Adulting

      For the past ten years, the term “adulting” has become increasingly popular and even become part of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, as many millennials seem to struggle with the difficult tasks of being a grown up. While I have my own struggles with life for health reasons, I was taught the basics of being an adult at home and in school. In fact, for most of us who became adults before Justin Bieber even existed, we took adulting classes in middle school, which they called “vocational education”. For 12 weeks each, we took Home Economics, Agriculture, and Business. The entire student population cycled through the courses during the year, and in these classes we learned some of the basics, with a little sugar on top.

     I went to George C. Miller Middle School in Crescent City, Florida. The campus overlooks beautiful Crescent Lake, and it was always a treat to catch a glimpse of the glistening water in between classes. 

     Home Economics was with Mrs. Brown, if I remember correctly. She was a younger teacher, and seemed very much like a homemaker. She wore longer flowery dresses, and she was maternal and patient, which you have to be with a class full of middle schoolers and hot stoves.  We spent a few weeks learning to cook, where we were split into groups with separate cooking stations and ovens to complete recipes provided by Mrs. Brown. For many of us, this was our first time attempting to cook anything. There were lots of failures, but there was also a lot of fun and no major injuries. School became really fun for the first time, as it almost felt like I was just hanging out with my friends. 

     One of my favorite parts of the class was learning to sew and watching Randy Shackley nearly have a breakdown every day when his needle got stuck. It was frustrating for him, but he kept a good sense of humor about it, and his whines for Mrs. Brown when he got stuck became moments of bubbling laughter in the classroom.

     My grandmother worked at Diane’s Hair Care just around the corner from the school. Diane was an older single Italian woman, who I absolutely adored. She always made me feel welcome even though I had to be annoying as hell sometimes. How many times did I spin around and around in those salon chairs? I guess I made up for it by sweeping up hair and folding towels on occasion. As many people do, Diane had a collection. Her collection consisted of clowns of every type, size, and material.  When the time came to pick a large sewing project for Home Economics class, there were only a few patterns to choose from, and when I saw that a stuffed clown was in the patterns, I snatched it up. First, Mrs. Brown taught us how to use the sewing machine, to thread a bobbin and to change our needles. After we learned the rest of the basics, like how to feed material through the machine and use the presser foot, we were on our own to begin cutting and sewing our projects. It took a few weeks for me to put it all together, painstakingly cutting the felt shapes from a pattern, of eyes and ears and buttons, sewing them on to the peach clown body by hand. Never had I been so proud of something I created. When Mrs. Brown graded our projects and let us take them home, I gifted my clown creation to Diane with glee. 

   Agriculture with Barbara Shott was thrilling. We grew veggies in the field behind our classroom. We incubated chicken eggs. We made our own yogurt with cultures. One thing that was NOT in the curriculum though, I will never forget. First of all, Barbara was not a regular teacher. She gave off mild hippie vibes, and while she wasn’t warm and fuzzy like Mrs. Brown, she was very dedicated to our learning. In fact, she gave us spelling/vocabulary lists each week and she quizzed us. This wasn’t her curriculum, but it was important to her that we had these skills. Now for the unforgettable “lesson”...One day in the middle of class, which by the way, I don’t even remember desks in her class, as we were always involved in a project of some sort, she says to us out of the blue, “Have any of you ever hypnotized a chicken?” We all look at each other in disbelief. She had to be kidding, right? Ms. Shott snatched up a chicken walking past and grabbed a piece of chalk. Again, we were waiting for her to tell us she was pulling our leg. Nope, she took that chicken and set him on his side on the ground, laid his little head right down, took the chalk and set it by his beak and began drawing a three foot chalk line on the floor. She let the chicken go and stood up. The chicken lay there transfixed staring at the chalk. Apparently, chickens will lay there for a few minutes until they snap out of it on their own. Who knew?

    Business class with Mrs. Pickney, a reserved, but kind middle-aged black woman, should have been the least exciting, as we learned thrilling things like how to balance a checkbook where we were given fake checks and registers to practice. The excitement in this class had more to do with my classmates. Once my friend Amy got so angry at a boy in our class for picking at her that she yelled out, “You dickhead!”. We all swiveled our heads around to Mrs. Pickney to see how she was going to handle this infraction. She just looked up and said, “What’s a dickhead?” Amy almost turned purple from embarrassment, but that moment broke the tension, and we got a good chuckle out of it. 

    My most vivid memory in that class had absolutely nothing to do with the class itself. The young folks have no idea, but there was a time where good underwear was hard to find, and the technology of elastic was elusive. I can’t tell you how many pairs of underwear I had as a child, that ended up as two separate pieces, a chunk of cloth and a chunk of elastic. We had the same issue with socks by the way. Often, the elastic was just so thin it would tear and then be useless, or uselessly droopy. It was in the middle of the school day, and I was in business class when I discovered a breakdown in my undies’ elastic band as I stood up when Mrs. Pickney called me to her desk. When I first stood, there was this moment where I felt the cotton undies slip an inch or two. Of course, of all days, I was wearing a skirt, and one of my shorter ones, so the panic struck me immediately. I wondered inside my head if I could make it to her desk.How could I pull them up without flashing everybody and drawing attention to myself?  I paused for a moment. Maybe if I tightened my thighs real tight and waddled I could make it?  I began taking my first few steps. They slipped again, and again, inch by inch, with every single step. Then it happened. Just before I reached her desk, my underwear abandoned ship and fell to the floor in front of everyone. Again, the class got a nice chuckle, okay, more of a belly laugh.  I’m embarrassed to say that this is not my only mortifying childhood skirt story, but I’ll save the other one for another day.

     The times, they are a-changin’, and I’m not really sure how these experiences translate for today’s teenagers, but I hope that somewhere some ag teacher is mesmerizing her students and maybe some chickens.