Miss M.’S Storybook

Miss M’s Storybook

By Miss M.

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: 1-800-839-8640

© 2010 Sandra Mendyk. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 6/21/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4490-0405-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-5711-6(ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Preface

Siblings

Anyone Want Free Gum?

Did You Enjoy Your Cigarette?

My Brother and the Dentist

Friends and the Beatles

A Rocket Ship Christmas

Let’s Make Some Peanut Brittle

Fighting

Name Calling

His First Drink

Our Cousin

A Christmas With Our Cousin

Aunts and Uncles Get Together

My Cousin Next Door

The Female Cousins

Spending Overnights

The Ouija Board

My Brother In Kindergarten

Going To The Movies With Our Cousin L

The Great Flood

My Nephew and St. Paul’s

My Nephew Becomes An Altar Server

Crashing A Car Into the Neighbor’s Pool

An Invitation from Prince Charles

My Sister Gets Stranded On An Island

My Sister and Her Drum & Bugle Corps Uniform

My Brother and the Young Marines

Our Trip to Silver City (A Western Re-enactment Town)

Throwing Tomatoes at the Neighbor’s House

My Brother and the Movies

The Mashed Potatoes Christmas

The Ball of Poo

My Cousin J

Neighbors

LL

The Motorcyclist and the Egg

The Next Door Neighbor and the Reincarnated Spider

Fighting With The New Neighbors

Stinky the Skunk

A Hot Foot

Friends

Peach Pickin’

Wig Catches Fire

The Fog Horn on the Hotel in the Middle of the Night

A Christmas Drink

Wheeling, West Virginia

Viva La France! Or, Watch What Utensil You Use!

The Bell Tower

The French Taxi Driver

Our Room In Paris

Hanukkah Man

The Bomb in London

The Irish Toilet Paper

My First Jet Lag

Kissing the Blarney Stone

Going Out West

The Mad Shamrock Strikes Again

Aliens?

Pittsburgh and the Baseball Games

An Adventure Trip to A Football Game

Niagara Falls

What Church Are We In?

The Movie and the Blizzard

ACTIVITIES

Flying Lessons

Sneaking Out To The Ball Game

Football Follies:

Stuck In the Waiting Room

More Waiting For Ballplayers

Playing Softball

A College Football Game In Pouring Rain

Another Memorable College Football Game

A Trip That Gave Us Heartburn, But Ended Up O.K.

My First Visit to A Dentist

Irish Dancing

Renaissance Faires

High School Daze

My Freshman Year

Sophomore Year

Junior Year

Senior Year

Eighth Grade Home Economics Class

Attending A Catholic School Back When I Was A Kid

Sister and the Relic

High School Released Time Schedule

Some of My Most Embarrassing Moments

My Mother and the Ballplayers

Getting Lost

Winchester Cathedral

A Boat Ride and A Weird Hotel in Scotland

Hanging Up On A Famous Ballplayer

Working In An Office For Twelve Years

The Stupid Decorated Christmas Tree

The Weird Accountant

Shutdown

The Fire Alarms

Where’s Birdbrain?

The End of An Era:

The Company Blows Up and Burns

Pets and Other Assorted Animals

Cats Who Like Heights

The Cat and the Christmas Tree

Sharpening the Claws

The Visiting Squirrel

My Life in the United States Army

Beginning Army Life

Qualifying with the M16 Rifle

Bivouac, or the

Three-Day Final Examination

Beginning the Adventure at DINFOS

I Love You, So I’ll Start A Fire

Finding Out I Speak With An Accent

Good Thing I Love Sports

Cheating Is No Good, Even In The Army

Getting Assigned To A Permanent Duty Post

Arrival at Fort Riley, and Other Adventures There

Start Processing Me Out

The Press Runs

Our Cook

The Flu Shots

Lieutenant K’s Movie Review

The Tornado

Inspections

Coming Down on Orders for Puerto Rico

Barracks Follies

Pranks in the Barracks

Food Fight in the Mess Hall

Hurricanes

The Bomb

Going Before The Promotion Board

Leaving Puerto Rico and the Army

My Brother Visits Me In Puerto Rico

The Army Reserves

School Days As A Teacher

Two Memorable Fire Drills

The Top Ten Excuses Why Homework Is Not Done

A Funny But Nice Janitor

Kids Who Get Sick In School

College Days

Moon Rocks

Can Anyone Spare A Nickel?

The Amazing Adventures of Cars

The Adventure of the Stalling 1956 Automobile

The Car That Caught Fire

A Tree Falls on the Car

Church Stories

The Clock

Out of the Mouths of Babes

Miscellaneous

A Bittersweet Day of Happenings

Snow Days

The Mysterious Disappearing Olive Pits

A Small True Joke That Reader’s Digest Didn’t Publish

My Aunt and the High School Kids

Being An Extra in A Canadian Movie

My Surprise Appearance on England’s BBC

Puerto Rican Oranges

Oh, Danny Boy!

