Friday With the RevGalBlogPals

The RevGalBlogPals Friday Five asked participants to share five spring break stories. I'm a pretty boring individual who doesn't take spring breaks, so I fear I don't have five stories, but I do have one story.

I was in 5th grade, and just before school let out for the summer we took a day trip to Mackinac Island; boarded a schoolbus in the wee hours, drove up to the Straits and took a ferry to the island.

We went to Fort Michilimackinac and learned history. We stood on the porch of the Grand Hotel, where the po' folks are relegated. We looked at lilacs. We visited churches. We watched fudge being made -- lots and lots of fudge. We ate fudge. We bought tacky, overpriced souvenirs. We dodged tourist bicycles and seagulls and horse carts and horse buns in the streets. We swatted black flies. We watched the boats.

All in all, it was a swell time. And soon we were back on the bus, going home.

We'd been instructed to bring along a light sack supper from home. I was especially looking forward to mine, because I knew my mom had packed a can of pop in it, and back in those days soft drinks were an occasional treat, not an everyday beverage. So with great anticipation I pulled my brown lunch bag out of the ice chest in the back of the bus. There was my peanut butter sandwich. There was my apple. There was my...

...my beer?

It seems that, in the bleary early-morning hours, as my mother was packing my supper, she'd grabbed my dad's can of beer instead of my can of 7-Up.

I was terrified. I was certain that one of my classmates would see the can and tattle; that some Authority Figure would get me into trouble; that I'd probably be arrested. (I was a dramatic child.) What should I do? Should I drop the bag on the floor and let it slide around? Should I hang onto it?

For reasons I don't fully understand now, I hung onto it. (It's a good thing that I never considered a life of crime, or else I'd wind up as a footnote in one of those world's-stupidest-criminals news nuggets.) I jammed it next to me, between my body and the bus, and threw my coat over it. And those next two hours on the bus were sheer hell as I imagined the bus stopping and a teacher shakedown of our class: "And what's this we have here? A can of beer? Beer?"

It was an unusually quiet ride home from school with my dad, my brown bag clutched in my hand. When I got home, my mother asked, "So how was your big adventure today?"

I produced the bag. "YOU GAVE ME BEER," I informed her, with feeling.

It's a pretty funny story, now.