Egg noggins

I went into the Columbia Falls Junior High this week to take a picture of some pre-schools kids who had come to visit to make Christmas decorations. The experience, of course, brought back fond junior high memories of my own.

I took shop in junior high. Metal and wood shop. In wood shop I made a gun rack, and in metal shop I made some crooked boxes out of sheet metal. Like all my other failed attempts to make things with my hands, I disposed of them.

No, no, no, I didn't throw them in the red Salvation Army Dumpsters. I gave them to my mother for Christmas.

"Oh they're wonderful, Chris!" my mother lied.

My mother was an excellent liar, particularly around the holidays.

"Yeah, I made them especially for you, ma," I lied back.

"Well, they're just wonderful," she just kept it going. "Look, John, look what Chris made. Aren't they wonderful?"

Then she'd hold them up to my old man, and he'd force a smile while he packed the tobacco into his pipe. That was the great thing about having an old man that smoked. You could always get him Prince Albert in a can and feel good about it.

Three bucks. Bang! You had your old man's Christmas gift. No fuss, no muss. But back to shop.

The gun rack wasn't much better. The only reason I made a gun rack in the first place was because I was deathly afraid of the lathe. I had horrible visions of getting my hair caught and being scalped, or the blade slipping and gouging my thumb to the bone. If I hadn't been so afraid of the lathe, I would have made a lamp or a table or something, well, something that was useful.

See, I didn't have a gun. The only weapon I owned at the time was a dull Barlow pocket knife. My parents wouldn't let me have a gun until I could buy one on my own. But I made a gun rack anyway, and the joints were way the heck off because I couldn't use a square any better with wood.

Plasticwood to the rescue! I gooped the joints up and sanded them off.

Mr. DiCarlo, the shop teacher, didn't think much of it. He drew a big "D" with his pencil on the side of my gun rack.

"Is that my grade?"

"It ain't my signature, kid," he said.

All that work in shop gave us fine young men pretty big appetites, of course. Lunchtime in junior high wasn't even remotely civil. But despite that fact, the school administrators and teachers spent a lot of time fancying up the cafeteria in 1980 with Christmas decorations. They made up a huge display with a Christmas tree and a Santa on a sleigh and his eight reindeer swooshing down on a lunch table. Fake snow and everything.

When they got it done, the principal put an announcement throughout the school: "Anyone who touches or vandalizes the Christmas scene will spend the month of December in detention."

You could hear his voice trembling already. You knew something bad was going to happen.

And we were around to make darn sure of that.

Our lunch table, as I recall, was just slightly more well behaved than a pack of randy baboons. We had a bunch of other friends who sat at a table clear across the cafeteria, and this cafeteria was big. You could have played full court basketball in it, easy.

In between us was that Christmas scene, begging for a junior high Christmas disaster.

It took all of five seconds for Paul Baronowitz to throw his rotten apple at the other lunch table.

Tim Maniscalco, of course, stood up and hammered the rotten apple with his math book with one mighty swing.

To this day, I have yet to see an apple explode like that one. Hand grenades don't explode like that. Apple sprayed all over Santa and his silly reindeer with such force that Santa slowly wobbled and then, ba-bam!

He tipped over, off the lunch table and onto the floor, dragging his reindeer with him. Crash! Santa suffered a cracked skull, Rudolph a broken nose and Donner had a broken tail.

We laughed so hard milk sprayed out of noses.

Of course we got caught. The apple core rolled by one of the lunch monitors. We were interrogated immediately. There was no way we were going to squeal on Maniscalco or Baronowitz. There is a junior high code of honor, you know. Plus we had so much milk in our noses we could barely breathe. So we all got detention, plus they never let us sit together ever again.

Junior high lunch was never the same. Heck, eating an apple was never the same.

See, you leave junior high, but it never, never leaves you.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.