Boysenberry Huckleberry. Huckleberry Raspberry. Raspberry Strawberry. Strawberry Cranberry. Peach.

Sweet Gummi Mary! Everybody wants a piece of our pie!

Not my pie. Heh, heh. Like I could make a pie by warming things in the oven or heating them in the microwave. Nope. Not Hick’s pie. My grandma used to make him blackberry cobbler if I picked the blackberries from our field ahead of the berry-snatchers who made it their business to drive up a private gravel road every year, traipse onto our property, and fill their buckets and gullets with the fruit of Hick’s labors. It got to the point where he quit mowing around those brambles. Let them eat cake! Or, rather, let them get all itchy and tick-y while robbing us fruit-blind.

No, I’m not even talking about the pie the Jeffersons got a piece of when they moved on up to that deluxe apartment in the sky-y-y. Not pie on the lunch tray. Students are not allowed pie anymore, unless it has whole wheat crust, no sugar, and limited salt. As if anybody would want to eat such a pie, even if they got it for free. No sirree, Bob! What I’m talking about is the educational pie.

Just before my lunch period at 10:53 a.m., a lunch period which was pieless, I might add, consisting of triangle sections of some quesadilla-looking thing that was supposed to be a taco, broccoli, canned fruit salad, and milk, an announcement blared over the ceiling speakers. “Teachers. During your lunch period, be sure to stop by the teacher workroom and see the three representatives with the Blues hockey team about opportunities they have to offer.”

Huh. Like my lunch 22 minutes is too long to keep me occupied actually eating my pieless lunch. Blues representatives in the teacher workroom meant something else besides opportunity to me. It meant three extra people to hear me peeing, three extra people to sit around the table in that limited space and block my path to the in-school suspension assignment box, and three more people to see my butt as I bent over to pick up reams of paper, rip them open, and deposit them in the bottom (heh, heh, I said bottom) drawers of the Kyocera.

A few fellow faculty went to visit. Apparently those guys had some good deals on buy-one/get-one tickets to Blues games, except you can’t pick the dates, and you have to pay $50 for your first two tickets. Like teachers carry that kind of money around with them, this being exactly six days away from payday. The #1 son LOVES the Blues, but with him being an RA this year, and away at college with only a few weekends off during the semester, I don’t think it would be feasible for us right now. How much money, really, do the Blues think they can make by selling tickets to teachers door to door?

I’m waiting for the next announcement. That the Fuller Brush salesman is here.