After-School Antics

After-School Antics (a stream of custardness)

I have never made custard, but I’ve eaten it. It was very tasty! Once, on a honeymoon, I bathed in custard…very nice; and when I was in high school, I participated in a custard fight [with my sisters]. It started out innocent enough, with the taping of our cat into an empty saltine box. Its head protruded from one end, so it could breathe [of course], but the rest of the animal was a saltine box, and it was very funny. We placed our saltine cat in the middle of the dining room table, and it became our centerpiece. Everyone thought it was funny. Even the cat was amused [I think]. It just flopped, like custard sometimes does. And, for the longest time, my sisters and I were entertained by standing the saltine cat upright, like a vase – only to have it flop over. Very funny stuff. But soon our fun graduated into a contest where we filled our mouths with grapes, and that was funny, too. The rule was, you couldn’t break your grapes; and you had to see how many you could fit into your mouth without breakage. Of course, the key to success was not laughing – which was hard, because we all looked like gerbils (which was amusing to teenage kids back then)…but, of course, things got out of hand, as they often do at cat tapings, and somebody spat a grape into another person’s face, and it splatted wonderfully, like custard sometimes does. Suddenly, we were shooting each other with grapes. And the next thing I knew, there were raw eggs within reach, along with shaving cream and, yes [you guessed it], a bowl of custard…I can’t recall much after that, but it was a fun afternoon. I remember losing the custard battle because I swallowed quite a bit of ammo. Also, one of my sisters got shaving cream in her eye, and that was a downer - there weren't supposed to be casualties…And I can’t remember what happened to Saltine Cat. Sometimes we had to rush to clean up the house before our parents got home, and it’s possible the cat got tossed into the back of the hall closet. In fact, it’s possible our tape job held and now, thirty-three years later, there is a skeleton in our closet…I don’t know…I just don’t know…It’s hard to remember details, especially after the custard part…I kind of got lost in that moment.