a bit about me and Birmingham University School

    Last night, a childhood friend, born and raised in Mountain Brook, aka The Tiny Kingdom, just south of Birmingham, emailed me:

I have to admit I had a brief moment when I wanted to write you in on my ballot today. 

I replied:

Morticia says you should have thought that. We aren’t watching the returns tonight.
Yesterday, Google disabled my afoolsworkneverends.blogspot.com after someone flagged it for hate speech. Google didn’t elaborate and said I could appeal. I clicked the appeal button today, and Google acknowledged. I wasn’t allowed to ask WTF, or could I take down whatever it was? For a few days I was thinking of starting a new blog. Maybe tomorrow.

I went to the Highland golf course voting place today and blacked in my lawyer John Amari for probate judge and left the rest of the ballot blank and stuck it in the voting machine and walked out and drove back to Locust Fork. I was in town to see doctors trying to keep me around longer, or I wouldn’t have voted. “Bob” told Morticia and me last night that he could tell us it could be worse, but he would be lying.

    I think it could have been much worse if Trump had lost yesterday. But then, we’ll never know, will we?  

    Morticia is my redneck witch girlfriend Gabby’s other nickname. “Bob" does the tech work for my digitized non-fiction, fiction and stranger than fiction books, which are free reads at the internet library archive.org, and he does the tech work for The Redneck Mystic Lawyer, The Redneck Mystic, and the Not So Sweet Home Alabama podcasts, which have YouTube channels and are hosted by about 50 Torrent platforms. Of late, Gabby has joined Bob and me in the podcasts.

    Let me back up and start over.

    I attended eight years of classes at Crestline Elementary School on the “poor” side of upscale white Mountain Brook. Crestline had two sections for my age group, and I’m pretty sure after the first grade the teachers drew straws for who would have me in their homeroom. 

    In a nutshell, I hated school, felt I was being sent to prison every day. I might tell more about my time at Crestline Elementary School in later posts, but today I want to tell how I came up with the name of this blog.

    I was a mediocre student at Crestline. I got “talks unnecessarily” checked on every 6 weeks report card.

    There was a private boys school named BUS, for Birmingham University School, on Montclair Road, which divided Birmingham from Mountain Brook. BUS was on the Mountain Brook side of Montclair

    My father sometimes threatened to switch me to BUS because of my grades, which mostly were Bs and Cs. I don’t know why, but I was terrified every time my father said that. 

    My first 6 weeks report card in the 7th grade was all Cs and a D in Conduct. I’d never had an all Cs report card, and I’d never had a D in conduct. My father told me my poor grades were caused by the D in Conduct, and if I made another D in Conduct, he would switch me to BUS. My next report card was all As and Bs, and a D in Conduct.

    BUS eventually merged with the all girls Booke Hill School on Altamont Road, up Morningside Drive from Montclair over Red Mountain into Birmingham, and then the school was called Altamont School. As far as I know, I am not infringing BUS’s name, image and likeness. If I were, I can’t see how I got the Birmingham University School domain name for this blog.

    I graduated from Crestline in 1950, and attended three years at Ramsay High School in Birmingham, where my mother and father  attended before their parents moved to Crestline. Shades Valley High School just east of Mountain Brook Village had about 40 kids per class, and Ramsay had about 25 kids per class, and my parents felt I had a better chance of learning at Ramsay, than at Shades Valley.

    I did not reach puberty until the middle of my sixteenth year, which caused me to quit school sports (football, basketball and baseball), which I had played at Crestline, and I had very little social life because of what I was certain was a terminal condition no other boy ever had  experienced, and I was a mediocre student at Ramsay. 

    During the spring of my third year at Ramsay, my father persuaded the McCallie School in Chattanooga, which he had attended for two years, to accept me as a student. If I had not gone to McCallie, I would not have gotten into Vanderbilt University in Nashville, I would not have met the mother of my children, I would not have gone to the University of Alabama School of Law, and for all I know, I would have died young. 

    As is, I’m 82, and if Gabby has any sway in it, I’ll live to 100, which is a terrifying thought.

    Say hello, Gabby.

   

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com