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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I have enough plaid shirts for every day of the week, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson learned because of 8th grade love.
Have anything exciting planned tonight? I do. Tonight is the first live show for our new Falling Skies podcast, Berserker Cast. You’re invited to join Emilee O’Leary and myself each Tuesday at 8pm eastern over at www.goldenspiralmedia.com/live. The webcam will be on, the chat room will be open, and you can join the conversation as we break down each week’s episode. Tonight we’ll actually be recording two episodes. In the first episode we’ll be interviewing special effects guru, Todd Masters. You know his work from Falling Skies, Fringe, Almost Human, Star Trek, True Blood, and more. In the second episode we’ll recap the series and get you all ready to go for the season 4 premiere on June 22nd. Again, the live show is tonight, June 17 at 8pm eastern over at www.goldenspiralmedia.com/live.
Friday Forum
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What I Learned Yesterday:
8th grade. Isn’t that one life’s greatest times? Here’s what I remember about 8th grade. Tommy Connor and Jamie Freeman got into a fist fight in the middle of class and I had a front row seat. Russell Menefee was the star running back of the 8th grade football team. In fact, that fight took place in Mrs. Iscimenler’s class. Russell had accepted the challenge to score a touchdown for every letter in Mrs. Iscimenler’s last name. Interestingly enough, Mrs. Iscimenler told me that I should write stories that had the same style as The Wonder Years.
At the time I thought she was crazy. I was in 8th grade. What that even look like. I guess she was a few years ahead of her time. This podcast definitely has a Wonder Years vibe to it, and today’s episode definitely will. You see, there’s one other thing I remember about 8th grade. The girl I liked in 8th grade wasn’t named Winnie; her name was Ruth.
Ruth sat in front of me in Mrs. Iscimenler’s class. She had poofy hair and tall bangs like all the cute girls did back in those days. She liked New Kids on the Block. We talked from time to time and I eventually got the nerve to ask her to go with me. What does that even mean? Will you go with me? Where? I can’t drive yet. Anyway, back to Ruth.
At some point during the school year, shortly after Ruth and I started “going out,” she moved to the city. Even though Oklahoma City was only about 30 miles away, in those days it might as well have been a thousand miles away. After all, I couldn’t drive, and it was a long distance call from my small town to Oklahoma City. I didn’t have any way to pay for a long distance call.
My parents would let me call Ruth on occasion, but it wasn’t often enough. One day a friend of mine told me about a way I could call Ruth as much as I wanted and not pay a dime. All I had to do was call the operator, tell the operator that I wanted to charge the call, make up a number, and then give the operator Ruth’s number.
It seemed too good to be true, but I just had to try it. I called the operator, asked to charge the call, rattled off a phony number, and she connected me to Ruth. I couldn’t believe that it actually worked! I called Ruth a lot after that. I tried to make up a random number each time, but found it easier to rattle off a number that was somehow familiar.
A few weeks went by and no one had caught on to my scheme. That is, until the day phone bills started arriving. It turned out that the number I was charging the calls to was familiar for a reason. My family spent a lot of time at the local video store, and we called the store a lot to check what was available. I’d been charging all those calls to the video store.
When the video store got their bill, it listed every one of the calls I’d made to Ruth and also listed our home phone number. You can imagine how surprised my parents were when the video store called and wanted to know why they’d charged long distance phone calls to them.
It didn’t take my parents very long to do a bit of investigative work and pin the crime on me. There was no use in lying about this one. I was flat out busted! The phone bill was over $40. Now that may not seem like much money now, but to an 8th grader in 1990 it was a fortune. I had no way of paying for the bill.
We lived about 2 miles outside of town on a house that sat on 5 acres of land. About 3 acres of it was a field. The other 2 acres we mowed. We had a riding lawn mower, but it was old and used when we got it and it was broken most of the time. There was a low spot near the back corner of the yard that I hated to mow. Because it was a low spot, it always had more moisture and the grass was thick. Because the lawn mower had been broken for a while, the lawn was getting pretty tall. My parents had an idea.
There, in those tall, thick, overgrown blades of grass my punishment would be worked out of me one drop of sweat at a time. I would have to mow the yard with a push mower, and the thick area had to be done by hand too. It was miserable.
I tried everything I knew to get that grass under control. I tried going slow, I tried pulling the mower backward, I tried tilting the mower up and coming down on top of the grass. It always ended the same way: every two or three feet, the mower would bog down and die. I’d clear out the grass, pull the mower rope to bring the machine back to life, and mow some more. Ruth was cute, but not cute enough to endure that punishment.
I kept at it for what seemed like an eternity. I pushed, it died. I pushed it some more, it died again. UGH! I kicked the mower, yelled at it, cussed at it and my frustration came to a boil. I finally let got on a cursing spree that would make sailors blush. Seriously. F bombs, and mother insults spewed from my mouth. I kicked the mower one more time and decided my best bet was to go back and try and work out another punishment from my parents.
I turned around to walk back toward the house and stopped dead in my tracks. My parents were not inside like I thought they were. They were outside on the patio, sitting in lawn chairs, drinking iced tea, and laughing at me. My frustration had been their enjoyment. I’m pretty sure they got $40 worth of entertainment from me that day.
Here’s what I learned.
Be sure your sins will find you out. We may think we are clever, but we very rarely are. Especially when parents are involved.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
If you’ve enjoyed this episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday, I would be grateful if you’d leave a review in iTunes.
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