Big Rubber Bands

     Recently Kay and I were in Office Depot looking for new computers, hers had died and mine had long ago become antiquated. Kay being the computer pro talked to the technician while I wandered around looking at the mass of products offered by the store. As I roamed the isles I came across a blister pack of rubber bands, specifically "BIG" rubber bands, they were red in color and several were folded to fit the packaging. These were rubber bands designed to be placed around large items such as file folders.
     Now a memory materialized from the time I was in the fourth grade at Donelson Grammar school, the memory was flooded with the aroma of well oiled wood floors that creaked as you walked on them and a simpler life. I started attending school there in the third grade, my teacher was a Mrs. Webb who right away recognized my name and asked if my Dad's name was Bill, when I told her it was she told me that she had been one of his teachers when he was in school ( this was about 1956 and Dad attended school back in the 1930's ). Having taught Dad at sometime in his youth and now me was a tell for how old Mrs. Webb was at the time, she was a nice lady who was a customer of Dad's when I went to work in the grocery store at the age of thirteen, she always had a smile and kind words and if I was the one to carry her groceries to her car she would tip me a quarter. 
     The school was quite old at the time but well maintained, today it is a senior citizen center and one of the few landmarks from my youth still standing. It was a small school by today's standards but it had all of the amenities except air conditioning which we didn't need too often because we didn't attend school during the summer months. When the temperatures did rise into the uncomfortable zone we had tall windows that started about three feet off the floor and rose almost to the ceiling some nine or ten feet above, the windows could be opened from the top and bottom for air circulation providing there was a breeze.
     One of the problems with open air air conditioning was that unless you had screens installed, there were none, every thing that flew, floated or drifted on the air at some time came into the class room. So at one time or another we had seeds from dandy lion flowers, leaves in the fall, an occasional bird, butterflies and rain if we were not fast enough closing the windows. The most prolific of things to enter the classroom were flies, the common house fly that supposedly only lived for twenty four hours. Flies were everywhere at times and they seemed to be quite large. The teacher carried a fly swatter and us kids developed various means of eradicating them including the use of rubber bands.
     Us boys decided that the best way to rid the class room of flies was to kill them from a long distance so we tied several average sized rubber bands together and holding one end between your thumb and forefinger pulled back on the other end while taking aim at a fly. Once a target was acquired you let loose the back end of the string of rubber bands which flew straight to the target and splat went the fly.
     The only limits were the rubber bands themselves, the more you could tie end to end the farther you could reach out to kill the elusive fly who could evade slaughter if you got too close. Rubber bands were a premium item, they were a non essential item in most households, if they had any at all they were the ones the paperboy wrapped around the newspaper. As it turned out, I or rather my Dad had a remedy.
     Dad was a butcher and in the 1950's butchers wrapped special cuts of meat in brown butcher paper and secured it with large red rubber bands. These rubber bands were thicker than their smaller counterparts and longer, like maybe ten to twelve inches and two of them when tied together would stretch a good three feet. The power they delivered guaranteed a long distance kill and there were soon little red spots from the blood of the flies we killed spotting the windows, walls and various other surfaces of the classroom.
     I was an overnight sensation when I showed up for class armed with three of these monster rubber bands tied end to end, I was the envy of the other boys and they were willing to pay for such a deadly weapon, I amassed a small fortune selling rubber bands at two cents apiece until Dad figured out where his missing rubber bands were going.
     I look back to the simpler times of my youth and understand why so many people who have reached old age wish and even try to recapture their youth. It is hard to believe that a child of today would find a rubber band entertaining.