Gramps was loudly holding court down at the small town coffee shop, regaling anyone within earshot with tattered, worn-out stories from the previous century when he was still a boy on the farm. Everyone inside the Lilliputian café was forced to sit and listen to Gramps’ rambling reminisces regardless of whether they wanted to or not. Gramps finally reached the point where he started in on his favorite story, referencing the period of time back during primordial days when he attended a miniscule, one-room country schoolhouse. “Y’know, People, when I attended elementary school back in the early Fifties, we weren’t such panty-waists like kids are nowadays. Why, seldom a winter morning went by when the temperature outside wasn’t at least twenty degrees below zero Fahrenheit; then I had to struggle at least two and half miles through at least four-foot-high snowdrifts with the wind howling at least forty miles per hour out of the northwest just to get to school, and the primitive path I followed to and from home just so happened to be uphill in both directions……” A little girl who was sitting nearby with her parents exclaimed loudly at this last comment, and a look of profound wonderment crisscrossed her cherubic face. “Uphill both directions…..?!?!” The amazed lass looked both dumbfounded and skeptical at the same time, before deciding to confront the aged windbag. “Uphill both directions…….?!?! Both directions…..?!?! Are you kidding me??? Old man……is that the reason why you walk so stooped-over now like the Hunchback of Notre Dame?!?!”
Fred's Soapbox 