Sins of my pre-pubescent childhood
10/12/03 11:58 AM
When I was small, well, young, some of us 10-12-year-olds experimented with smoking. I can’t speak for the others, but I do know that volunteer milo (a name I gave it for lack of knowing what that brown stuff really is) will not stay in rolled up pieces of paper from the Montgomery Ward catalog (taken from the old catalogs that ended up in the outhouse) and in case you want to try it, DO NOT use colored paper! In either case, you suck fire and swallow those little tiny brown seeds, but the colored paper burns much hotter.
My Grandma Black used to taste the crumbs in my jacket and shirt pockets to see if they were tobacco or cookie crumbs and they were usually the former rather than the latter. Tobacco was easier to come by because the son of the grocery store owner kept us supplied. We would all congregate down in a basement where Joe Hieb was going to build his house. We would puff like there was no tomorrow. I suppose we thought we had to smoke up all of the evidence because none of us dared carry them home. Maybe we hid some in the basement for the next night, I can’t remember.
Smoking in the wintertime was more challenging. Us Reliance kids used to build igloos (using a scoop shovel to make oblong snow blocks and by the time we were finished we REALLY NEEDED THAT CIGARETTE we were going to smoke as soon as we got inside our hiding place! On our way to Lower Brule the other evening I noticed there was plenty of that good snow for making igloo blocks. The message here? The next time you don’t know where your kid(s) is/are just follow their tracks to the igloo.
WARNING: This could happen to you if you start smoking when you're too little!
And, if you ever lose any money and if I had been in the area when you lost it, please don’t tell me. I become overwhelmed with guilt. Where does the guilt come from? Every Sunday after church Aunt Katie Stallman would take us kids out to the little Conoco Café just west of Reliance and buy us each an ice cream cone. Before long I decided I wanted to be able to pay for my own cone, but where to get the dime?
One Sunday as we went into the church I knew where my dime was coming from … out of the box in the entranceway where the congregation picked up their newsletters and dropped their money in. I stalled as the others entered the chapel and once everyone was inside the church, I took a dime, but there was a major problem … GOD WAS WATCHING!!!
I paid for my own cone that day, but I would venture to guess the wonderful goodness of it was greatly diminished.
Now I had a major dilemma on my hands. How would I ever get that dime back in the box … and when! I didn’t dare confess to the priest because then he would know that I had committed a mortal sin. Eventually, I did get the dime put back, but I have been reminded of that dime a million times in these past 50 years.