The sun's coming up and there are cakes on the griddle, and life ain't nothing but a funny, funny riddle.

I booked my plane ticket last night. Fred has some of the details of my itenerary. Today, I am thinking of a more simple time before I ever left on a jet plane, a time when I had barely left the comforts of Ouachita Parish and still suffered from culture shock. Not the kind of shock when my life was turned totally upside-down when I was 7 when my parents were getting divorced, my maternal german merchant grandfather died and my paternal grandparents bought a house with indoor plumbing and without a barn in the suburban neighborhood of Kiroli Woods.

The kind of shock that I am refering includes the onset of puberty, attending an inner-city school for the first time and locating the FM side of the radio dial. I find out for myself on the sly what Altantic Star's Freak-a-zoid was all about as not to appear clueless, to be up on the latest moves from the last Saturday's Soul Train Episode to compete at recess and to be try to figure out as to what exactly what that girl in my class was doing when she took off her shirt, threw a fellow boy classmate down on the floor and commence to straddle and bounce on his pelvic area after the teacher left the classroom for whatever reason.

We (the class) voted to marry those two (to make them a respectable couple) behind the cafeteria during the lunch break because the playgrounds at this particular institution of learning was sexually segregated. The 10 year old bride and groom exchanged vows wearing matching black parachute pants. That day (like everyday) I was forced by my mother to wear Lee Jeans and the "name-on-the-back-of-my" belt like some huge redneck. There were NO parachute pants allowed in my closet, or at least the ones with zippers all over them. The bride's bouquet consisted of monkey grass. The class brain officated the ceremony, reading the rite of marriage from one of her mother's harlequin romance novels. The couple kissed and then the groom was immediately thrown down onto the ground, the bride's shirt flew off again for (this time) a honeymoon of respectable topless dry humping while the weird but dumb kid was hiding in another place with his big brother reeking of weird smelling cigarettes and returning to class with a serious case of the giggles. Is there anything here that resembles a typical recess for 5th grade students?! Something really tells me no, but it is all part of the influencing truth that has shaped the person you know today.

All that was so far away from the world that I was familiar with, a world with no boobies, a world without hair sprouting from weird places. It was nowhere near Sam's house on the river, with the huge garden, the round red fuzzy superdome bed, 3 staticy network channels on the TV that nobody ever watched and motocycle rides down a dusty road. At least weekend visitation with Dad was constant while everything else was not definetly in Kansas anymore.