A Virtual Realistic History of London

Getting Hit By Lightning

The Bingo Idiot

My Observation of Bingo and Its Importance

When Jehovah Witnesses Come Knocking on My Door

My Weekend At A Catskills Resort

An Adventure on a Train

People’s Quirks

My Brother and His Casino Trips

My Aunt’s Friend

My Mother’s Friend and Her Bingo Lucky Charm

I Retire from School Teaching

Ghost Stories

My Friend’s Haunted House

Dudleytown

The Ouija Board

The Ghost In My House

The Restaurant Ghost

Looking for A House Without A Ghost

The Phantom Car

Playing Cards on the Railroad Tracks

Epilogue

Biography

Preface

Teaching for twenty-two years in a private (Catholic parochial) school, I found that not only do you need teaching tools, but you also need a good sense of humor, patience, and background in acting. I’ve always felt that a teacher not only needed the teaching skills and a little bit of experience, but needed acting skills also. A teacher can be considered on stage as soon as the bell rings.

I also have felt during the first year of my teaching career that studying and learning can bore a child, especially when one considers a six-hour school day long. One day, in the first year of teaching, the weather made it impossible to take the class outside for a recess. Indoor recesses do not sit well with students who need to run off the pent-up energy they accumulated during the lessons. Another class took the television/videocassette player, and that left me alone with my class to wonder what to do with them.

Something then took me back to the days when I roamed my childhood neighborhood with a group of girls–totaling about seven or eight of them–and how I used to entertain them. Since I was the oldest of the group, they looked to me for things to do. I told them stories. I put their names as characters of the story, and they loved it! Even today I would run into one or more of these girls, now grown and in various professions, and told to my face what a great storyteller I was back then.

Looking over my class I realized the potential to get their attention: tell them stories! And tell them stories I did. All I had to do was to reach back into time and tell them stories about my past: my family, friends, trips, former jobs, my own personal experiences, my time in the military, my high school and college days–I had plenty of that.

What you read in this collection of Miss M’s stories are true. The names are generic, for instance, my brother, my sister, and so on–to save us all from embarrassment, including myself. Once in awhile I may use initials. Also, these stories are written as they were told to the students.

This book will not only show hilarious incidents but will also be a taste of the good, the bad, and the ugly! I’m even throwing in a few ghost stories–the stories that the principals I had all twenty-two years of my teaching career at one school wouldn’t allow me because it may scare one student.

I am dedicating this book to all my students who have asked on a daily basis, Can you tell me one of your stories? I hope this book of stories will lighten up your life as much as they lightened up my students’ lives!

–Miss M

Siblings

A majority of my students throughout the years would tell me something about their relationships with a brother or sister. I had many of my own to tell. The oldest sibling of the family usually gets in trouble for what the younger ones did. I had plenty of tales to tell about my life with my siblings.

Anyone Want Free Gum?

When our family moved from a nice quiet street to one that had more traffic, across the street from us stood a liquor store and grocery store. That made it convenient for my parents who didn’t drive, and that meant we didn’t have to trek long distances to pick up milk and bread.

The grocery store was one of those Mom and Pop types that had a gumball machine in the front. At the time of this incident, I had hit eighteen years of age. My brother reached eleven years old, seven years younger than I, and my sister was nine years younger than I. My brother made some friends, some acceptable to my parents and some not. He had some weird friends, and my parents were concerned by the way they dressed (in cowboy hats and boots). Plus, they walked around with their thumbs tucked in their pants, thinking they were so cool.

One day my brother got this bright idea to get some of the gum from the machine without putting in any money. He asked his friends, Anyone want any free gum? Naturally, his buddies said, Yes. My brother pulled out a wire, put it around the gumball machine, carried the wire across the street, and tied it around one of the poles holding up the porch of a house. They waited patiently until a car came by and hit the wire. The gumball machine fell over, broke, and gumballs bounced all over the street. The kids scattered and chased the gum all over. The store owner came out yelling, but it was too late: the boys got away with the gum! Sadly for the boys, they couldn’t cash in the stripers. Stripers were the gumballs which were covered in aluminum foil with stripes. You get one of these, and you can cash them in for a free candy bar.

To add to this story, my brother also did this with a Coca Cola machine. The only difference there happened that the car that hit the wire was a police patrol car. They didn’t get the soda, but they got a lot of exercise running. Luckily for my brother and his friends, they got away!

Did You Enjoy Your Cigarette?

My brother had the position of the family prankster, and one day he played a prank that even made me laugh (usually I don’t think his pranks are so great). My sister hit the age of experimenting with cigarettes. She was around fifteen years old when this event happened. Daily she would ask my mother if she needed anything at the store. At my age, I figured out that the only two reasons she would volunteer to go to the store would be to either meet a friend who was considered persona non grata (not acceptable) by my parents, or to sneak a smoke.

