Stranger in a Strange Land

I want to preface the following as to say I look back in hindsight with a degree of fondness to the town of LeRoy MN. I certainly didn't think that way when I was there at 14 years old. It was the complete opposite. I started the whole puberty thing later than most people my age, so there were the imminent mood swings, weird growth spurts, and some sort of mental disorder(arrested development) where I would be torn by doing the things I did when I was younger(i.e. watching cartoons in the afternoon, playing with action figures sometimes, re-enacting the greatest super bowl win with the then hapless Broncos), and then there's doing more adolescent things(i.e. Rebellion against parents, being more social to people my own age, developing skills like talking to women, or getting involved in car maintenance). I was truly a bizarre individual, regardless where I would have spent these formative years.(Reading Tom Harris Silence of the Lambs and Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho do not make you look mature at this age. You look really creepy) I tended to remain in the former, grasping at the increasingly passe things of childhood, as if things and people would adapt to me. Maybe it was because I was afraid to change and grow up.

Of course, the surroundings, however beautiful and tranquil, were completely alien to me. The weather was consistently nice to begin with. I was hoping as I started 9th grade, we would have a month's worth of snow days, because of the connection with the far north and winter. We only had one day where we missed any school, and this was because it was a complete whiteout in weather.

The second alien like quality of my new surroundings was the fact that this town was small and somewhat tight knit from all appearances. Everyone knew each other and their relatives sometimes three generations ago. I and my family were somewhat interlopers, because we were new. We spoke with a southern twang. There were other differences that you could spot immediately.

For example: all short words with "a" like bag was pronounced "bayg".

There was a term used "Uff Daa" which had 30+ definitions to it. You could never know if it was in excitement or was it an expletive. Depended on the speaker.

The stupid pun that everyone says "yah, sure". It was there, but not everyone said it.

So, take all these trivial things and then absorb it into your 14 year old thought process. It was bewildering and sometimes cruel. Especially High School.

But that will be later.