Penguins and Ink

The Slice of Life story challenge runs every day in March.

Serve up your slice or stop by Two Writing Teachers for a second helping. 

My Dad told stories about grade school this evening. He grew up in Detroit and went to Gesu elementary school. I started writing down his story at the dinner table. It's a rough capture.

"We used to have this candy truck that would come during lunch time. My brother and I would walk home for lunch. We'd have some eggs and then come back and still have at least twenty minutes to play. Marbles was big then."

"How long did you have for lunch? We have twenty-five minutes now!" My son, Collin, said.

"I think it was about an hour. We could walk home for lunch. It was only about eight blocks or so."

We could never walk home, I thought. We live nearly thirty miles from school. That's a walk-a-thon.  

We discussed lunch time, who had how much when and then Dad got back to his story. 

"Well, in the fall and usually the spring we'd be outside at lunch time. We could get candy from the truck and if we crossed Livernois there was even a little candy store. If you had a penny you get some candy."

 I felt rich with fifty cents in my pocket as I stood up pedaling my bike for all I was worth up to the Seven-Eleven with neighborhood friends. Penny candy, well that was the 1940s.

Dad described how sometimes they got more than candy from the man who drove the truck. "We used to get chips of dry ice from the guy in the truck. We'd stick the chips in a napkin. Otherwise it would burn your hand. If you didn't make sure there was enough napkin and you put it in your pocket--it got pretty dicey."

"What we'd do is put it someone's inkwell. Every desk had an ink well made of glass and topped with a cork. We'd put that chip in someone's inkwell at the end of the first period after lunch. Not our ink wells mind you, but someone else's as we walked out of the door. Then we'd put the top, the cork, on and hustle out before the nuns noticed."

He described how he and his buddies would anticipate the explosion from the hall or the next room. 

"The nuns would go crazy when those wells blew! Ink everywhere. Lucky for us it was a time release reaction. We were always long gone before it got going. It was the perfect grade-school crime. Don't think I was the only perpetrator either."

"That dry ice had special properties, you know," he chuckled. "It's  different from regular ice. You could even make it sing."

"What? How'd you do that?" Collin asked.

"Well you wrap it in tin foil, but it'd have to be very quiet to hear the sound. I wonder where we could get some dry ice? Heh, heh." Dad the prankster, who knew? 

I'm glad there are no ink wells in my classroom!