Mincey’s Musings Year Two, Week Two

A frustrated conductor once asked a band player with issues, “Son, what is it with you? Is it ignorance or apathy?” The player replied, “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

This is a slightly tweaked missive that came my way via email. It reminded me of a joke I once heard at a meeting which I shall attempt to embellish for your reading pleasure.

It seems there was once in the rural hills of Appalachia a young man (I’ll call him Dud Bloke) who was six feet tall, seventeen years old and in eighth grade for the third time at the Last Chance Grammar School. Red-headed, freckle-faced Dud was often late to school because he had to shave with a dull straight-edge razor. He had a look that let people know what an ox might have looked like in human form. Dud had spent two years in practically every grade he had ever attended in his mountain grammar school.

Dud was definitely tenacious, but even a determined country boy can become weary with well-doing. One day Dud’s teacher, Ms. Ree L. Stern, asked him if he knew who wrote the Declaration of Independence, to which he replied, “I don’t know, and I don’t give a @#$%.”

This caused the four foot, one hundred pound Ms. Stern to go into a rage. Her blood filled face was in direct juxtaposition to the black dress that was buttoned up to her neck.

No one could ever remember seeing Ms. Stern in any color but black, and either all her dresses were the exact same style and color or she wore the same dress every day.

She took the hulking Dud by his ear and drug all two hundred pounds of him to Mr. Al A. Jitter, the principal. She pushed Dud into a chair with legs that groaned with its new burden as it was meant for people half Dud’s weight.

The exasperated teacher originally from Richmond who had the distinction of having once taught at VMI raved to the prim, weary Mr. Jitter about the “outrageous” conditions under which she had to try to educate the poor mountain youth of this backward hillside community. She “elaborated” about how her job was made all the much harder by the poor example set by the “elder” to the younger students and the “deterioration” of discipline that “ensued” from such “abhorrent deportment”. Never in her sixty years of classroom instruction had she ever so “flagrantly” been disrespected.

It is somewhat doubtful how much either Dud or Mr. Jitter understood from Ms. Stern’s rambling outrage, until Ms. Stern told Mr. Jitter to ask Dud who had written the Declaration of Independence.

“OK, Dud, who wrote the Declaration of Independence?” the weary Mr. Jitter asked.

Dud replied, “Like I told her, I don’t know, and I don’t give a @#$%.”

This was enough to get Mr. Jitter “all het up”. He used many important words to let Dud know that such “impertinence” would not be tolerated at the Last Chance Grammar School. He instructed Ms. Stern to leave Dud sitting at the table in the office while he called Dud’s father, Mr. Ima Bloke, to come in for an immediate parent conference. The table sagged with the pressure exerted by Dud’s elbows as he held his chin in his hands and waited for his father to arrive.

The mollified Ms. Stern returned to teach her class while the call was made and Mr. Bloke arrived. Neither Ms. Stern nor Mr. Jitter had ever seen Mr. Bloke, and he certainly made an impression. If Dud resembled an ox, his father called to mind a woolly mammoth. He was a mastodon of a man with bushy sideburns and a red beard that fell just below where one would estimate his belly button might be located inside the cavernous, oil and grease-covered overalls that surrounded his three-hundred fifty pound, six and a half foot frame. He wore no shirt, and the buttons at his waist were not sufficient to his circumference, resulting in the sides of the overalls flapping like wings too small to fly such an odd bird. Ms. Stern could not help but wonder if the man wore undergarments, but no amount of cash would have caused her to look closely enough to be certain. Mr. Bloke smelled of pine and gasoline, and every inch of his person was covered by a cascade of sawdust from the mill from which he had been called to this emergency meeting.
Mr. Jitter nervously explained the reason for Mr. Bloke’s “summon” to the school for this conference. It is unlikely he understood much of what Mr. Jitter was saying about “mutual respectability” and “consideration of others”. It was hard for Mr. Bloke to “empathize” with the unfortunate Ms. Stern’s “plight rendered all the more difficult” by his son’s “atrocious” behavior. Hesitantly, Mr. Jitter asked Mr. Bloke to have his son tell him who wrote the Declaration of Independence.

Mr. Bloke stared straight into his son’s washed-out blue eyes with a scowl and said, “Tell us boy, who wrote that there thing they’re talking about.”

Though Dud didn’t exactly understand why everyone was so upset, he sheepishly told his father, “Like I told them, I don’t know, and I don’t give a @#$%.”

Mr. Bloke reached across the table in the principal’s office and seized his son by the throat with one massive paw. He shook his son like a rag doll for a few seconds and said, “You little @#$%^&, if you wrote it, admit it!”

I leave you this week with another pearl of wisdom from the world of email:

It’s hard to make a comeback when you haven't been anywhere.