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2006-08-19 - 12:20 p.m.

Another rock rolled away!

Several readers responded to the “Who rolled away the rock” (or, “Where the hell do these people come from?”) entry. The general theme of those responses was: “Is this for real?”

Yes.

There are a lot of people out there—I mean WAY out there—like that mother-daughter duo. In fact, writing about them and then receiving mail questioning the truth of the story wiggled loose a memory of another duo who visited my office years ago.

At the time I was working in a school district a few miles northwest of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Cedar Rapids was—and is—a very progressive city and home to many international corporations: Quaker Oats, Rockwell International and several others. But Shellsburg, Iowa, was home to several misfits. Several of us working for the school district referred to Shellsburg as “The Mecca for Misfits.” At least once a week in our car pool back to Cedar Rapids we questioned: “What the hell do they put in the drinking water over there?”

Anyway, those people certainly marched to the beat of a different drummer, and of all the weird and whacky things I encountered in that bizarre little town, the day a father and son came storming into my office ranks at the top of my you-ain’t-gonna-believe-this-one list.

I can’t remember their names so I’ll refer to dad as Hook and son as Possum. Possum was a scrawny, filthy (Pig-Pen), illiterate outcast who really did look like a possum. One day the coaches (three of them in my building) decided they’d had enough of Possum’s vile personal hygiene. They drew straws and the loser had to come to me. They either wanted me to talk to Possum about his lack of cleanliness or fumigate him! So I did. Talk to him, I wasn’t about to fumigate or do anything else to him!

Dumb, dumb me. Wrong thing to do.

The next day, a day that had been relatively quiet in The Mecca, dad and Possum came raging into my office. Who “the fuck” was I to tell his son he was dirty….and on and on. I was called names even I had not heard before. Hook—named that because he wore a hook on his right arm—was foaming at the mouth. Possum was sneering and also calling me some foul names.

When I finally got my wits about me and decided I’d had enough of their loathsome behavior and name calling, I asked them to leave my office.

Another bad move.

SLAM!

The hook was buried deep in the top of my desk! Holy keee-rist! My mamma didn’t raise no fool--I wasted no time running out of the office and frantically went looking for someone to save my ass. I knew if that man got that hook yanked out of the desk the next place he was going to bury it was in me!

After Hook and Possum were escorted from the school, I beat it to the coach’s office and raised some hell of my own. Those boys knew they’d better never set me up like that again. They laughed and high-fived, but they never put me in harm’s way again.

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