This particular day she sneaked a cigarette from my mother’s pack which lied on the table. As she went out the door and down the front stairs, I heard a loud BANG. My brother, in the meantime, hid in his room, laughing.

He came out and asked if I heard the bang.

I said, Yes. What was it?

He told me he had put a cigarette load (a small piece of wood that explodes when lit) into the cigarette. The first thing I thought of what if my mother took that particular cigarette. I looked down the stairway and saw bits of tobacco and cigarette paper all over the stairway rug.

When my sister returned, my brother waited for her at the top of the stairs and asked, Did you enjoy your cigarette?

My sister replied, Shut up. She didn’t go to the store much more after that.

My Brother and the Dentist

When my brother turned seven years old, he had his first bout with a toothache. At that time, the family visited the local dentist, also known as to us kids as The Butcher. I tolerated those long novocaine needles, and sometimes I would find myself on the floor in a dead faint. This happened to me with ANY needle.

The day came when my brother had to go, and I could see why after we got there why my parents wanted nothing to do with this visit. After calling my brother in, I sat in the waiting room with a magazine. A few minutes later the nurse came out of the room and called me in. When I got there, I couldn’t believe the dentist was chasing my brother around the dentist chair! The nurse asked if I could help catch my brother and then restrain him in the chair. I knew that would be an impossibility, but I tried.

My brother tried to make a run for it and escape out the door. I blocked it, but he ran between my legs, out the waiting room door, out the main door, and onto the street. The hardest thing was explaining to my mother why my brother didn’t have his tooth taken care of that day.

Friends and the Beatles

At the age of twenty-one years old, I joined in hundreds of thousands of fans when the Beatles came to America, and Beatlemania took over the rock world. I passed beyond the teenybopper state with the screaming and hysteria, but that didn’t stop me from being a fan.

My sister got the family to watch The Ed Sullivan Show that historical night in February 1964. I couldn’t believe what I saw or heard. My parents groaned, my brother hid in his room, and my sister rolled around the floor raving about Ringo [Starr]. (Note: She later became a John Lennon fan.)

As days went on, my sister came home with all kinds of photos, magazines, bubble gum cards, and she convinced me the Beatles were fab, gear, and all the other new British lingo that infiltrated America’s English language during that time.

I got hooked. I ended up being a Beatlemaniac (but still didn’t do any screaming in the theaters) like my sister and her friends. Since I had the car, we had ample opportunities to see their movies in the theaters in different towns over and over. Back then every city and town had its own cinema–not like the super cinemas found here and there in an area. We just went from one movie theater to another.

At this time my sister had a friend, who fit into the earlier mentioned persona non grata, with whom my sister was forbidden to hang around with. I never figured out why, but who could figure out parents? The girl seemed OK to me. One day I told my mother my sister and I were going to the movies. I didn’t say which one or where. My sister already made arrangements with this girl to meet us at the bottom of our hill. Everything was going great–so we thought. I got to the bottom of the hill and felt the car slump to one side. A flat tire! Great! Good thing I had roadside service. The people came to put on the spare time, and off we went.

Somehow my mother found out from someone who was shopping in the area of that hill that night and told her that this girl was with us. We got in trouble. Even me–at twenty-one years old!

Another incident happened the night my mother went to bingo. She loved bingo, and we loved the fact she would be out of the house. My father worked nights and would get up around 10:00 P.M.. That would be about the time my mother would come home. So we had the house to ourselves until that time.

One night my sister decided to invite the forbidden friend over to the house. I didn’t mind because we would sit around, drink soda, and talk about the Beatles. My father just happened to get up earlier than usual this one particular night to use the bathroom. We had to sneak the girl into our bedroom and made her lie on the floor flat (which was hard because she was very overweight). My father decided to stay up and watch some television. We had to transfer the girl to our closet. The dilemma was to get the girl out of the house without anyone knowing.

Then my mother came home. We didn’t realize how close to 10:00 P.M. it had become. Now the girl, squeezed in our small closet, started to panic–and so did we. She also had coughing fits which would wake up Rip Van Winkle–and she started to cough. We had to think of something also before the girl’s mother would call our house looking for her.

My sister and I came up with this plan: We decided to divert my parents’ attention by asking a lot of questions about bingo, and can we see the new bingo chips, the magnetic wand, the dotter, etc. While my mother showed my sister these items, I sneaked the girl out the back door.

Thinking we made it, the next day my mother called the both of us into the kitchen and started yelling about having that girl up our house. She found out because when we sneaked the girl down the backstairs, the bottom of the stairs went by the door to the landlady’s apartment. She saw the whole escapade and told my mother!

