Don't let your house catch on far!
It's funny the things a person remembers. Me, being the ridiculous unserious person I am (watched way too many cartoons as a kid), was just blathering about "tars" in another thread. You know, rubber car tars.
Anywho - It jogged a memory in my head. A memory from when I was 7 years old. First grade. I remember this very distinctly ... at least this instant in time.
We had these weird open-air type classrooms for the 3 first grade classes we had. We could see over into the other rooms. We could hear them. They could hear us. To get to these rooms, you sorta had to walk through a built in stage type area. I forget what you call it. But it had roundish stairs and the part where a person talked was lower (at the bottom of the steps). Anywho - That's not all that important, just setting the stage. They'd give instructions or some such crap from time to time in this stage area. All the 1st graders would sit in this stage area on said built-in steps.
So that's what was going on. Probably 60 first graders sitting in this stage area, and they were giving a lesson on fire safety. What to do if your house caught on fire, etc etc etc, yada yada yada.
And they introduced this next guy as an expert that was going to give us details. He was the epitome of a redneck. He was probably about 35, big beer type belly, overly tight fireman's T-shirt, big beard. He looked like a character from Redneck Rampage. And the following is the funny part.
He steps out front and he says, "Now kids, if your house catches on far...."
And I swear to you, SIXTY 1st graders BUSTED out laughing at his "far" instead of "fire." Now, we're little redneck kids, and even his "far" was hilariously exaggerated. But not only did we kids start laughing at his "far" but our laughing escalated due to the fact that we all laughed at the same time! It was a totally spontaneous thing. I'm betting the lady teachers giggled (Mrs. Townsend, etc).
I remember it was probably the first (and maybe last) time I felt ... empathy? Whatever the feeling is where I felt embarrassed *for* someone else. This guy had to be humiliated, to have 60 little kids laughing at him all at once, right at the first sentence out of his mouth. And he couldn't get mad, we were just innocent kids. But laughing our guts out at him spontaneously! They had to intervene to get us to stop laughing so he could go on. That "far" was all the talk around the 1st grade classes for days. We even as little kids would ask each other, "has your house ever caught on far?"
7milesout
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