September 5th…“DID YOU EVER ENCOUNTER A BULLY AT YOUR GRADE SCHOOL IN MINNESOTA DAYS?”
Seeing that this is a public forum, and not wanting to incur legal liabilities or hurt feelings, I will change the name of the person I’m about to “spear” in this story to “Turgid Tommy Tyrant”.
Growing up in the culture of farm life, I found it interesting that in today’s topic, the person in question is referred to as a “BULLY”. The male bovine animal is called a BULL. We owned at least one or two of those over-muscled monsters on our family farm northwest of Kiester, Minnesota. In most cases, from my personal observations of the male bovine, they are obnoxious, spit-spewing, nose-drooling, booger-snorting behemoths of titanic tons of testosterone.
Those same treacherous traits were easily transferable to the human framework of “Turgid Tommy Tyrant”. “Tommy” was a member of my class from Kindergarten through 7th Grade. The following August, after school was out for the summer, my family moved to Washington State, so I lost track of this person after 1967.
I ponder if maybe a bull may have stepped on his head (or other parts) to have made “Tommy” so ornery and troublesome. That young kid possessed a crazy, maniacal, wild look in his eyes all the time. As far as the turgid part of his nickname……you never wanted to cross that youngster in the least of ways or else he’d BURST all over you and “go off like a firecracker”!
I noticed that that bully was not in the photos of the 1972 graduating class of my hometown. Maybe he finally met his match, or stepped in front of his bovine namesake and got boosted into the stratosphere. He’d deserve it. I was always scared of that mean-spirited whippersnapper. It may not sound very diplomatic of me or tolerant, by today’s politically correct standards………but those are the feelings of how I felt about a bully I knew, says this Norwegian Farmer’s Son.
Norwegian Farmer's Son 