Mushroom & I

This post has taken a long time coming. The other day, I got around to reminiscing about the days of old with KO, who has known me since I was knee high to an ant. The conversation wound around to one of my best buddies from boarding school, Mushroom, who I still keep in touch with from time to time despite being separated by miles of ocean. In retrospect, Mushroom was the proverbial trouble maker.

The one thing that drew us together - a sure-fire reason that still draws me to some people more than others - was our shared craziness for all creatures great and small.

After returning from a weekend home, Mushroom ran up to me, bursting with excitement. Drawing me away from prying eyes, she showed me a biscuit tin with holes poked in the lid. Raising the lid, I spied a bunch of cabbage leaves with a whole lot of tiny butterfly eggs.

Thrilled to bits, we kept the tin in her desk in our classroom, waiting for them to hatch. And hatch they did. Right in the middle of a Math lesson. We suddenly noticed a sea of tiny caterpillar larvae swarming out over her desk. As inconspicuously as possible, we tried to herd them back into the tin, only to have them pop right back out through the holes in the lid.

Growing more adventurous, they then swarmed over to other desks, creating quite a row with girls squealing in horror and running for cover. Needless to say, we were thrown out with our precious biscuit tin to release the wannabe butterflies in the woods surrounding our playground. However, we kept finding stragglers in the classroom for days afterward.

Our foray into entomology didn’t end there. There was the matter of the housefly called Snoopy - held hostage in an empty glue bottle by a couple of curious eight-year olds. Snoopy, R.I.P.

Entomology aside, Mushroom and I were probably “wiser beyond our years.” Engrossed in drawing the Garden of Eden for a Scripture class, we decided to go all out and ensure Adam and Eve were “anatomically perfect.” When we sat back to admire our handiwork, it suddenly struck us, “What will the teacher say?!” In panic, we grabbed an eraser and hastily tried to erase Adam’s generous manhood.

Erasers, back then, were ineffective things that left an ugly black smudge on paper. Ultimately, we ended up with an erroneous Adam with a suspicious black cloud over his crotch area, which, when held up to the light, even boasted a hole in the paper.

A terrible giggle fit later, we found ourselves thrown out into the corridor once more, wielding our masterpiece; Adam now sporting green-crayoned “grass” scrawled up to his waist with Eve almost up to her eyeballs in misshapen foliage.