• Tag Archives boys school

  • “Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” Graham Greene

    Posted on by The Thousand Yard Stare Comment

    After the first evening of a rather self-destructive (and yet somehow productive) weekend, I went and got my hair cut on Saturday. As I walked in, my notable barber was discussing one of the things that I’ve never found that enjoyable – camping out. Several times I have been camping, and not just because I am a city-boy, the experiences I had never seemed to live up to the golden glory of the Great-American-Campout™.

    Since my barber is a rather self-sufficient kind of guy, he’s got deer antlers and pictures of himself with giant catfish all over the walls of his, uh, barber shack. Really cool guy, we had a great discussion about his pecan trees all over his lot when it was my turn.

    Anyway, the discussion of the campouts reminded me of some of my out-of-country time. In the local rivers there, there  were such things as fresh water eels. This could not have been more freaky for a city-boy like myself. The waters were typically crystal clear mountain snow run0ff, and while it was generally cold, the swimming was great, and the rivers full of huge boulders and rocks. BUT, around these rocks hid these freshwater eels. I’ve noted our local swimming “hole” with an asterisk. You can see more or less where my old house was (marked with the ever-present Google Maps Point “A” )

    MerrilandsDomain

    So when people are at the beach imagining sharks mere inches below them, the same was happening when we would swim in these icy clear swimming holes.  Sometimes you would forget about them, but there would usually be dark overhangs of brush, and you sure as hell wasn’t going to swim in there!  One time we went out on a school sponsored trip and some of the guys fished for eels and caught some. They caught the first one (I think the guy’s name was Chad if I remember) and laid him along the bank.  Chad was contemplating his next catch and started tapping his foot. Right on the head of the eel.  Chad was wearing the sandals that our boy’s school typically wore in the summertime. Nothing but a small flap of leather between his foot and this eel who was obviously not happy being out of the water.  In a very typical lord-of-the-flies ritual, I recall them beating the eel in the head until it was dead. I also recall someone skinning it and cooking it, so I guess while it was a little barbaric, it wasn’t completely senseless violence.

    Either way, those buggers are creeepy man, very creepy.

    That almost dovetails the time my brother was nearly attacked by a sea-snake, but I’ll leave that for another time.


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  • “It sounds all very sort of technical, but in fact it was very much a kind of bootlace affair. I mean, in the Abbey Road in those days was a fairly primitive place by today’s standards.” George Martin

    Posted on by The Thousand Yard Stare Comment

    The intro to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” came onto the radio on my way home.

    I never remember the song until the verse comes in.

    The intro makes chills come up my spine – for the sole reason that the first time I heard it I was in a music class in New Zealand. It was probably the first week of being in a new all-boys school, and I was in a music class taught by a hippy-dippy woman who wanted us to absorb the wonderment of the lyrics. She played it over and over and over again.

    I hadn’t been there long enough to pick up their accents, so she kept asking me questions which terrified me.

    Every time I hear that song it takes me back to the drafty classroom next to the terraces.

    This is a pretty nice picture. Good shot. Obviously you can see the terraces (which were lots of fun to get into fights on and then tumble down the sides of). However, you can’t see the tennis courts just below the music room, but you can see the creepy grounds-caretaker’s house on the left in white, then the creepy cemetery up at the top of the picture. The jogging class would typically end by running through the cemetery (which paradoxically we were strictly forbidden to enter) back onto school grounds.

    Good times.


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