When I was Your Age

“Now do you believe dead rats float, Lisa?”

 - Homer Simpson

We had to do homework over the summer. We had to read a bunch of books. We had to show up in September at Catholic school, probably circa 6^th grade, circa 1959, with a book report on, among other forgotten gems, Kon Tiki. It was a story by an anthropologist who wanted to test his theory about how people might have migrated from the old world to the new world. It was mind-numbingly uninteresting to someone who had the intellectual imagination to theorize about how a snail felt when you put salt on it to watch it dissolve.

Notwithstanding that I hated the pathetic young under-educated nuns whose “calling” was more important than their teaching abilities, the book was rubbish. Homework over summer vacation has been outlawed by Article XXIV of the Human Rights Convention. It’s no coincidence that that’s also the number of the last book of the Iliad. Or is it??

I remember my report said that floating across an ocean on a homemade raft was probably slightly more exciting than reading a book about floating across an ocean on a homemade raft because at least the raft had a mast tall enough to hang myself and probably enough rope to get the job done. All I had that summer was a salt shaker to punish snails who squished between my bare toes when we played hide and seek after dinner. When I was your age, snails didn’t even have shells. (I think I mean slugs, don’t I?)

In my book report deliberately misspelled the author’s name multiple times, which I will boldly spell here without the help of the google because we didn’t have spell check or google back in those homework-laden summers of yesteryear and because I want to make a point about how stupid this book was. I think it was Thor Hyerdhal. Or Tor Hayrideall. Or Joris-Karl Huysmans.

Sister Alice Maureen didn’t have spellcheck or even, apparently, a copy of the book. She certainly never read the book reports. I think the idea was to just count the number of reports turned in and then laugh over communal supper at the suckers who actually bothered. It’s a wonder I’m not bitter.

Anyway, in my report, I said the part I enjoyed the most was when the sailor/author befriended a stowaway rat with whom (late at night over brandy and cigars) he discussed whether to include a chapter - or at least a paragraph - about masturbating to the soft porn magazines the author had brought along “just in case”. That didn’t happen, at least in the book. At least as I recall. Spoiler alert: in my (as yet unpublished) book report, the rat was lost at sea.

Perhaps it’s worth another read now that I’m a grown up. Although my intellectual development has advanced beyond questioning the inner lives of snails, I did once shoot a man just to watch him die. It was Whore Higherdoll, just after he announced he was writing a sequel about his return trip across the ocean in the cargo hold of an overbooked Jet Blue flight.

Picture credit: http://rosamirabooks.blogspot.com/2011/11/rat-ahoy.html