A day in the life of a Parktonian

Some of my blog's fans (that's you Danie and Bevan) have raised a concern that I sound a bit too much like the awesometacular Jon Acuff. Other friends have mentioned that my mild obsession with food is also somewhat estranging. So I thought I would regale you with a tale from my early high school years for a change. This is my normal style of writing, which is decidedly bland, hence I've plagiarised the style of Jon Acuff to make my other posts more exciting to read. Let me know what you prefer:

One of my good friends from high school, who now teaches there, always tells me this story when we haven’t seen each other for a while.

One lunch break we were sitting around because we didn’t feel like playing touch or soccer at the bottom of the terraced hill leading up to the school’s old boiler room. It was early summer so the peaches on the trees were still small, green and hard (not that they ever grew into anything worth even thinking of eating). They had a decent flight to them when thrown around so we started hurling them at unsuspecting passers by; always taking care not to hit a matric or, even worse, a prefect with one. We weren’t looking for a beating.

This became rather entertaining and a group of other guys from our class came to enjoy the spectacle. The group started growing and then I saw my chance: One of the guys in my standard was walking through “gate of opportunity”.

He was quite a muscular guy, not the kind of guy I’d take on in a fight, so I was in two minds whether to launch the peach at him or not. But the other factors just seemed to line up beautifully, the visibility was perfect, I had an audience egging me on, and a slight suspicion that I’d miss anyway. So I took aim and threw it and our world went into slow motion. At first sight the trajectory looked incorrect and it looked like it would be a near miss at best. Then the spin I put on it started curling it in. The guy it was aimed at noticed and started covering his head with both his hands. However he had left one tiny peach sized space open inadvertently. With sniper-precision the peach struck him on that exact spot and totally shattered on his head with pieces of peach and the pip flying everywhere. I can still remember that glorious sound to this day. Then there was the pause until everyone watching had drawn enough breath to burst out in laughter. My target was not impressed, he started charging for me, so my friend and I hightailed out of there hoping he’d be too lazy to follow. Thank goodness he was. We laughed all the time while running and even after we’d stopped, we laughed till our stomachs were sore.

Now my friend teaches that guy’s younger brother, he tells me every time he looks at that kid he wants to laugh.