A Rocket Ship Christmas

When Christmastime arrives, we used to fight over looking in the catalogues to note what we would want for presents. One particular Christmas, when my parents asked my brother what he wanted for Christmas, he answered, A rocket ship.

This was the time where the space race happened to be foremost in everyone’s minds, and my brother wanted to be an astronaut. We took him to see Santa Claus, and, yes, he asked Santa for a rocket ship. The face on Santa would be precious to take and save. He just mumbled something like, I will see what I can do. That may be too heavy for me to carry down the chimney, but you can’t tell what Christmas miracles can happen. Good show, Santa! I wouldn’t know what to say to that.

As Christmas approached, my parents started getting nervous. They looked in magazine ads and circulars, looking for something that resembled a rocket ship. One of my aunts found an advertisement in a magazine for a rocket ship made of cardboard. Just put Flap A in Slot A, etc. That type of rocket ship.

Christmas Eve I told my brother he had better get to bed because Santa would have to deliver his rocket ship early so he’d have more room for the other children’s toys in his sleigh. When we got him to bed, my parents, my aunt, uncle, and I took out the big box hidden in the back of the closet with all the cardboard. It took the adults near 5:00 A.M. Christmas Day to get the final tab into the final slot. The cardboard monstrosity even had a corrugated tube in front that looked like it could have been some kind of weapon to fire into space.

When my brother awoke around 5:30 A.M., his eyes lit up when he saw the rocket ship. We smiled as he played with it. As the adults had some breakfast, I pointed out to my parents that my brother was having a blast in the cardboard box that the rocket ship pieces came in. I saw my sister more in the rocket ship than I saw my brother. I think that ended any ideas of his becoming an astronaut.

Let’s Make Some Peanut Brittle

When I attended ninth grade, we had to take cooking classes at 8:00 A.M. every Wednesday. In one class we learned to make peanut brittle. A simple recipe entailed putting shelled peanuts on a tin pie plate (making sure there were no holes in the bottom) and melting a cup of sugar in a pan on the stove. Then you pour the hot, melted sugar over the peanuts, let cool, then turn the pan over and smack it on the bottom. Pieces of the peanut brittle would fall out.

One night when my father slept and my mother attended a meeting, my sister and I decided to make peanut brittle. We didn’t have any peanuts, but that didn’t deter us. We would melt the sugar as usual and use plastic spoons and make lollipops. We melted the sugar, placed the plastic spoons in the pie tin, and poured the mixture over the plastic spoons.

Big mistake. The spoons caught fire! They started to smolder and smoke. We opened the window and threw the mess out. There was a lot of smoke, but thankfully no fire–it went out immediately. The house was loaded with smoke–so much smoke, that when the window was open, the smoke filtered out. Then someone called the fire department. Try explaining what we did to the fire department! My parents didn’t take kindly to that incident.

Fighting

Like any normal family, spats erupt from time to time. The same with our family. When my parents leave the house, I had to be the one in charge. It’s not easy when you have two siblings who both have tempers and are very explosive.

One day as I sat reading in my bedroom, I heard loud voices. My brother and sister has an argument, and it got out of hand. I opened the door and looked out in time to see my brother pick up an ashtray and throw it at my sister. My sister was standing in front of my bedroom door! I quickly shut the door in time to hear a crash. I opened the door, and pieces of the ashtray lie on the floor–with the ashes and cigarette butts all around. My sister retaliated by picking up a square magnet–a cube-shaped, heavy magnet–and heaved it at my brother. It missed him but took a chunk out of the closet door. The next bit of excitement followed when my brother tipped the couch over. This made my sister scared, and she ran into the bedroom where I was hiding. I heard another crash and saw sugar coming in from underneath the door. My brother had taken the sugar bowl and heaved it at the door after my sister ran in.

Guess who got blamed for all this? Me.

Name Calling

Throughout history there hasn’t been an incident within a family without a little name calling. Our family was not exempt from this process.

Somehow no one ever called my brother any names, but he sure had a few good ones for my sister. No one knew how he came about with calling her names, but they would lead to battles that could carry on for days!

For instance, my brother once looked in a TV guide and saw an advertisement for Swiss Night Swiss Cheese. Suddenly, my sister had the nickname Swiss. I never figured out how and why he came up with something like that, and neither did my sister. Then my brother would sit across from my sister in the same room and whisper out loud, Swiss Night or Swiss Day. But the best name from that came out when he started calling her Cheeser. My sister didn’t like that one bit. Neither did my mother or father, for that matter. The Cheeser started getting pronounced as Cheesah as the time went by. Every time he passed by her, he would whisper, Cheesah. She ended up being called Swiss Cheese, Sis Cheese, Swisser, and other variations of the above-named nicknames.

It happened one day where my brother slunk by my sister and did his whisper of Cheesah, when my sister suddenly turned around and smacked the side of his head with an ashtray. Luckily the ashtray was plastic, and my brother received