You Can’t Polish a Peach

Oh good Lord.  I’m blogging!!  I can’t believe it!  It’s like “I’m skiing”! or “I’m flying”! I don’t have a clue how to do this, and this is remarkable for me considering I’m semi-cyber challenged and the first time I saw the term “blog” I thought it was something you needed a plumber for…I hope there’s a BACK button or something for this thing.  Anyway, not knowing a thing about blog behavior, I suppose the proper thing to do would be some sort of self-introduction.  I’ve been a schoolteacher for many years.  DON’T HANG UP YET!  I’m also a Southerner in a not-so-southern place.  HANG ON! I work in a School for Underachieving Kids–We’ll just not put in the “F” for “for” and shorten it to SUK.  How’s that? When one works in a SUK environment, all kinds of unbelievable things happen almost daily, so my friend, Renee, and I  decided today that blogging would be a good outlet.  You see, I figured out a good many years ago that THEY still think that teachers should still wear those long black dresses that cover neck-to-knees, board in a room at someone’s house, and be above reproach and perfect like nothing has changed since 1910, so I acquiesced and went clear across town to buy beer.  My, how things have changed! Have you read the paper?  It’s like Teachers Gone Wild–doing Lord knows what with Lord knows who, (where do they get these people???)  so I decided to lighten up a little.  Now I just go to the grocery store down the road to buy beer and figure if that’s the worst I do, then THEY are getting a bargain saving the legal fees and all since that’s legal.    

OK, I just now looked on the thing where you can get all kinds of backgrounds for your blog.  They have two with bananas.  Not a peach one anywhere.  What’s up with the banana obsession?  I need a PEACH!

You see, this whole blog thing began with a conversation about the Carolinas.

I hail from a sleepy little town there where the annual main event is peaches. During the summer, we pick peaches, then pack, peddle, and freeze them. The rest of the year is spent pruning, fertilizing, and wondering whether we’ll have peaches the next summer because of the spring freeze. We usually do because peaches are tough little fruits and there’s just a small window of opportunity for the freeze to get them. There is no better food in the world than that right-off-the-tree first peach of the season. It’s all covered with a sticky layer of protective fuzz which, if it gets on you, makes you feel as if you’ve been wallowing in an attic full of insulation all day. Once you get that scrubbed off and you bite into the peach, with that good juice all over your face and running down to your elbow, you just know that there is no more pungent, sweet-tasting, comforting food on Earth.

Educated at a genteel little teacher’s college nearby, I eventually wound up teaching at a tiny school in southern Florida (the SUK). There, I met my friend Renee, who, like me, has a penchant for shopping and a hatred for all things mediocre and dull. Our very first conversation was about geography as Renee declared herself more Southern than I since she was a Navy brat born in San Diego. I countered with the fact that being Southern has less to do with latitude and more to do with culture. One day, as I was telling her about peaches, we mused that, while we liked being teachers, we shared a disdain for one particular aspect of the profession–-the Apple Wardrobe.  (You’re supposed to click on the colored words).    If there exists a uniform for teachers, it is the Apple-Crayon-Ruler-School Bus-bedecked denim Jumper-Vest-Sweater ensemble and variations thereof. 

The Jumper is usually worn with all manner of fashion faux pas ranging from the T-shirt to the lumpy turtleneck with ankle socks and Keds or CROCS. Then, there are the peripherals like the apple purse, apple pins, apple earrings, and room décor. Our cafeteria lady even had a great dessert on Fridays known as “Apple Crapple” (we named it that, so I don’t know if it counts). We’re not taking away from the apple itself, of course, because it’s a perfectly acceptable fruit. After all, an apple a day is supposed to keep the doctor away. We looked that up in Wikipedia and found that it is not true in the case of teachers because apples do not naturally contain Paxil or Valium which have become staples of teachers’ daily intake regimens ever since it was determined that No Child should be Left Behind. The apple does not stave off SOME doctors. We agree, by the way, that no child SHOULD be left behind-we just don’t like standing behind the bus that’s leaving with the children who are not being left behind–eating dust, giving tests, having anxiety attacks, and being left behind ourselves, but that’s another chapter in someone else’s book. Way too heavy for us. (We’re maybe a tad cynical because of all this, and we hope you don’t think, “Gee, I’m glad they’re not teaching MY kid!”  , but if you do, well, OK, we’re anonymous…)

 

We also found that this whole apple scam started back in the 1800s when people paid teachers with bushels of apples because they didn’t have real money. This is still pretty much the case, minus the apples, and the scam itself probably nets a gazillion dollars of poor teachers’ money each year as they buy up apple items. As I was extolling the wonderfulness of peaches to Renee, we decided that peaches would have been a better choice as an icon. Besides, nothing can be that juicy and good, colorful and fuzzy without some kind of mind-altering drug in it.We teachers have grown accustomed to having sunshine blown up places where there is not usually sunshine to make us think that we’re happy in the world’s best underpaid profession. This practice is also known as “apple polishing”. Renee and I, being averse to this tactic, decided to change our professional icon since, with all that fuzz, there is no way in hell anyone can polish a peach! And heck, I’m a southern girl– Did the Allman Brothers say “Eat An Apple”? No!

We got a couple of specially knitted sweaters and embroidered blouses with peaches instead of apples. We were then immune to sunshine blowing and apple-polishing and we looked more fashionable at teachery functions. On Fridays, when the other teachers wore their apple ensembles, we wore our peach ones as an act of civil disobedience. Being that we are a couple of preppy wardrobe snobs, it was a major coup for us and we decided to have some more fun with it because teaching can be a heavy thing to do, and we wanted to be light. Funny crap happens when and where you look for it. Remember when you were growing up and you thought your teachers lived at school? They went into suspended animation every day at three o’clock and there they were the next morning at eight with their apple outfits on! I guarantee that you never imagined your third grade teacher did things as mundane as go to the mall, the grocery store, or the toilet. When you did, on a rare occasion, see an escaped teacher out in public, the first thing you did the next morning was to march into her room and declare, “Mrs. So-and-So, I SAW YOU!” (Many an apple jumper has hidden a six-pack!)Renee and I set out to correct some of the false perceptions about what teachers actually do, say, and think about. Mind you, some teachers ARE so straight-laced they probably live smack in the middle of the apple orchard, but not us, the Peaches.
We like to think of ourselves as regular folks, so we decided (today) to write down some of our experiences and here we are. Oh, and we do solemnly declare this blog to be a work of fiction. Truly. Sorta.