Roger had the best penmanship between all of us; he was able to
duplicate the signature of our parents.
When we needed a written excuse, after skipping school, Roger
would write us one. Our parents never knew how many days we skipped
school.
We could only have so many doctor or dentist appointments in a
month, so we had to come up with something new. Miss Fickel worked in
the principal office.
She was the one you had to give your written excuse to, and
then she would fill out a slip, that allowed you back into the class.
Miss Fickel had no knowledge about cars.
The test came, when I handed her my excuse, about my broken
muffler roller bearing. She looked down at my excuse, then looked up
at me and said. "I hope it was not expensive to fix?"
"No Miss Fickel, but it took me most of a day to replace it."
The excuse passed the test.
The car nuts in my school came up with some creative excuses
once the word got out about Miss Fickel. There were the lost axle key-
Hi performance bumper blots that came lose-the fluid in the
distributor cap over heated-a electric short in the exhaust system
–connecting rods kept spinning on the crank.
The list went on and on. Poor Miss Fickel had no idea.
Then someone found a medical dictionary; there were students in
my school that had some of the rarest diseases known to man. There was
one student that had a skin rash only found in the mountains of Peru.
After fact… Rogers’s brother was four years behind us in school, when
he was a senior, he told us some of our excuses were still being used.
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