Because It’s Educational

Her name was Debbie. Debbie Sayler. She was my friend. A good friend. She had brown hair and glasses. She was tall and slender. Skinny. It was the Central House. We lived there briefly before we moved to the Prospect house. It was after the Euclid house. Debbie lived on Capitol. Down towards the west end of town, West Capitol.

We played together a lot. Either at my house or hers. It seemed like the time spent at each house was equal. I always liked going to her house. Her mom was really nice. There was always crafty stuff going on at their house. I wanted to be crafty. I was not. 

We played together and sometimes did school work and other times we played games or just did other things. 

On this day, we were bored. It was warm outside so we went out and sat on the front steps. We sat there and talked about things that were important in our lives at that time.  

 At some point in our young lives we both watched Sesame Street. Sesame Street was a very educational series, with puppets. We learned a lot from Sesame Street, particularly the formation of words. Remember the segment where Maria and one of the puppets would have a lesson in sounding out words or forming the word and then putting it all together? A typical word may have been something like the sw sound and then the ing sound. One person would say the sw sound and the other would say the ing sound. Next they both would say the word together. So it would be sw, ing, then swing. Pretty cool way to sound out words. Pure genius. 

Debbie and I did that too. We were having a lot of fun. We couldn’t stop laughing. We played this game for quite a while. I’m not sure whose idea it was. I will concede we were both at fault. Our words were more creative than Sesame Street’s though. Our words were swear words. Because why wouldn’t they be? It was educational. Sesame Street said so. And, we were learning. We were using the lessons we had learned. 

We thought we the funniest kids ever. Over and over and over again, sh— it —shit. We would look at each other as we sounded out the word and then would burst out laughing. That was our main word. The other was damn. I don’t think we did the f word, but it’s entirely possible. We played and played and laughed and laughed. 

I always had fun playing with Debbie.