that the 1st grade material was boring and the 2nd grade, which wasn't a whole lot better but was more interesting. I was always getting in trouble for answering the problems presented when no one over there seemed to know the answer. I was one time gagged and put out in the hallway.... they didn't use Ritalin back then. I still resent the fact that my primary education punished rather than encouraged me.By the 3rd grade I was so bored with school that I would rather stay home and play by dismantling clocks and reassembling them. This could have been the reason I became a sickly kid who'd missed so much school that I was set back to do the third grade over again.
The second time around in the 3rd grade and then from that time on I began acting out... ridiculing teachers and students alike. The 4th to 6th grades were my most miserable because of my frail body and obnoxious behavior I became the target of the class bullies. My father saw me running away from one of those bullies and he told me it was better to stand up to them than to run. So I learned to fight and never back down in those years. Dad didn't know that I taunted the kid all day in class, flipping him off whenever his glowering in my direction caught my attention.
It really pissed off ole Butchy that this skinny reed of a boy was so belligerent. No matter how much he beat the crap out of me I would never back down. This carried on for several months straight through,even though his pummeling of me after class almost every day for a couple of months, that it became an attraction for our school mates. This carried on until my sister, Barbara, interfered and beat him bad enough to chase him off. I was only mildly embarrassed that I had to be defended by my sister but I suppose it wasn't near as humiliating as it was for him to be beaten by a girl. We got over it and became good friends after I got strong enough to beat him soundly after a match for old times' sake the next year.
This rebellious and cynical attitude about people and institutions in general during this period that was followed after into the 7th and 8th grades, but, as I grew into a lean athlete in football, track and field and a pretty damned good speed skater at Cloud's roller rink. I learned to stick to it and never give up when it came to athletics and I even began to become a better student in the classes I enjoyed like art, literature and the rudiments of physics taught at that level. However, I never did let down on my teachers and I was the type of class clown that wasn't very funny at all to my teachers and some of my classmates. My new-found athleticism only made me bolder and attracted the attention of bigger and better bullies.
Around this time I discovered girls and the teaching of The Church became a bother to me. I had been feeling torn between a vocation there or a suspicion that the Church's teachings amounted to little more than sanctified bullshit. A morbid reflection one night... probably after feeling guilty about "spilling my seed"... I resigned to the probability that the grave was all there was to it and the worms got what would be left of me after I die.
(to be continued...)
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