10 Years Old

I'm going to go ahead and assume that I was in the 5th grade when i was 10 because I really don't remember. As a 5th grader, I attended Paxson Elementary in, where else, Missoula, Montana. Life was good. I'd get up in the morning and have breakfast, which was usually cereal and make sure I had my lunch and head out the door with my mom. We would walk the blocks to the bus stop so i could catch my ride and after I got on the bus, she would head home and do here mom stuff. On the bus, I would sit next to my friend Robert Jay. Oddly enough this is what he went by. I never questioned it even though that was a pretty grown up name for a 5th grader. We would sit in the front seats behind the bus driver every day and he had a little handheld football game that we would play. Along with that, we would sing different songs on a daily basis.

At school our classroom was pretty much any ten year old boys dream. Imagine walking into a jungle and that was the room. The amount of vivid green foliage that either hung from the ceiling or sat in pots around the room even gave you the feeling of the sticky, humid, jungle air. There were also animals. In the front right corner was a tank with six tree frogs in it. Only the brave people held them because they had the tendency to pee in your hands. This isn't something that you want happening on even a semi-regular basis. Along the back wall were two more tanks. The first contained a blue tongued skink. Everyone thought this was one of the coolest things ever mainly because it's tongue was blue raspberry blue. The second tank had an iguana. This wasn't a small iguana as one may think with it being in a 5th grade room. No this animal was four feet of scaly awesomeness. When people were around it had full reign of the room. Like I said, a ten year olds dream.

The other thing that sticks out about being ten is recess. Everyday this was looked forward to by all of us. It was a fiendish race to the playground when the bell rang. We went through different phases too. Sometimes we'd go weeks where all we did was swing. If you could be the first one to the swings, you would pump your legs until the bell rang because if you got off you weren't getting your swing back. Other times it was football, or rugby, that dominated the field. A full out war between the grades would wage for the whole recess. Usually it was the 3rd and 4th graders versus us. Even this was unfair cause, come on, we were 5th graders. We couldn't lose. Kings of the playground. Usually if we felt like we felt like we were on the brink of a loss, we would quit and find something new to do. Move on to the new activity and the cycle repeats until we were right back where we started. Those were the days...