10.08.05
I don’t waaaant a pickle …
… I just want to ride my motor sicle.
So in grade 10 I had a couple of bad influences. In the lunchroom, some older students introduced me to the fine pasttime of pickle snapping.
What is pickle snapping?
I’m glad I pretended you asked.
Some people would come to school with sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. Certain mom’s might wrap in a sweet pickle slice right into the fold of the waxed paper. I guess this was a traditional thing in the depression days or something. Anyway, my mom didn’t do that, but the corner store made sandwiches, and the lady there would do it. If I wanted ammunition for lunch time, I would have to buy a sandwich at the corner store. My bad influence classmates came with ammo every day, thanks for their keener moms and their pickle obsession. I still haven’t answered what pickle snapping is, have I?
OK, pickle snapping is when you take your waxed paper, and put a sweet pickle slice in the middle of it. Then you hold the waxed paper by the edges and make it form a U shape, with the pickle slice at the bottom of the U. Then you snap the waxed paper by pulling your hands outwards very rapidly. This pulled the waxed paper taught with a snap, and sent the pickle flying upwards. The goal was to hit the ceiling.
Why would we do this?
Aside from questionable sanity, the idea was to save this trick for the end of the lunch. We would snap our pickles when we were about to leave the table. If all went according to plan, the pickle would hit the ceiling and stick there. We got up and left, and then new people came and sat at our table. A few minutes later, a pickle would land on the table in front of them. (Yes, I know, immature. Did you expect better behaviour from 16 year olds?) We found this endlessly funny, and I apologise now if a pickle has ever landed on your lunch.
Pickle Fossils
One day, we watched and watched, and one pickle didn’t fall down. We had to go to class, and gave up on the little guy. When we came to lunch the next day, we looked up, and saw that the pickle was still there. And a week later, it was still there. We finished grade 10, and the pickle was still there. Actually, we finished grade 12, and the pickle was still stuck to the ceiling. I went back to the school for the 60th reunion, and sure enough, the pickle was still there.
By now of course, it wasn’t green, but brown and crusty. Recognizable only by it’s shape.
All good things
must come to an end. When the 75th Anniversary reunion came along, one of the things I was eager to show my wife was the pickle. I brought her down to the cateteria and looked up. No pickle. Someone had cleaned and painted the ceiling of the cafeteria. I was at least hoping to see the pickle had been painted over, but obviously some painter with a good work ethic actually scraped it off. He couldn’t have know he was destroying history. I forgive him.
Pamela81 said,
October 8, 2005 at 11:01 am
I was wondering why pickles would seem to fall from the sky when I was eating lunch. Thanks a lot guys.
dmci_dood said,
October 8, 2005 at 4:19 pm
What I want to know is who was the idiot that kept pumping coins into the jukebox and playing Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park” over and over again.
Pamela81 said,
October 10, 2005 at 9:41 am
That MacArthur Park was really annoying after a while, I agree
Roy R Clark said,
October 15, 2005 at 4:56 pm
I remember when I came back to Winnipeg from a working trip to Germany in the Spring of 83 and one of the things that I did was check to see if that pickle was still on the ceiling. I had promised to see the Principle when I came back after 6 months of working there and checking on the pickle was my second stop at Daniel.