Just Joking Some More

This little ditty involves linoleum floors, a large bucket of soapy water and three naked 8-year-old girls in an orphanage.

I was 8 years old and living at Holy Family Institute in 1968. Believe me, we orphans found pleanty to occupy our time here. There was the weed-up-the-nose trick. A friend bragged she could do this great feat of sticking a weed up her nose and immediately pulling it back out.

"Easy," I said as I stuffed a weed up my nose, but I couldn't repeat her trick of pulling it back out, and this scared me. She laughed and wanted to prove to me that she could do it again, but she too got one stuck up there. Now we both were scared. I told her how to make herself sneeze by pinching either side of her nose just below the bridge. We were both sneezing with no resolve.

Crying, we ran to the nurses office, asking her to get the weeds out of our noses before they reached our brains and killed us. She laughed: not funny to us: and told us that they would come out on their own eventually. She was right. A couple days later we sneezed the most disgusting wad I'm sure we ever sneezed before or after this.

In another incident at Holy Family, my two roommates and I were cleaning our room on a Saturday, which was cleaning day at the orphanage. One of my roommates had a wonderful idea: something she did on a visit with her family.

Here's how it went: we filled our bucket on wheels with the soapiest water ever used, wheeled it to our room. We proceeded to push a dresser against the door, pour the soapy water all over our linoleum floor, removed all our clothes and slide from one side of the room to the other.

We pushed off the walls and slid all over the place. We thought we were getting away with something because our usual nun was off shopping and we had a substitute. Unfortunately, our room was right next to the nuns quarters, and it was separated by a door with a window.

Next thing we knew, the nun was knocking at the door wanting to see what a good job we were doing. I was half way from one wall to the other, and I shouted, "Uh, we want to suprise you."

The door started to slide open, and my friend, Cheryl, who started all this, shouted, "Quick, under the bed." She made it and stopped herself from sliding through to the other side, and so did I. However, Sarah was coming straight on, and flailing her arms and legs as she landed at the door when the nun made her way through.

The nun responded: "Girls! get your clothes on; you know better than this." She, of course, told our regular nun, and she shot us a look. She let us do it again though, but we had to wear our tee-shirts and underwear. Also, it wasn't in our bedrooms, but the bathingsuit changing room in the basement. It wasn't quite the same, as the basement floor was cement. Lookiing back now, I realize the nun just wanted the floor cleaned. That was no fun at all, actually, it kind of hurt trying to slide along that floor.