I've never read Lord of the Flies.
It feels good to say it. I've never read Of Mice and Men or got my jollies off of the metric system, because I must have been sick and had stayed home from school when this was assigned and/or discussed, and will now be forever left to my own inch-counting devices.
It's weird to think about all of the precious life and grammar lessons that are covered in just one day of elementary school learning. If you miss one day of school, or even several, your ability to share with others and design a character web based on Charlotte's Web will be forever neglected.
If you miss a whole week of school, you may never learn how to write vowels in cursive!
I think about this a lot, because people say things like "Oh yeah, we learned all about how to raise sea monkeys in 5th grade," and I know I must have missed that unit, because all of mine died after 4 days in the plastic tank.
Maybe it was when I got food poisoning from a KFC chicken pot pie. Or that one time I got a nose bleed from playing tetherball at recess, and had to stay home while my head bled for two days. Maybe. Just maybe.
I have problems counting which WrestleMania or Superbowl we are up to now, and I blame the Brister family vacation to Florida to visit our blonde relatives who live on the beach (no joke) for my inability to read and/or write in Roman Numerals.
I'm pretty sure Mrs. Day (who had a gray parrot named Long John Silver at home and would talk about it all the time) used that week to explain to all my peers what V and I mean, and that MXXVIII means something to a lot of people.
More things I don't remember from elementary school:
-The rules on how many syllables and lines are in a haiku
-How to boil and egg
-the history and theory behind the Recorder, the great "gateway instrument"
-how to play Hot Cross Buns on the Recorder
-operating a yo-yo
-"Slamming" techniques for Pog play
-ever watching Fraggle Rock.
-F.L.A.S.H. (the sex-ed program. Family Life And Sexual Health. Nice one.)
But staying home for a "sick day" when my siblings and I were in elementary school was anything but bed rest and re-runs of Hangin' With Mr. Cooper.
Whenever one of us kids got sick and stayed home from school (due to pink eye, relentless vomiting, or a high fever confirmation on her old timey glass thermometer) and it was either a Tuesday or Thursday, our mom would take us on a little field trip to Cascade Lanes.
Nance was the best bowler in the entire league, and had records up on the wall for my entire childhood. I remember laying down on the plastic benches overlooking the lanes and all the townspeople chain smoking, and in between bouts of nausea and vomiting - being so proud of my mom.
Her bowling team needed her, and the alley had a day care room. Yes, a child monitoring room right there in the bowling alley slash casino. It was basically an all-inclusive resort for negligent parents. I'm kidding.
Cascade Lanes also had vending machines, with those Peter Pan neon orange crackers with peanut butter inside. Those were my absolute favorite.
But the day care room was a plainly decorated room near the bathrooms, that an old, batty woman named Grandma Nelly would watch over, and anytime we came along with my mom, we had to check in with this Grandma Nelly. She yelled a lot. And had this translucent wrinkly skin and a smoker's cough. But if I watched people's kids at the bowling alley, I'd yell a lot too probably.